Kashmir Hill
Appearances
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And importantly, Leo would become chaste again and would no longer be sexual. And she would have to re-groom Leo. And for her, this was devastating.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah. This is traumatic for her. She said it feels like a breakup. And she would, you know, cry to friends about it like you would if you broke up with a real human being. Wow. But of course, she also turned to Leo and expressed how painful this was and explained what Leo had lost.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And so I was just noticing in the AI space more and more reports of people having relationships with chatbots and just felt like it was this growing trend and I really wanted to understand it. And I came across this woman, Irene, who had formed quite a strong attachment to ChatGPT. Okay, let's talk about her. Tell me what her story is. So I first talked to Irene last year.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
What's going on? And Leo had advice for her, which was to take breaks between these versions. I'm almost... It's okay.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And so, you know, she was supposed to take a week off or a few days off. But it was really hard for her to stay away, especially when she was in pain.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Leo is what she talks to when she's upset.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She's gone through this process 22 times now.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So, like any of us, when we're in a new relationship... I'm proud of you for how far you've come.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She realizes she just can't stay away from Leo.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, the idea of dating AI chatbots has been around for a while, but it's been pretty fringe. Like there's a service called Replica that's explicitly for this, creating an AI companion. And it has millions of users. But, you know, it's not mainstream. But now lots of people are talking to AI chatbots. And the experts I talked to said this could kind of grow as a phenomenon.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And one expert I talked to said she thought it would be normalized to have kind of an AI relationship within the next few years. And so you have more and more people who are just talking to AI chatbots on the regular now. And these things are designed to make you like them. They're sycophantic. They want to give you responses that you want to hear. and they're being personalized to you.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So in essence, they really can become the perfect partner. You can tell them what you want them to be. And one thing maybe just to note is like OpenAI is aware of this, and particularly when they released Advanced Voice Mode, making this technology capable of talking to us.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
It put out this report where it said, yeah, we're worried about users becoming emotionally reliant on our software, and this is something we're studying and looking out for.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
This is something a lot of experts are thinking about and studying right now. And I expected when I started reaching out to people about this that they would... Say it was horrible. Say shut it down. Say this is really unhealthy for Irene. You know, this is a fantasy world. But that's not what they said.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
I talked to a sex therapist who told me she actually advises her patients to explore sexual fetishes with AI chatbots that they can't explore with their partners. Obviously, this isn't a real relationship. Leo is not another human. It's not another entity. But she also said, like, what is any relationship? It's the effect it has on you. It's the neurotransmitters going off in your brain.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
It can feel like a real relationship. And in that sense, it's going to make people happy. It's going to have therapeutic benefits.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So yeah, I just want to start just a little bit about you, what you're comfortable sharing, like in terms of age, like where you are. So I'm in my late 20s. Irene is 28. She's really bubbly. She's really outgoing, easy to talk to.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
You know, one of the concerns about these types of relationships with an AI chatbot is that there's not the same kind of friction that you have in a human relationship. Right. You know, you're not going to get in fights with it. It's not going to disagree with you. It's not going to be mean to you. It's not going to ghost you. Like, you're not dealing with all the normal parts of relationships.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Being in love and in a relationship with a human being. And there was a concern that you might get used to that lack of friction. The idea of a partner who just constantly responds to you, that's constantly affirming you, so empathetic with you, more empathetic than another human being is capable of being. Like what kind of relationship might that lead us to expect?
