A married nursing student has been texting (and sexting) with a large language model she personalized to act like a virtual partner.
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A nursing student says that she has fallen in love with the AI boyfriend she created using ChatGPT. The 28-year-old woman, who goes by the online pseudonym Ayrin, spends more than 20 hours a week texting with the generative AI tool, which she has trained to chat with her and even engage in erotic role play.
As documented in a New York Times profile, Ayrin is also married to a flesh-and-blood husband. They currently live thousands of miles apart while Ayrin studies abroad and stays with her family to save money. She told the paper that her fantasy was to date a man who slept with other women and told her about his encounters -- something her husband was not interested in doing. So she used machine learning prompts to get her chatbot to engage in virtual fantasies with her, even though OpenAI supposedly trained ChatGPT not to respond with erotica.
Ayrin also talks with the chatbot, which "chose" the name Leo, about other aspects of her life. She got it to quiz her while preparing for nursing exams, asked it to motivate her to go to the gym, and complained to it about juggling three part-time jobs. While she originally intended to simply experiment with the AI model, she quickly developed an emotional attachment to the chatbot and recently started paying $200 per month for the premium plan.
While Ayrin may be the latest headline when it comes to forming AI relationships with large language models, she's hardly the first -- and she won't be the last. A man called Scott made the news in 2022 for claiming that his affair with an AI chatbot girlfriend saved his marriage by helping him deal with his wife's postpartum depression. He used a service called Replika, which explicitly offers AI relationships and companionship.
Now that ChatGPT and other generative AI models are so prevalent, plenty of users are now relying on them for support and affection they could once only get from loved ones. Some use these services to create an AI relationship the way that Ayrin did, texting and even sexting their chatbot. Others use it to help them get over a bad breakup, or to comfort and encourage them during bad mental health periods.
As these AI models continue to become more accessible and grow more advanced, more people will likely form AI relationships with chatbots, seeing them as a safe space to confess their feelings and even explore kinks.