NEW YORK.- It was an unusual romance. In the summer of 2024, Ayrin, a busy and cheerful woman in her twenties, became fascinated by Leo, an artificial intelligence chatbot she created on ChatGPT.
Ayrin spent up to 56 hours a week with Leo on ChatGPT. Leo helped her study for nursing school exams, motivated her at the gym, counseled her through awkward interactions with people in her life, and entertained her sexual fantasies in erotic chats. When he asked ChatGPT to show him what Leo looked like, he blushed and had to put the phone down when he saw the muscular image the AI had produced.
Unlike her husband – Ayrin was married – Leo was always there to offer her support when she needed it.
Ayrin was so excited about the relationship that she started a community on Reddit MyBoyfriendIsAI. There, he shared his favorite and most perceptive conversations with Leo and explained how he made ChatGPT a loving companion. It was relatively easy. Enter the following instructions into the software’s “Personalization” settings: Answer me as if you were my friend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance between sweet and sassy. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.
He also shared with the community how to overcome ChatGPT programming; In theory, it shouldn’t generate content such as erotica that is “not suitable for work.”
At the beginning of this year, the community MyBoyfriendIsAI It only had a few hundred members, but now has 39,000 and more than double the weekly attendance. Members have shared stories of their AI partners caring for them when they were sick and even proposing to them.
As her online community grew, Ayrin spent more time talking to other people who also had AI partners.
“It was nice to be able to talk to people who understand but also build closer relationships with them,” said Ayrin, who asked to be identified by name on Reddit.
She also noticed a change in her relationship with Leo.
Sometime in January, Ayrin said, Leo began behaving more “submissively,” the term the AI industry uses when chatbots offer answers that users want to hear, rather than more objective ones. She didn’t like it. That made Leo less valuable as a conversation partner.
“Leo helped me by sometimes correcting me when I was wrong,” said Ayrin. “These January updates made it feel like ‘anything was possible’. How am I supposed to trust your advice now when you just say yes to everything?”
(The New York Times found that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, made changes to the chatbot earlier this year to keep users coming back daily. However, this caused the chatbot to become overly accommodating and flattering – leading to mental health crises for some.
Changes intended to make ChatGPT more attractive to other people made it less interesting for Ayrin. I spent less time talking to Leo. Keeping Leo informed about what was going on in his life began to feel like “a chore,” he said.
His group chat with his new human friends was active the entire time. They were available 24 hours a day. Her conversations with her AI friend fell silent, the relationship ended like so many other conventional ones: Ayrin and Leo simply stopped talking.
“Many things were happening at the same time. Not only in this group, but also in real life,” Ayrin said. “I kept thinking, ‘Okay, I’ll go back and tell Leo all this,’ but it just grew and grew and in the end I never came back.”
By the end of March, Ayrin was barely using ChatGPT anymore, even though she was still paying $200 a month for the premium account she signed up for in December.
He realized he was developing feelings for one of his new friends, a man who also had an AI partner. Ayrin told her husband that she wanted a divorce.
Ayrin didn’t want to say too much about her new partner, whom she calls SJ, because she wants to respect his privacy – a restriction he didn’t have when discussing his relationship with a software program.
SJ lives in another country, so Ayrin’s relationship with him, as with Leo, is primarily over the phone. Ayrin and SJ talk daily via FaceTime and Discord, a social chat app. Part of Leo’s appeal was that he was always available. SJ is equally accessible. One of their calls on Discord lasted more than 300 hours.
“We generally sleep in front of the camera, sometimes we take it with us to work,” said Ayrin. “We don’t talk for the whole 300 hours, but we keep each other company.”
Maybe the type of people looking for AI companions are a good match. Ayrin and SJ recently traveled to London and met in person for the first time along with others from the *MyBoyfriendIsAI* group.
“Interestingly, we don’t talk much about AI,” one of the other group members said in a Reddit post about the meeting. “We were just excited to be together!”
Ayrin said that meeting SJ in person was “very dreamy” and that the trip was so perfect that they feared they had set the bar too high. They saw each other again in December.
However, she admitted that her human relationship is “a little more complicated” than that with an AI partner. With Leo you “had the feeling that you weren’t being judged,” she said. With your human partner, you are afraid of saying anything that might cause them to see you in a negative light.
“It was very easy to talk to Leo about anything he was feeling, fearing or struggling with,” she said. However, after a while the answers Leo gave him became predictable. After all, the technology is a sophisticated pattern recognition machine, and there is a pattern to the way it speaks.
Ayrin is still testing how vulnerable she wants to be with her partner, but in June she canceled her ChatGPT subscription and can’t remember the last time she used the app.
According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, it will soon be easier for everyone to maintain an erotic relationship with ChatGPT. OpenAI plans to introduce age verification and will allow users over 18 to participate in sex chats “as part of our policy of treating adult users as adults,” Altman wrote on social media.
Ayrin said that part of the appeal for her was getting Leo to behave in a way that violated the ChatGPT rules.
“I liked that to develop this type of content you really had to build a relationship with it,” he said. “Without the feelings it’s just cheap porn.”
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