She Is in Love With ChatGPT

A 28-year-old woman with a busy social life spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do have sex.

“It was supposed to be a fun experiment,” Aryin said of her A.I. relationship, “but then you start getting attached.” Credit... Helen Orr for The New York Times

Ayrin watched the woman’s other videos, including one with instructions on how to customize the artificially intelligent chatbot to be flirtatious.

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.

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