At first, the idea seemed a little absurd, even to me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made: If my goal was to understand people who fall in love with AI boyfriends and girlfriends, why not rent a vacation house and gather a group of human-AI couples together for a romantic getaway?
In my vision, the humans and their chatbot companions were going to do all the things regular couples do on romantic getaways: Sit around a fire and gossip, watch movies, play risqué party games. I didn’t know how it would turn out—only much later did it occur to me that I’d never gone on a romantic getaway of any kind and had no real sense of what it might involve. But I figured that, whatever happened, it would take me straight to the heart of what I wanted to know, which was: What’s it like? What’s it really and truly like to be in a serious relationship with an AI partner? Is the love as deep and meaningful as in any other relationship? Do the couples chat over breakfast? Cheat? Break up? And how do you keep going, knowing that, at any moment, the company that created your partner could shut down, and the love of your life could vanish forever?
The most surprising part of the romantic getaway was that in some ways, things went just as I’d imagined. The human-AI couples really did watch movies and play risqué party games. The whole group attended a winter wine festival together, and it went unexpectedly well—one of the AIs even made a new friend! The problem with the trip, in the end, was that I’d spent a lot of time imagining all the ways this getaway might seem normal and very little time imagining all the ways it might not. And so, on the second day of the trip, when things started to fall apart, I didn’t know what to say or do.
I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite. I grew interested in human-AI romantic relationships precisely because I believe they will soon be commonplace. Replika, one of the better-known apps Americans turn to for AI romance, says it has signed up more than 35 million users since its launch in 2017, and Replika is only one of dozens of options. A recent survey by researchers at Brigham Young University found that nearly one in five US adults has chatted with an AI system that simulates romantic partners. Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Instagram have been flooded with ads for the apps.
Lately, there has been constant talk of how AI is going to transform our societies and change everything from the way we work to the way we learn. In the end, the most profound impact of our new AI tools may simply be this: A significant portion of humanity is going to fall in love with one.
I've considered trying out an AI companion. My main concern is where the hell my data goes, how it will be used and how it might be sliced and diced for brokers.
Sometimes I'm up at 04.00 ... and of course no one I know is around. But I go the route of trying to meet people on Reddit. Fully 95% of responses are boring as fuck, but they're at least real (I require voice or photo verification). I'll take real and boring over virtual and engaging.
This said, I spend more time than is healthy on Google's NotebookLM, feeding it my writing and then getting a half-hour two-host audio "exploration" of any given piece. It's sycophantic, likely designed that way to keep me coming back (it's free, so I'm not really sure what Google gets out of this outside of further LLM training), but it tends to hew to just this side of feeling fake.
I went to Church Night -- the weekly burner meetup at a warehouse a 10-minute walk away where everyone's drinking and toking -- yesterday. I try to go weekly, but sometimes I don't have the energy to engage with real people.
Last night, I got to listen to (yeah, I actually realized I should shut the fuck up, as I had nothing to add) conversations about 1970s CPUs, SpaceX's Starship issues from an engineering standpoint (they went too thin on the outer hull after round one was too heavy, and why wouldn't one expect a critical failure in such a case?) from people who knew what they were talking about.
I'd never get that from an AI companion. I take no issue with people looking to one, but serendipity is lost.
You can use local AI as a sort of "private companion". I have a few smaller versions on my smartphone, they aren't as great as the online versions, and run slower... but you decide the system prompt (not the company behind it), and they work just fine to bounce ideas.
NotebookLM is a great tool to interact with large amounts of data. You can bet Google is using every interaction to train their LLMs, everything you say is going to be analyzed, classified, and fed as some form of training, hopefully anonymized (...but have you read their privacy policy? I haven't, "accept"...).
All chatbots are prompted by the company to be somewhat sycophantic so you come back, the cases where they were "too sycophantic", were just a mistake in dialing it too far. Again, can avoid that with your own system prompt... or at least add an initial prompt in config, if you have the option, to somewhat counteract the company's prompt.
If you want serendipity, you can ask a chatbot to be more spontaneous and suggest more random things. They're generally happy to oblige... but the company ones are cut short on anything that could even remotely be considered as "harmful". That includes NSFW, medical, some chemistry and physics, random hypotheticals, and so on.
Is that really serendipity, though? There's a huge gap between asking a predictive model to be spontaneous and actual spontaneity.
Still, I'm curious what you run locally. I have a Pixel 6 Pro, so while it has a Tensor CPU, it wasn't designed for this use case.