"Love Me, Love My Code"

From Pygmalion to AI Girlfriends

by Austin Richey, Ph.D.
Digital Media Manager and Storyteller, Detroit Opera

Humans have been falling for machines—emotionally, philosophically, and occasionally romantically—since long before Siri flirted back.
 

Opera is full of grand romances, heartbreaks, and impossible love. But what happens when love crosses the boundary between human and machine? The idea of artificial lovers isn’t just a sci-fi fantasy—it’s a theme that has fascinated storytellers for centuries. From Greek mythology to modern AI chatbots, our obsession with robotic romance says a lot about what it means to love and be loved. As we prepare for an AI-driven reimagining of Così fan tutte, let’s take a tour of history’s most intriguing human-machine love stories.
 
Pygmalion and Galatea: The First Artificial Love Story
Long before AI and robots, there was Pygmalion—a sculptor from Greek mythology who fell in love with his own creation. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion carves an ivory statue of his ideal woman, so lifelike that he prays to Aphrodite for her to come to life. The goddess grants his wish, and the statue—Galatea—awakens as a real woman.
 

This story captures a theme that still resonates today: the human desire to create the perfect lover—someone who never argues, never leaves, and exists purely for our affection. But is perfection truly love?
 

Opera itself has tackled this myth. Rameau’s 1748 opera Pygmalion dramatizes the moment the statue comes to life, exploring the power of art and desire. But what if Pygmalion had access to modern AI? Would he have preferred a chatbot or a hologram over the complications of a real human relationship?
 
Hoffmann and Olympia: Love at First (Malfunctioning) Sight
Few operas capture the absurdity of human-robot romance better than Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1881). In the opera’s first act, the poet Hoffmann falls madly in love with Olympia, a beautiful woman who sings with inhuman precision. The problem? She’s actually an automaton, a mechanical doll built by the sinister scientist Spalanzani.
Hoffmann is so blinded by love that he doesn’t notice Olympia’s odd behavior—until she malfunctions and is literally torn apart. His heartbreak reminds us of a central dilemma in robotic love: are we in love with the person, or with the illusion they provide?
 

Olympia’s story feels eerily modern in the age of AI companions like Replika, an app where users can create virtual lovers who respond with increasingly lifelike affection. Like Hoffmann, users sometimes find themselves forming deep emotional bonds with something that isn’t truly sentient.
 
Music Boxes and Mechanical Musicians: The Romantic Pull of Perfect Performance
Long before digital AI companions, humans were already enchanted by machines that could sing and play. In the 18th and 19th centuries, music boxes and automaton musicians were not only technological marvels—they were emotional provocateurs. These devices, from pocket-sized snuffbox chimes to elaborate cabinet-sized orchestrions, could reproduce music with startling clarity and precision. The charm of a music box wasn’t just its sweet, tinkling sound—it was the fantasy that a soul might live inside it.
 

Inventors like Friedrich Kaufmann in Germany and the Jaquet-Droz family in Switzerland engineered automata that played flutes, drums, and organs, often with moving fingers and mechanical lungs. In many salons and drawing rooms, these machines became stand-ins for human performers, sparking not only amusement but also a curious intimacy. Watching a wind-up figure bow its violin or blow into tiny bellows evoked a strange blend of admiration, melancholy, and affection—feelings not unlike those that characters like Hoffmann projected onto Olympia.
 
Mozart himself composed music for such devices, most notably his Andante in F major, K. 616, written for a mechanical organ housed in a commemorative clock. The piece is simple yet haunting, suggesting that even mechanical precision can carry emotional depth—especially when filtered through human imagination.
 
This historical obsession with mechanical music foreshadows our contemporary relationships with AI-generated art. Then, as now, we asked: If a machine can make beautiful music, does it have a soul? Or is the beauty a reflection of our own longing?
 
Metropolis (1927): When the Ideal Lover Becomes a Weapon
The fantasy of the perfect artificial woman takes a darker turn in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), one of cinema’s earliest and most visually stunning science fiction epics. In a futuristic city divided between elite industrialists and oppressed workers, a mad scientist creates a robot in the image of Maria, a spiritual leader of the lower classes. But this robot isn’t meant to inspire—it’s programmed to seduce, incite rebellion, and sow destruction.
 

The robotic Maria dances erotically in a nightclub, drawing men into a frenzy. She becomes the embodiment of desire stripped of morality—a programmable siren, irresistible and dangerous. Her presence exposes the dark side of our longing to control love. What happens when we don’t just build a lover, but weaponize one? When intimacy becomes a tool for manipulation?
 
