I was struck yesterday by the story of the lovestruck French woman, named only as Anne, who fell in love with an AI version of Brad Pitt.
Not only did Anne, a 53 year old interior designer, fall for the fake Pitt. She also divorced her husband and sent €830,000 to the person or persons behind the fake Brad Pitt profile. In return, she received images of Brad Pitt holding up signs with her name on it, and professing his love. These were AI generated, and fake. You can see some of them in the tweet below.
What struck me is this: A 53-year-old woman who has earned so much that she can afford to give €830,000 to “Brad Pitt” cannot, unless she either inherited all the wealth or won the lotto, be stupid per se. Your immediate reaction – mine certainly, and I don’t think I am abnormal – is to think “how can anyone be so gullible and naive?”
But of course, we can all be that stupid, in various walks of life.
In business, there is something known as the “sunk costs fallacy”. This is where a person invests money in a company, and that company keeps losing money. You have two options really: You can walk away from the business and accept the loss you have made. Or, you can keep pouring even more money into it in the hope that you will turn it around and recoup the losses. Gamblers in particular are vulnerable to this way of thinking: We have all heard the story of the person who ends up mortgaging the house and betting it all away, trying to recoup what they have already lost.
It happens in relationships, too. How many marriages or long-term relationships continue, long past the point when they have become irreconcilable, because one or both partners believes that they have invested so much of their lives into the relationship that another year of trying and counselling is worth it? Quite a few, I would say, including some that I have observed.
Anne, therefore, is not to my mind a pathetic figure, but a cautionary tale. The mind plays tricks on us.
I wonder when it was that she first started to feel uneasy. Was it, I wonder, when Brad Pitt – one of the wealthiest stars in Hollywood, remember – first asked her for the loan of a few quid? Not being a woman, what follows is speculation, but one might have thought that amongst the other charms of Mr. Pitt, the lifestyle and glamour of being his partner was at the very least an added benefit, if not always the main attraction.
Or was it when a man with access to a private Jet was somehow never able to visit the woman he professed to love? Or was it long before that, when she knew in the back of her mind that Brad Pitt was unlikely to be chatting to random Frenchwomen on the internet?
The point here is that at each step along the journey to what is indisputably a humiliation, Anne had access to the red flags, and chose to ignore them. Just like a gambler rationalises that a losing streak is “just a run of bad luck” rather than evidence that he or she is bad at gambling, Anne clearly thought that the evidence that this was actually Brad Pitt was worth clinging too, even when it was massively outweighed by countervailing facts.
Romance scams have a particular stigma attached to them for a reason. The first is obviously that most of us have never fallen for them. The second is that we still live in a society where most adults are in some form of permanent or long term romantic relationship, and are not experiencing fundamental loneliness in middle age. The third and biggest reason is that we all assume you have to be a complete idiot to fall for them. And the fourth reason is that so many of the victims are easily stereotyped as lonely middle aged women who’ve read one romantic novel too many.
Yet the basic dynamic at play here is the same as afflicts all of us in various walks of life: Anne here lost a substantial fortune because she wished something was true, rather than recognising that it was untrue. I see the same broad trend at times from even the smartest of my own readers: People who will insist that an opinion poll which contradicts their prejudices must be fake, or rigged, or an outlier. Or people like me, who, despite all the available evidence, enter every new football season in the convinced belief that Manchester United might make the champions league places. Our particular delusions are less financially costly, but they’re based on the same ultimate dynamic: Ignoring uncomfortable evidence in favour of a much thinner and more comforting theory.
So, I don’t judge poor Anne. I feel sorry for her. She wanted to believe, very much, that she was special, that she had found true love, and that she could be happy with the person of her dreams. That’s all of us, really. We could all be her, given the right circumstances and the wrong kind of evil manipulator coming into our lives – whether we deny that or not.