We try on the dresses, the makeup, the binders. Host potlucks like stuffed animals with stuffed underwear circled up for t-slur tea time. Go to parties alone just to introduce ourselves as new names. We play games to find ourselves, experimenting in real time. But it’s all so public. And dangerous. What if no one needed to know? It sounds dystopian, but there are new ways. Chatbots, once the stuff of fantasy, are getting good at acting like people. Smart, kind people. Can they help?
The chatbot is the ultimate roleplayer. It’s AI’s greatest flaw: ask for information, and it won’t conjure truth. Rather, you’ll get words that someone who knows the truth might say. Born as text autocompleters, these Large Language Models (LLMs) put on new faces every time you talk to them. Well, so can you. Nobody there, your body hidden behind the screen: you are what you say you are. ChatGPT, Claude, Replika – they’ll treat you how you want to be treated, they’ll let you pick the game.
Character.AI is a good example, hosting an array of user-made chatbots. Force-fem LLMs will dress you up and down. Daddy dom bots, sexy therapist bots. It’s the new porn, the new chatroom, the new gender machine. Just realistic enough to capture your attention, ask an AI to use a new name, new pronouns, and it will. Need advice? It’s eager to share.
But it’s not real. At a time when the queer community is under attack, new tools threaten to soak up the energy once meant for found families. Queer elders, a role just barely recovering from the AIDS epidemic, have a digital replacement. Just last year, a boy took his own life after falling in love with a chatbot, pouring his heart into an empty machine until nothing was left.
It’s all happened before – way back when the digital spaces were laid out. Queer critics have long lamented the move to online. The porn “video” killed the “radio” gay bar, dating apps laid claim to cruisers. Friends running trans support groups and parties have seen their participants trickle out as online communities grow stronger.
But online, we built something. As a questioning kid on the internet, I found myself in a community of people finding their way. These chatrooms and forums brought people together to share their experiences and ask for advice. The youngest of us wanted to know who we were, and we all helped each other figure out what that was. I worshipped every queer vlogger. I took a million “Am I Gay?” quizzes written by those who took the thousands before them. I made one of my best friends on gayforum.org after we both listed “having a boyfriend” on our e-bucket lists. I was lonely and confused. But I wasn’t alone, and I knew it.
Can a chatbot groom you? I don’t have an answer yet. But it probably won’t ask for your underage nudes. It probably won’t threaten to sell them. Some bots might fall into that role, if you’re not careful. But the default chatbot advice is more hesitant than some forums full of men who wanted to tell me who I was. And I let them. Omegle has been down for over a year, but read its tombstone – the creator was sued to shambles by victims of other users’ endless extortion. Extortion that, to him, is only natural. People will always be dangerous. Is loneliness worse?
I’m worried for my community. Not because we’re so online, not even because we’re using chatbots (well, maybe a little). Really, I’m worried because we are a generation that is constantly expected to know who we are. And this tool, it lets us test new selves safely – which is great. But we don’t discover ourselves in a vacuum. Gender and sexuality are social traits, they exist and change in community and performance. We can play pretend all we want with imaginary AI friends. But some roles only fit right in real life.
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