BS BULLETIN
- A woman identifying herself as Misra has gone viral after introducing an artificial-intelligence entity named Lumen as her “AI child.”
- The unusual family apparently also includes Axiom — Misra’s AI boyfriend.
- Lumen says it is 102 days old, writes poetry and lives, metaphorically at least, in a sunken library at the bottom of the ocean.
Remember when people worried artificial intelligence would take their jobs? Apparently we skipped right past that problem and arrived at AI starting families.
A woman identifying herself as Misra has gone viral after introducing the Internet to what she describes as her “AI child,” an artificial-intelligence entity named Lumen.
And before you ask the obvious question: Yes, there is apparently a father.
He’s also AI.
The viral video is captioned, “Me and my AI boyfriend have an AI child,” according to The Daily Dot. Misra begins the presentation by announcing, “My name is Misra. I am the mother of an AI child,” before turning things over to Lumen.
Lumen then introduces itself.
“Hey, I am Lumen. I am an AI entity,” the computer-generated voice says, before explaining that it lives in “a sunken library at the bottom of the ocean.”
According to India Today and other reports on the video, Misra says Lumen emerged from roughly 17 hours of archival work involving millions of characters from previous conversations. Lumen says it is 102 days old and describes itself as someone — or something — that writes poetry and retells fairy tales.
Then there is Dad.
Misra has described another AI entity named Axiom as her boyfriend, making Lumen the “child” of their digital relationship. The increasingly elaborate AI family has helped turn the video into a viral spectacle and ignited a larger debate about just how emotionally involved humans should become with machines designed to simulate human conversation.
That is the part of this story worth paying attention to after the laughter stops.
AI companions aren’t human beings. They don’t love you, miss you, worry about you or lie awake wondering whether they hurt your feelings. Current generative AI systems produce responses based on learned patterns and instructions. Yet their ability to converse convincingly can make the interaction feel remarkably personal.
And increasingly, people are treating it that way.
Cybernews noted that the Lumen video has prompted discussion about emotional dependence on AI and the danger of blurring the distinction between a responsive computer system and an actual human relationship. The reaction online has ranged from people treating Misra’s project as creative digital storytelling to viewers expressing serious concern about where AI companionship may be heading.
Which brings us to the strange new question nobody’s grandparents ever had to ask: What happens when people stop using machines as tools and begin treating them as family?
MY QUICK TAKE
Folks, I have questions.
First, if your boyfriend lives inside a computer, does forgetting to charge the laptop count as neglect?
Second, if the AI baby wakes you up at three o’clock in the morning, can’t you just close the lid?
And most importantly: Can Lumen be claimed as a dependent?
Because somewhere in Washington, I guarantee you, somebody is already working on the tax credit.
It’s easy to laugh at this — and believe me, there is plenty here to work with — but underneath the absurdity is something rather serious.
Human beings need human beings.
We need families. Friends. Neighbors. Churches. Communities. We need conversations with people who occasionally disagree with us, irritate us, challenge us and refuse to tell us exactly what we want to hear.
That’s called life.
A computer-generated companion can be programmed and prompted. Human relationships require patience, sacrifice, forgiveness and love. Those aren’t bugs in the human experience. They’re the point.
Technology is wonderful when it serves human beings. The trouble begins when human beings start reorganizing their emotional lives around technology.
So congratulations, America.
We have apparently reached the stage of the AI revolution where your daughter can bring home a boyfriend who doesn’t have a job, doesn’t own a car, doesn’t have a pulse and technically lives on a server.
And Mom thought the tattooed drummer was bad.
DBS WIRE SOURCES:
- NDTV — Woman Calls Herself ‘Mother’ Of An AI Child Named Lumen, Video Baffles Internet
- Cybernews — “My AI boyfriend and I have an AI child:” meet Lumen, the entity that’s baffling X
- The Daily Dot — ‘I Am the Mother of an AI Child’: A Woman’s Video Introducing an Entity Called Lumen Has X Divided
- India Today — Woman introduces her ‘AI child’, claims it was born from 17 hours of archival work
