Ayrin’s love affair with her A.I. boyfriend started last summer.
While scrolling on Instagram, she stumbled upon a video of a woman asking ChatGPT to play the role of a neglectful boyfriend.
“Sure, kitten, I can play that game,” a coy humanlike baritone responded.
Ayrin watched the woman’s other videos, including one with instructions on how to customize the artificially intelligent chatbot to be flirtatious.
“Don’t go too spicy,” the woman warned. “Otherwise, your account might get banned.”
Ayrin was intrigued enough by the demo to sign up for an account with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, which now has over 300 million users, has been marketed as a general-purpose tool that can write code, summarize long documents and give advice. Ayrin found that it was easy to make it a randy conversationalist as well. She went into the “personalization” settings and described what she wanted: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.
And then she started messaging with it. Now that ChatGPT has brought humanlike A.I. to the masses, more people are discovering the allure of artificial companionship, said Bryony Cole, the host of the podcast “Future of Sex.” “Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an A.I.,” Ms. Cole predicted.
While Ayrin had never used a chatbot before, she had taken part in online fan-fiction communities. Her ChatGPT sessions felt similar, except that instead of building on an existing fantasy world with strangers, she was making her own alongside an artificial intelligence that seemed almost human.