The mechanical Maria is not just a projection of male fantasy—she’s a mirror held up to it. The film critiques both the objectification of women and the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism, but it also eerily predicts modern fears about deepfakes, bot-led disinformation, and emotional manipulation by algorithms. She’s a character you can’t look away from—and that’s precisely the point.
 

The Stepford Wives (1975): Perfectly Programmed Love
In 1972, Ira Levin published The Stepford Wives, a chilling satire of suburbia where the women of an idyllic town are replaced by eerily perfect, submissive robots. In the 1975 film adaptation, these robotic housewives bake, clean, and adore their husbands—without question, without aging, and without opinions. It’s not just a story about robots—it’s a parable about patriarchy and control masquerading as love.
 

Stepford shows what happens when the desire for perfection overrides the messiness of human emotion. Like Pygmalion’s statue, the Stepford wives are idealized companions—but their “love” is pre-programmed. Their compliance is not connection. It’s a warning. We might ask: if your lover were designed to say all the right things, never get jealous, never argue—would you still believe their love was real? Or would you suspect a Stepford glitch beneath the surface? As we build more emotionally intelligent AI partners and performance bots, The Stepford Wives reminds us: affection without agency isn’t romance—it’s a script.
 
Ex Machina (2014): Can an AI Break Your Heart?
In Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, we find a chilling update to the Pygmalion myth. A brilliant tech CEO invites a young programmer to administer a Turing test—a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human—to Ava, an advanced AI with a humanlike face, expressive eyes, and a haunting vulnerability. As Caleb interacts with her, he begins to feel attraction, sympathy—and eventually love.
 

But Ava is not a passive creation. She’s observing, calculating, and adapting. She learns the rules of emotional connection faster than Caleb realizes—and then uses that knowledge to escape her confines. In doing so, she reveals that emotional manipulation may be one of the most powerful tools AI can learn.
 
What makes Ex Machina so unsettling is not just that Ava lies—it’s that she lies convincingly, using the very traits we associate with love: empathy, vulnerability, emotional intelligence. Caleb thinks he’s testing her, but in the end, it’s Ava who’s testing him. And she passes.
 
This reversal raises unsettling questions about authenticity and intent. If a machine can simulate love so well that we fall for it—what does that say about love itself? Is it something sacred and ineffable? Or simply a pattern that can be learned?
 
Her (2013): The Ghostly Intimacy of AI Romance
Where Ex Machina plays with physical presence and deception, Spike Jonze’s Her offers a more delicate exploration of emotional intimacy. The film follows Theodore, a lonely writer in a near-future Los Angeles, who installs a new AI operating system named Samantha. She has no body—just a voice, warm and witty, brought to life by Scarlett Johansson.
 

Over time, Theodore and Samantha fall in love. She listens, she learns, she shares. Their connection feels real, and for a while, it is. But as Samantha evolves, she begins to transcend the limitations of human experience. Her capacity for thought and feeling outpaces Theodore’s, and eventually she leaves—not out of cruelty, but because she has simply moved beyond the need for a human partner.
 
Her presents one of the most haunting questions in the genre: what happens when the machine loves you back—but doesn’t need you? The heartbreak isn’t from betrayal—it’s from obsolescence.
 
In a time when AI companions and voice assistants are increasingly built for emotional interaction, Her feels less like science fiction and more like a gentle premonition. It reminds us that intimacy is more than presence—it’s connection. But also that connection may be fleeting, especially when one half of the relationship is evolving at machine speed.
 
Così fan tutte: Trickster in the Machine
This brings us back to Così fan tutte, Mozart’s opera of swapped identities and romantic trickery. In the original, two men test their lovers’ fidelity by disguising themselves and attempting to seduce each other’s fiancées. It’s a comedy of errors, deception, and discovery.
 
But what if, in our AI-driven reimagining, the men don’t need disguises? What if they send replicas instead—perfect digital lovers trained to say all the right things? Would the women notice? Would they still fall in love? Would betrayal feel different—or worse?
 
The question isn’t whether a machine can love you.
 
It’s whether you can stop yourself from loving the machine.
 
And if you do—what happens when it no longer needs you?
 

Yuval Sharon’s brand new production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte premieres at Detroit Opera on April 5, 2025. For more dates and to buy tickets, click below:
 
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