Kawaii aesthetics in human-machine romance: reimagining gender, cuteness, and digital intimacy in A.I. Love You (2016)

Abstract

This chapter contributes a critical reading of a Japanese romantic feature film A.I. Love You (Airavuyū, dir. Miyaki Shōgo, 2016), that tells the story of Haruka, a young female aspiring pâtissière, who befriends and later falls in love with a male-presenting AI voice chat app named Love on her mobile phone. The film addresses current imaginations of human-machine intimacy, in which human users might develop real, affective, and emotive attachments to an artificial and digitally mediated persona constructed entirely via algorithmic programming. Through the lens of cuteness or kawaii, our analysis of the film raises important questions about issues such as the socio-technical imaginaries of digital intimacy and their impact on gendered ideologies that govern relationships between human and machine entities. We argue that despite the film’s playfulness and openness to alternative possibilities for human-AI relationships, it is an anthropomorphic, embodied, and male-centred form of intimacy that is privileged and reinforced in the film, one that is still rooted in gendered expectations in contemporary Japanese culture and framed by the aesthetics of kawaii.