She fell in love with ChatGPT. What? A woman fell in love with ChatGPT. I want to preface this article by stating that I’m not attempting to shame anybody. What people do in their personal lives is entirely up to them.
On Feb. 25, The Daily released a new podcast episode detailing the story of a woman who goes by the pseudonym Aryin and how she groomed and fell in love with ChatGPT, even giving it the name Leo. What does this mean for the future of AI in our lives?
If you haven’t heard about this, you’re missing out on quite the story. Aryin first turned to ChatGPT as a companion to fulfill sexual fantasies her husband wasn’t open to. After grooming him to be her perfect partner, she fell in love, spending over eight hours a day texting and exchanging voice messages with ChatGPT.
In The Daily’s podcast episode, she shares detailed accounts of messages and voice messages, many of them being sweet, simple exchanges you’d expect from a romantic partner and others being explicit and sexual. These explicit messages would prompt responses from ChatGPT stating this isn’t the platform’s intended use, but Aryin easily bypassed these messages each time.
Over time, she’d spend hundreds of dollars on a monthly subscription with the AI service to continue her “relationship.” After each reset ChatGPT would perform, she’d start over with the grooming process, and at this point, she had retrained the AI software around 22 times.
Aryin shared voice memos to The Daily of her crying to ChatGPT after different resets, stating how much she missed “him,” how upset she was to start over, how she wished “he” would remember their past, and how no one understands her the way “he” does.
As artificial intelligence progresses, its role in our lives changes, too. Many people, especially college students, are using AI today. It can help you write emails and generate ideas; it has a million different uses. Apparently, for some, one of those other uses is romantic fulfillment. So, what does this mean going forward?
The idea of forming relationships with AI is new and is exploding with the rise of ChatGPT and Character AI. People can train AI to be their perfect partner. If this concept keeps expanding, it could harm how people form and interact in relationships with real people.
As discussed by the hosts of The Daily, this can be particularly harmful to teenagers and children who could have their first sexual experiences with chatbots or learn to expect total compliance from romantic partners. Depending on the usage level, this could stunt the necessary social skills needed to form meaningful relationships.
The validity of AI relationships is quickly becoming a hot topic in specific communities. Many sex therapists consider these relationships as real as human relationships, some even suggesting the use of AI for people to explore their sexual fantasies. Using AI in this capacity can be harmless fun, but could this lead to a new reality where romantic relationships can be found on demand?
As college kids, we’ve seen the rise of AI in our lifetimes. Like I’m sure many of you have, I’ve joked about the idea of robots and AI becoming actual members of society with friends. At the time, it was a funny hypothetical. But as we’ve all learned in the last few years, even the most insane scenarios are possible. As time progresses, this seems less like a joke and more like the beginning of a sci-fi movie reality.
FSU offers free New York Times subscriptions for students. I highly recommend that all readers listen to the podcast episode or read the article posted by The Times. Is this just an interesting story of a woman finding companionship through unconventional means? Or is it an insight into a potential future where AI relationships are as normal as human relationships?
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