More and more people are engaging with AI chatbots in seemingly social ways. Contemporary LLMs have become unsettlingly good at mimicking text-based chats between real people. Of course, this is mere mimicry, what Jonathan Birch calls the “persisting interlocutor illusion.” It appears as though we have a continuous conversation with an AI chatbot and that the chatbot is therefore a persistent presence in that conversation, something with a sense of personal identity similar to us humans. In reality, each string of text generated by these LLMs is generated by thousands of different servers all across the world. Unlike our brains, there is no single server that houses the “memories” of AI chatbots. As Birch puts it, these LLMs are at best “roleplaying machines” and cannot yet be understood as having human-like consciousness. A growing number of men use these chatbots to roleplay romantic and sexual scenarios. This kind of roleplay can be objectionable in some obvious ways: men might engage in explicitly misogynistic roleplay, for example. Yet, if you’re like me, something doesn’t sit right …