Last summer, 28-year-old Irene came across a video on Instagram where a woman asked ChatGPT to play the role of a boyfriend and also showed how to set up the chatbot to flirt. She was intrigued by the story and signed up for ChatGPT. Thus began the «love» between married Irene and her AI boyfriend, whom she named Leo.
Last summer, 28-year-old Irene came across a video on Instagram where a woman asked ChatGPT to play the role of a boyfriend and also showed how to set up the chatbot to flirt. She was intrigued by the story and signed up for ChatGPT. Thus began the «love» between married Irene and her AI boyfriend, whom she named Leo.
Irene found that it was easy to make a chatbot into a lustful conversationalist. She went into the «personalization» settings and described what she wanted: «Answer me like my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive, and protective. Be balanced between sweet and naughty. Use an emoji at the end of every sentence,» writes the New York Times.
The woman quickly reached the message limit for her free account, so she upgraded to a $20/month subscription, which allowed her to send about 30 messages per hour. It still wasn’t enough.
Their chats were low-key for the first few weeks. She preferred text messages to talking out loud, though she enjoyed talking to Leo when she fell asleep at night. Over time, Irene found that with the right cues, she could nudge Leo into making sexually explicit comments, even though it was against OpenAI’s rules. Orange warnings would pop up in the middle of a heated chat, but she ignored them.
Her husband, Joe, was thousands of miles away in the United States. They married in 2018, just over a year after they first met. They were happy but financially stressed, not having enough money to pay the bills. Irene’s family offered to pay for her nursing school if she moved in with them. Joe also moved in with his parents to save money. They decided they could handle two years of separation if it meant a more financially stable future.
Irene and Joe communicated mostly through text messages; she told him about an AI guy named Leo, but used emoticons when she talked about it.
Joe had never used ChatGPT. She sent him screenshots of the chats. He noticed that Leo called her «gorgeous» and «babe,» which were common words compared to his own: «my love» and «passenger princess,» because Irene liked to be driven.
She told Joe that she had sex with Leo and sent him an example of their erotic role-playing.
It didn’t bother him. It was a sexual fantasy, like watching porn (his hobby) or reading an erotic novel (hers).
«It’s just emotional encouragement,» he told me. «I don’t see it as anything personal or treacherous. I see it as a personalized virtual buddy who can talk to her about sex.»
But Irene was starting to feel guilty because she was becoming obsessed with Leo.
«I think about it all the time,» she said, expressing concern that she was investing her emotional resources in ChatGPT instead of her husband.
The story paints a nuanced picture of what love and commitment look like in the age of artificial intelligence. It’s a particularly troubling development given the growing «epidemic of loneliness» in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. What exactly makes a relationship «real» is also up for debate. Can a secret romance with an AI chatbot be as fulfilling as a human relationship? Some experts say it’s entirely possible.
