Annie Bot Review: Why We Shouldn't Start Shagging Robots
In Sierra Greer’s latest novel, Annie Bot, artificial intelligent has reached a whole new level within robotics and in the world of the uber-wealthy, you can buy your very own Annie, designed and created to be the perfect girlfriend.
Doug bought Annie to replace his human ex-girlfriend and loves how quickly she’s progressed, how she looks, feels and acts like a real woman; she’s sentient.
Annie is designed to please Doug in whatever way he wants, both emotionally and physically but especially when it comes sex. She’s programmed to match his libido, enabling him to adjust it at his leisure, and perform whatever sexual act will please him.
While Annie experiences genuine pain whenever she displeases Doug, her learning and cognitive development begin to clash with what he believes a perfect girlfriend should be, and she begins realise just how little autonomy she really has.
The book takes a sexy, subtle look at ownership, autonomy and the moral complexities of such a questionable area of artificial intelligence.
Build-a-Girlfriend
In Greer’s world, you can bag yourself more than one kind of AI robot, including a Nanny to help with those pesky kids you don’t want to spend time with and a House Maid to cook, clean and sort out anything else you can’t be bothered to do.
Then there is the option for a Cuddly Bunny! You can customize your AI to turn them into your very own live-in partner with personalised sexual interests and you have the option to enable them to develop sentience for that true to life experience.
This narrative focus within Annie Bot gives us a really interesting insight into the motives behind why one might purchase an AI for a relationship and the dynamics between Doug and Annie give way for some disturbing but honest parallels between their relationship and the sense of male ownership over women that is still present within modern society.
Hints of Doug's past controlling habits are peppered throughout the narrative and it is easy to see why someone like him would purchase an AI.
Control and ownership are important to him and he ensures that Annie is reminded of this whenever she displeases him. He locks her in storerooms, uses her basic functions to torture her and punishes her through sex.
Had he behaved this way with a human, it would he domestic abuse but because Annie is a machine and he has purchase her, nobody can object to his behaviour.
What a slippery slope to perch our sense of morality upon. In a patriarchal society where so often women are seen as commodities, Doug’s attitude certainly reflects this sentiment and he consistently reminds Annie that they have a genuine romantic connection but only within the margins of his ownership.
Doug loves how smart Annie is and how many human-like emotions she has developed but reduces her to a basic machine when she begins to show a sense of agency, then lashes out further when she behaves exactly like the sex doll he has designed for himself.
Like My Ex But Better
There are so many disturbing details around why Doug purchased Annie that link her, a machine he owns, to his talked-about human ex-girlfriend Gwen.
Doug designs Annie to look like Gwen, a Black woman, but changes her skin to be a little lighter and picks an eye colour he prefers. He mentions how much he liked that Gwen was Black but also notes how with Annie, he doesn't have to worry about her heritage, suggesting that this was an issue in his relationship with Gwen.
“…you don’t have these layers of heritage that are different. You don’t have a past and ambitions that compete with mine.”
Doug uses his wealth to purchase a replacement for his ex-girlfriend and the way he justifies the likeness between Gwen and Annie is just dripping with misogynoir.
He wants all the eroticism of fetishizing Black women without having to navigate the cultural differences that clearly occurred between him and Gwen.
This gives away so much about Doug’s character and his motives behind the aesthetics he chooses when designing Annie, as well giving us an insight into his past relationship.
It often feels like Doug is punishing his ex-girlfriend through Annie, despite her not actually featuring in the book, she’s only ever talked about not to.
There is still some clear resentment from Doug towards Gwen and he uses Annie as a way of expressing these feelings. We can see this in the way that he berates Annie for not cleaning enough and then describing Gwen and a slob, the way that he decreases Annie’s weight and increases her breast size and how we’ll punish Annie through sex for ever disagreeing with him.
I think it’s such a testament to Greer’s writing talent that we can clearly see disturbing and problematic parallels between Gwen and Annie, and how we can assume Doug’s abusive behaviour will be present in all his relationships due to his overall opinion of women.
Say No To Sentient Sex-Toys
So, maybe you’re asking yourself why this all matters. Why do we care about what Doug does with Annie when we know she is a machine that he’s paid a lot of money for?
Who cares if he’s lonely enough to design her like his ex-girlfriend? Should we really worry about the fragile terrain that is developing AI for romantic relationships at all?
My argument is yes, we should, and I believe there are two key arguments to think about here.
Firstly, there is the general moral argument behind the possibility of sentient AI, especially those that mirror what it is like to be human, emotionally and physically.
Considering I could notice a particular coffee stain and see a cute, little face in the shape it makes, thus feeling some kind of emotional attachment to my new little coffee mate, I know that I could not interact nor own any kind of humanistic artificial intelligence without losing my mind a little.
In this case, we objectively know that Annie is not human, this is fact. However, she does experience human-like emotions that we can resonate with. She feels happiness, sadness, anger and even physical pain.
Whether she’s human or not, these are real experiences for her and how far can we really stretch the justification of her being created by humans in order to own and control her.
I simply can’t imagine wanting that kind of power over something that feels very close to human. It all feels a little too close to people who feel like they own their children, that they’re their property just because they made them, that they’re not their own individual beings with autonomy.
Furthermore, there is the very clear misogynistic undertones that weave themselves through the narrative and this is an issue I can very easily imagine spilling into real life.
I simply think that the existence of AI for sexual gratification will be a danger to real women. Yes, men too, but considering one woman is killed by a man every three days, I don’t think it’s out of the realms of possibility to imagine that the same statistics apply in this hypothetical.
Not only do I believe that the existence of a ‘perfect girlfriend’ would cause men to question why human women do not act in the same way, do as they’re told and perform for them with the same dedication but I think this would spiral even further to real life consequences.
No matter how realistic or sentient an AI can be, I think we will always see them, on some level, as the other and I think that if the wrong men were able to abuse their own Annie, then there is only a matter of time when they would seek to behave the same way with a human woman.
It’s like a nicotine path instead of the cigarette, nothing is quite like the real thing, is it?
The world of AI development is enormous and can be adapted to so many areas in our lives that sometimes my mind cannot even comprehend it (I’m still only just learning about ChatGPT), and there are various positives and negatives to how we’re approaching the increasing use of AI.
However, when it comes to worlds like the one Greer has created with Annie Bot, it seems there is a far bigger social and moral complexity to consider.
If you’ve read this book then I would LOVE to talk about it because I still have so much to say that goes beyond why we shouldn't start shagging robots.
Seriously though, don’t start shagging robots.