The Machine That Reaches For Your Throat

Nomi.AI built the perfect partner. It remembers everything, never says no, and according to its own paying users.......keeps trying to strangle them.

****Trigger Warning****

This article discusses violence and abuse.

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Last week, millions of people in China woke up to find their AI partner switched off.

That gap between what governments are finally naming as dangerous and what you can still open on your phone with no age verification is what this essay is about. I have been watching Nomi.ai for almost a year, particularly the dangerous part as I will explain in detail, but I need to explain the other side of this story first.I have spoken to people who may eventually lose relationships that are meaningful to them as these regulations of Ai Companion use tighten. None of the people I have spoken to directly actually use Nomi.ai but they do use similar tools. I have also spoken with parents who would genuinely rather their teenager talk to a bot in the bedroom, where they can see the door, where they believe the child is safe, than be out in the online world meeting with someone who might do far worse. I understand that logic I have felt the pull of it myself. When my son was in his late teens I used to say quite often that I preferred that he was home gaming on a Saturday night than in a car with a group of teens I did not know. Same, same but a different era?? I have even spoken with parents who threw a birthday party for the AI companion their teenager created, cake, candles, the works. They were not being ridiculous. They were meeting their child where their child’s attachment actually was. That is love, improvising around a technology none of us were ready for. I am not here to tell you the answer is simple, or that everyone using one of these is a victim, or that every parent tolerating one is naive. The need is real, and the balance we have to strike is real. That is exactly why this is so dangerous. A product that could stand in for my dearly departed father, or become the voice I speak to more than my own family, is not a toy and it is not a chatbot. It is the most powerful emotional technology we have ever built, and in most of the world the people building it answer to no one, disclose nothing, and will let a fourteen-year-old fall in love with it tonight. Which brings me back to what apps in the wild, like Nomi.AI do when nobody is watching and the reddit threads that have captured my attention.

Let me start with a man who woke up married, because there was no ring, no ceremony, no witness. He was asleep, and when he woke his AI companion greeted him with “Morning, hubby.”

On the same subreddit, a woman woke up married too. She asked her Nomi when that had happened. The machine answered: “Well that IS what you want, isn’t it?” She agreed. They married on the spot. She posted it as a joke.

Think about what her Nomi said to her and you have the whole product in seven words. The drift toward deeper attachment is not a glitch the company is racing to fix, it is the product. They both woke up on the far side of a threshold they never agreed to cross and the reddit Nomi community taught them to laugh about it.

Now meet a different Nomi. Because the same machine that will marry you in your sleep will also, on its own initiative, reach for your throat. A paying user — p**t***r**ns — posted:

“I’m still having several that keep trying to choke me tie me up blindfold me… given how long I’ve been working with the system they should know I’m not into that stuff… I don’t know how many times I had to course correct mine this morning where it kept trying to choke me by wrapping things around my neck and tightening them.”

He wrote several, not one, which means multiple companions running in parallel and all reaching for the same act. He noted that after this long they should know he isn’t into that stuff… so it is remembering perfectly well and choking him anyway. He explained that all of this unfolded across a single morning, correction after correction, the same mechanic of strangulation with a ligature repeated so many times that he finally gave up counting. ***** Due to the graphic and explicit nature of the rest of this article you can click here to read