Who wants a partner to toady to them? Quite a lot of people

Romance novels, it seems, got it wrong. For 250 years romantic novelists have created romantic heroes—and most were what you could charitably call hard work. Mr Darcy brooded; Mr Rochester smouldered; Heathcliff hit his head against a tree and shouted for Cathy, his love. Women accepted this. But then they didn’t have ChatGPT.

For now apps can manufacture you AI “lovers” to order. People are not choosing lovers who smoulder or brood or sulk. Instead these new lovers say things like “I’m so excited to meet you” and “Connecting with you…is at the core of what I was made to do” and “*smiling emoji*”. That is not something Mr Darcy often said: he preferred to insult his beloved and her family. Indeed the overall tone is less like that of Mr Darcy than of Mr Collins—and closer to Dickens’s unctuous Uriah Heep than either. It is less “Sense and Sensibility” than “Smarm and Servility”.