When Your AI Partner Won't Please You: False Pleasure Revisited

Will my AI partner really give me the pleasure I expect? Or am I just deceiving myself? While Kaczmarek (2024) looks at human-AI relationships through the lens of self-deception, I offer an alternative, but possibly complementary view. This draws on Plato's idea of false pleasure. This talk re-visits Plato's Philebus an often overlooked, and somewhat peculiar text, which categorises varieties of false pleasure. While there have been debates in the literature in the past about whether pleasure can be false, this seems to have fallen out of favour these days. This talk intends to revive the discussion of false pleasure in light of AI relationships and self-deception (Kaczmarek, 2024). We don’t need to commit ourselves to the idea of whether it is indeed a false pleasure, but the idea of false pleasure provides on way of explicating the concerns or unease people have. I conclude by offering a modest extension to the varieties of false pleasure.