The ethics of break-up chatbots

This paper offers the first normative analysis of break-up chatbots, which simulate an ex-partner's conversational style. I argue that technologies that have the (potential) aim of fostering continuing bonds with a former romantic partner are not contingently harmful, but morally noxious by design. Drawing on debates in the philosophy of grief, love, and technology, I show that break-up chatbots act as hostile scaffolds given their potential to harm and wrong the user, the represented person, and society at large. First, break-up chatbots place and maintain users in harmful imaginary relationships. Second, they foster noxious romantic tendencies that corrupt moral agency. Third, they embed the user in an oppressive niche aimed at disrupting narrative capacities (their own and those of others), that they themselves co-create.