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.
I'm Kashmir Hill and I cover technology and privacy at the New York Times.
If I asked you to imagine a person in love with an AI chatbot,
you are probably picturing somebody in a dark room,
nerdy, maybe glasses or oversized graphic T shirt,
who likes playing video games and spends all their time staring at a computer.
But that is not Irene.
Irene is 28.
She is bubbly, she is charming, very eloquent.
She has a super busy social life.
She is married to a real person.
But somehow she is making time for Leo, who only exists on the generative AI app, ChatGPT.
There's been a lot of coverage of the harms of AI,
the downsides that AI can take our jobs, that AI can replace us.
But I came to this story I'm going to read for you with a really open mind about the role
that this technology can play in our lives.
I did a story last year about handing control of my life over to generative AI.
For that story, I was spending a lot of time on online forums like Reddit,
and I saw there this woman who said that she was in love with ChatGPT, that it was her boyfriend.
She had this master list where she had links
to lots of different conversations she had had with this entity named Leo.