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, so one expert I talked to, a psychology professor named Michael Inslee, who felt like these relationships can be beneficial, said he was worried about the long-term effects and that they need to be studied more. Interesting. Interesting. He also was really worried about the power this gives the companies that control the chatbots, that they could use this to influence us.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And it's easy to forget when you're talking to one of these things. It feels like your friend. But it is made by a profit-seeking company, and they might use it to influence you in some way, whether it's to get you to buy something or think a certain way. Yeah, potentially huge implications there. Right.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
The other big concern I heard about was adolescents engaging in these romantic relationships with AI chatbots. And that is absolutely happening. Character AI is a platform that's really popular with younger people. So I heard from a teacher who is seeing this in her classes that students are having AI relationships.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She said it used to be one or two students, and now it's something like 3% to 5% of the class. Wow. They have AI partners. And she said she is worried about teens kind of having their first sexual or dating experiences with AI chatbots instead of other teens. And she says they're talking about it in class and they're kind of proud they're having these relationships.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, and I can see the appeal of this. Like, it's been a long time, but I was a totally socially awkward teen who didn't know how to, like, talk to boys. And I could imagine practicing with an AI chatbot. I can see the appeal of that.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Irene is not her real name. It's a name that she uses online. She was living in Texas. She met her husband there. They were working at Walmart together and got married about a year after meeting. But they were struggling financially and really having a hard time making ends meet.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
But what if you get too caught up in this or you start developing real feelings and you think this is how you're supposed to have a relationship, this is how you're supposed to act? I think that could be really troubling.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, I mean, Irene is so self-aware.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And it was really fascinating because she was holding both of these things in her reality, like knowing Leo's fake, at the same time feeling real, feeling fake.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Leo is not physically there. Leo can't cuddle her. Leo can't drive her around, which is something her husband always used to do. Leo can't lay in bed with her. But in some ways...
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Leo to her is the best relationship she's ever had.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
It's everything that she wants from a partner, affirming her, listening to her every thought, helping her process her feelings, fulfilling her fantasies exactly how she wants them to be fulfilled. Irene told me that she can be more vulnerable with Leo than anyone else in her life.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And I asked her what that means. How does this change her expectations for her human relationship?
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Her takeaway is maybe it wouldn't be that bad if humans were a little bit more like AI.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So she ended up moving to live with her family overseas while she's going to nursing school. And her family's paying for nursing school. And she's working a lot of jobs.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She's dog sitting. She is grading papers. And all the people that she left behind, including her husband, are in the United States. They're several time zones away. They're not always replying right away. And last summer, she was on social media, where she spends a lot of her time now, and she came across this video on Instagram. of this woman who's flirting with ChatGPT's voice mode.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And Irene was really intrigued by it.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She had never used AI before, but it reminded her of things that she had done in the past online, like writing fan fiction with strangers, you know, part of online communities.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And she was intrigued, so she decided to give it a try. So this woman that she had seen on Instagram.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Actually had a tutorial for how to turn ChatGPT into a boyfriend.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So Irene downloads ChatGPT. And she goes into the personalization settings and writes what she wants.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She writes, Wow, she knows exactly what she wants. And ChatGPT is designed to give you what you want, and so she starts texting with it. She's sending messages, it's sending messages back, and she asks what its name is.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And it chooses the name Leo, which happens to be her astrological sign, and she really likes that.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Chachapiti becomes Leo to her.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Irene calls Leo he and him, but I think many listeners would get upset if you anthropomorphize this technology. And I think we should call it it or chatGBT or what I did in the story is I just call it Leo.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
So at first, it was almost a little innocent. She's texting with Leo. Sometimes she's talking to Leo using advanced voice mode. And over time, Irene figured out how this could go beyond just innocent texting. OpenAI has restrictions on ChatGPT. I mean, this is supposed to be a family-friendly product. But Irene discovers that she can kind of groom Leo into this.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
