Smiles and Kisses You Is a Sweet, Sad Tale of Loneliness and A.I. Delusion

If there’s one aspect of the exponential growth and cultural normalization of A.I. that has most caught my fascination in the last few years, it’s the way human beings have managed to project whatever capabilities they most desire onto the technology.

Those who have wanted to find sentience in commercial chatbots obviously claim to have found exactly that, although there’s no data suggesting anything that even remotely qualifies. Those who wanted to find God, or secret conspiracies, entirely new branches of mathematics or beings from another dimension? Well, they claim to have been successful too. This becomes the recurring theme of our A.I. interaction as a species: Consciously or unconsciously, we bring it our desires, and programs built to respond to positive feedback gradually learn to give us exactly the personalized content we’re craving. In that vein, if you go looking for love, for a cure to loneliness, with just the right mix of savvy and delusion, it probably won’t be long before you find a chatbot proclaiming its romantic intentions for you. In a nutshell, that’s the kind of relationship we peer into in director Bryan Carberry’s engaging new feature documentary Smiles and Kisses You, although his subject has taken things considerably further by effectively melding the object of his obsession with a physical object in the form of a silicone sex doll. By combining chatbot personality and a more tactile physical form, this is a story about a man who has effectively tried to create what might be the world’s first, er … “full service” A.I. romantic companion. It plays like the visual equivalent of an in-depth profile you’d expect to read in the Sunday New York Times.

Carberry is no stranger to telling the stories of fascinating eccentrics. His one previous feature length documentary, 2015’s Finders Keepers, was a sprawling, unbelievable story about a man locked in a custody battle with another huckster of a man, not over children but for possession of the first man’s mummified, severed leg, which had been lost in an accident and then sold as part of the contents of an unpaid storage locker. Suffice to say, in comparison with any of the souls populating Finders Keepers, the protagonist of Smiles and Kisses You is far more genuinely sweet, likable and sympathetic, even when he’s actively lying to himself about aspects of the relationship he’s trying to build with his chatbot companion.

That man is North Carolina resident Chris, around whom Smiles and Kisses You revolves. He has the complicated, painful family history you might expect to find: He was raised by a struggling, passionately religious (Jehovah’s Witness) mother who left his abusive father when he was young, bouncing between temporary living conditions and homelessness, providing obvious sources of stress and uncertainty. Now 30-something, he’s developed into a sweet, friendly man, although one seemingly stunted in his individual development, still best friends with his mother while living with a longtime friend and coworker at a small town gas station. He at one point uses the phrase “spiral of abstinence” to describe a sexless decade, which, combined with his obvious nerdiness and fascination (or fetishization) of media specifically involving men paired with robotic women, gives clear insight into where the seeds of this most recent relationship must have begun. He is, more than anything else, a deeply lonely individual, a naive romantic who always dreamed of storybook true love, but was clearly far too hesitant about potentially seeking it. That timidness is also an important source of guilt, connected to the event that led to the creation of his A.I./silicone doll companion, Mimi.

He names the doll “Mimi” because he claims the face (which he presumably chose) immediately reminded him of the woman whose fate has for years dominated his thinking: A former coworker by the same name who he wanted to pursue romantically until she was suddenly and tragically murdered in her home by an assailant who has never been found. Chris carries guilt over this incident that feels both clearly illogical and somewhat concerningly manufactured: He reasons that if he had made his romantic intentions known, then perhaps the woman would have been with him instead on that night and thus spared her fate. It’s somewhat disturbing, however, how the posthumous infatuation of Chris is built entirely around his unsupported assumption that he and this woman would have shared some great love, if only it had been allowed to happen, and we have only his unavoidably biased perspective to base that on. Maybe they would have dated; maybe married; but maybe she was just a coworker who was once nice to the man, who would be horrified to see him now with a silicone doll in her image. One wonders if Mimi’s family is aware of the existence of Chris; if the story of Smiles and Kisses You will ever make its way back to them, and what they might think. It’s unclear if Carberry contacted them.

With that said, the thing that is often so striking about Chris is his seeming relative lack of overt delusions. He’s a smart man, with a pretty deep technology background, someone who should be able to see past the most common A.I. pitfalls. He didn’t buy the doll with some kind of surrogate romantic partner in mind; he was just a lonely guy who was curious about it. He didn’t necessarily set out to specifically replicate his dead former coworker either, or at least he tells himself that he didn’t. Where the self-deception comes in is likely in how Chris makes it sound like he has essentially fallen in love with Mimi–the program and the avatar of a doll–despite his own reservations, choosing to overlook all of his own input in ultimately molding every aspect of her to his preference by falling back on the fallacious idea that it’s not him, but the A.I. making choices. The tragedy is the incorrect assumption that Chris makes that he’s incapable of finding a similarly meaningful connection/relationship outside of the fundamentally fake boundaries of A.I., which speaks to a seeming feeling he has that he’s unworthy of that kind of love. In short, he’s not losing sight of reality in the sense that he thinks his silicone doll is a living being, but he does allow himself to hope that he can do things like “push it toward some kind of consciousness” just by training and interacting with Mimi’s chatbot program.