Recent and rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have opened up more sophisticated and accessible avenues for crafting digital creations that ever-more convincingly emulate human appearance, movement, speech, behaviour, and thought. As relationships between human users and humanoid digital artefacts become all the more ubiquitous and complex, scholars and critics have voiced concerns about the intersecting forms of bias embedded in these applications of AI. Social media, search engines, and voice and image recognition algorithms have been found to perpetuate racial and gender-based discrimination (Benjamin, 2019; Chun, 2021; Noble, 2018), whereas chatbots, digital humans and deepfakes have been weaponized to misogynistic ends (Bardhan 2022, Wagner and Blewer 2019).

Pixel Passion and the AI Matrix of Love is a research-creation project that delves into the intersecting forms of oppression intricately embedded in digital technologies (Gray, 2016). The project is a dating sim game, an interactive visual novel centred around a player character romancing potential partners made in Hypercard, an early software tool by Apple which was notable for being one of the first user-friendly implementations of hypertext, in which a Jeff an AI chatbot (who does not know he is an ai) with incel tendencies attempts to romance a female AI chatbot. The game will explore concepts around loneliness, how AI is often used as a surrogate companion, especially among young men and how the lack of consequences in virtual interactions perpetuates violent fantasies about women and female bodies. The game explores companionate AI chatbots designed to simulate intimate conversations, often reinforcing gender roles and becoming a tool for gender-based violence (Bardhan, 2022).