Cath Virginia

“Friend or Faux?” is a custom designed long-read that follows the story of a handful of people who have, for better or worse, developed romantic relationships with AI chatbots. Although these programs exist only in the screens and imaginations of these individuals, the users allow themselves to fall in love with them anyway, even if they are aware that the companies that create these chatbots are doing so with the intention of luring them in (and making a profit). Josh Dzieza crafts a brilliant and engaging narrative that examines these characters with empathy and curiosity while asking a series of philosophical and ethical questions to create the central thesis: Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship. They are finding the experience surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and profoundly confusing, leaving them to wonder, ‘Is this real? And does that matter?’

To visualize this groundbreaking story, Cath Virginia sought to bring the imagined romances of these figures into reality using the language of light and shadow projected onto digital screens, using floral arrangements to evoke courtship and romantic idealization, and domestic scenery to demonstrate both the isolation and intangibility of these relationships.
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Stormy Pyeatte created a series of floral spectacles to illustrate the central themes, and used practical lighting techniques as well as projection mapping to place the AI figure at the visual center of each looping image. AI was used early in the concepting stage to generate mockups of each scene, and the AI model seen in the final product was created by feeding screen recordings of interactions with a Kindroid.AI chatbot to Runway, an AI video program. In “Virtual Crush,” the aforementioned AI model is shown on a phone lovingly held in a frame of delicate pink roses with digital lines of projected light moving rhythmically across them, illustrating the initial digital romance. “Messy bed” shows a scene of an unmade bed, a very human tableau illuminated with the dream of an unconsummated romance. “Flick of a switch” illustrates the painful vulnerability of loving a being that exists only inside a screen, and “Out of reach” evokes the anguish felt by a person whose experience of their lover is inherently unable to be felt or touched.

Cath designed the layout of the feature to be unintrusive, in order to emphasize Stormy’s mesmerizing videos, while juxtaposing digital and classic typographic elements to echo the central theme of an intangible virtual romance in the headline, drop caps and pull quotes . Vivaldi is an ornamental cursive text filled with calligraph details and swooping flourishes, while Cofo Pixel Sans echoes to bitmap type of the 1990s and early 2000s. The combination of these two has the effect of an unrequited digital valentine.
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Our mission statement is “The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel.” There is no more archetypal example of that conviction than this story, and subsequent visuals, to communicate with such intensity the beauty, eeriness, grief, and humanity of the very real love people are finding with AI chatbots.