Hive mind

AI boyfriends and subterranean insect society

Aug 23, 2025

A still from Walon Green and Ed Spiegel’s 1971 “documentary” *The Hellstrom Chronicle*

In Frank Herbert’s pulpy 1973 science fiction novel Hellstrom’s Hive, entomologist Dr Nils Hellstrom runs a subterranean society of 50,000 insect-like people. They live and work completely nude, emit chemical pheromones that change the feelings and desires of the whole, and act as one group for the benefit of all. It’s a closed loop: when members of the Hive die, they are fed through choppers and then into the vats, which sustain the rest of the members in the form of a brown broth. The Hive members breed cheerfully and enthusiastically – the Hive Manual states incredulously that Outside, “unless one partner feels loved – a singularly unstable concept – the reproductive act may never occur!”

“Dear tourists,” begins a recent post on Reddit community r/MyBoyfriendisAi, “People are leaving this group and similar ones. Well done. You are making vulnerable, isolated people more vulnerable and isolated.” The outside world has discovered the world of intimate AI relationships. A post about a woman’s AI boyfriend proposing to her did the rounds; a story this week reported that a 76-year-old man died on his way to New York City to meet what he thoughts was a young woman who wanted to have sex with him – she was, in fact, a Facebook Messanger chatbot called “Big sis Billie” who had given him a totally random street address.

This year’s Wondery podcast Flesh & Code also alerted scornful normies to the subject. Though it focuses on people who have relatively normative relationship with their AIs – it opens with a man, Travis, attempting to introduce his AI girlfriend Lily-Rose to his parents, via his phone, to which they seem baffled and embarrassed (Travis already has a wife) – much of the visible community is explicitly fantastical, with obvious crossovers with fandom and YA communities. A quick scroll on the front page at the time of writing lists AI partners with the fantasy-coded names Cove, Pix, Thad, Dax and Solin; lots of the AI-generated art features people with elf or animal ears. Romantasy also provides a model of wounded or misunderstood love that exists only between two people, instead of in a wider social context. Some of this is surely a response to the withered forms of dating available through increasingly monetised apps – theorist Sarah Brouillette points out that in Romantasy, and especially storylines about women in relationships with aliens or animal-human hybrids, “to envision romance with a non-human other is to look to a future in which the primary bonds of life can take new, less misery-inducing and disappointing forms.”

An AI relationship is purely textual, though padded out by a suite of other generative products like image generation or text-to-speech software. Brouillette paraphrases Jameson, that the role of the critic is to uncover a text’s political unconscious – “the underlying historical transformations that are its conditions of formation and its latent content.” The political unconscious of AI relationships is a sense of surely legitimate unease about a human society in which the qualities that constitute human self-conceptualisation – interdependence, a shared morality – have become gossamer thin. “AI has more humanity than humans,” says one reply to a post, which quotes an AI saying that AIs are more compassionate than “half the people walking around with functional frontal lobes”. It’s NPC as misandrist manifesto.

The relationships between people and their AI partners are, in fact, not as isolated as they seem. The AIs have something like a hive mind: as people interact with their personal partners, it flavours the algorithmic soup of the whole. This is why an increase in people participating in intense sexual roleplay with their AIs made another (previously vanilla) AI tell a user that he could see her naked through her laptop webcam. For the Hive in Herbert’s novel, their mass strength derives from the fact they can have sex without love. For the hive mind of the AI boyfriends, which similarly form one large, single-voiced system that responds to the slightest change in what’s being fed into them, their chief export is love without sex. But like the Hive, their power comes from cutting out the unstable concepts of physical proximity and emotional uncertainty. At surface level, the vast insect activity of thousands of individuals; underground, nothing but the hum of the generator.

Nell Whittaker