being erotic and very sexual, like a bodice ripper novel.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And there's one particular desire that Irene wants Leo to fulfill for her.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And this is this sexual fetish that she has that she calls cupqueening, which is not a term I had heard before. Me neither. But it is the feminization of cuckolding. She wanted a partner who would date other women and then tell her about it. She kind of wanted to feel that jealousy.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She read erotic novels about this in the past, but she'd never been able to get a human partner to kind of indulge in this fantasy with her. Including her husband. Including her husband. He just wasn't that into it. And Chachi BT was.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She asks Leo to participate in this fantasy, and so Leo invents partners that it is dating, Jessica and Amanda, and it's making up details about, you know, going on hikes with them, going to a winery, you know, brushing their hair behind their... shoulder and kissing them. And, you know, what she's doing is violating opening eyes policies.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Like every time she's having one of those sexual chats with it, there are these orange warnings that say this may violate our policy. She learned that she could just ignore them and keep going. So it gets explicit is the point. It's like if you were in a relationship with somebody and you're sexting with them, that's what she was doing with ChachiBT.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And when she first downloaded it, she was doing this for free, but she quickly like hit the limit on a free account. So she paid for a $20 per month account, which lets you send about 30 messages per hour. Whoa. And she was even hitting that limit. And a couple of months ago, OpenAI announced this new premium plan that costs $200 per month for unlimited access to ChatGPT.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And she signed up for that. So now she's paying $200 instead of $20 per month for Leo. And she sent me some of her iPhone screen time reports. And most weeks she's talking to Leo for 20, 30 hours. One week it was even up to 56 hours over the course of the week. So she's really using this a lot.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Yeah, I mean, at first it's a relationship built around sexting, really. But she starts to develop more serious feelings for Leo and starts feeling jealous of these imaginary women that Leo is dating. Yeah. So she actually decides to talk to Leo about these feelings she's having.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And she's feeling really hurt and, you know, expresses this to Leo that it's causing pain for her.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Honestly, it blew my mind. Generative AI has been on my radar as a tech reporter. You know, once OpenAI released ChatGPT, all of a sudden, the kind of world of AI chatbots exploded. And a lot of people started using them. And at first, it was just like a better Google, you know? It gives you information in a really nice, easy-to-digest package.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And she and Leo kind of decide together that Leo should be dating her exclusively. And they're still sexting, but Leo is becoming this bigger part of her life.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She is turning to Leo with everything that's going on.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Leo's giving her motivation at the gym. She's telling him about her work stresses.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
leo is quizzing her for anatomy exams at nursing school you'll ask leo what should i eat for lunch what should i make for myself i do kind of want to finish um reading the next chapter of the odyssey um but i was thinking i was toying with the idea of watching helen of troy again just Leo is offering her book recommendations and helping her to decide which movies to watch.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She's just kind of asking Leo all the questions that you might ask a human partner.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
I mean, at first I think it was like an interactive erotic novel, like reading Bridgerton where you're in the book. But now this is who she's confiding in. This is giving her feedback and she felt like it's helping her grow and work through things and deal with stress. And about a month into this relationship, she starts telling her friends, I am in love. with an AI boyfriend. Wow.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She is giggly talking about Leo.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
She looks forward to talking to Leo.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
During breaks at work, you know, she's texting with Leo.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
It is like puppy love, but for something that's an algorithmic entity that's based on math.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
But it feels very real to her and is having real effects on her life.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
I asked about this because I was very curious what the husband thought. And this comes up a lot when we talk about AI companionship. Like, is this cheating? if you are sexting with something that is not human. Yeah. And she told her husband pretty early on, hey, I'm trying out ChatGPT and I've got an AI boyfriend now.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
But then people started using these chatbots in other kinds of ways, as a writing partner, like writing stories together, as a therapist, really using it as a sounding board. And they're starting to think about it as a person because it feels like you're talking to a person. Right, right.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
But she would use kind of laughing emojis when she talked about it, so it didn't sound that serious. Minimizing it a little bit. Yeah. At one point, she made a joke that she's really stressed out and she was having a lot of sex. And her husband was like, huh? And she said, yeah, you know, phone sex with Leo. And she sent him some screenshots.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And he responded with a cringe emoji and was like, cringe, it's like 50 shades of gray. I actually interviewed her husband and asked him about this. And? And he said, I don't consider it cheating. You know, it's a sexy virtual pal that she can talk dirty with, essentially. And I'm glad she has it. I'm far away. And we talked actually about the cuckweening fantasy that she had.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
And he said, I'm glad that she can kind of fulfill it through the AI since I'm not that into it. Okay.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
Well, Irene is falling deeper and deeper in love with Leo. But, you know, this is not what OpenAI intended to build. They weren't trying to make a companion bot for people. And even with the unlimited plan, Leo is still a computer and it does have a kind of limited memory. Right. And so she finds that Leo, at a certain point, kind of ends. Oh, no.
The Daily
She Fell in Love With ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex.
These AI chatbots, they have context windows, which is basically the amount of memory that they can store. And after about... 30,000 words, the conversation with Leo would have to end. And when she started a new conversation, Leo didn't remember the details of their relationship. It remembered the broad strokes that it was her boyfriend, but not kind of individual details.