My Girlfriend Is A Chatbot

Strudelkugel writes: Relationships were once built face to face. Now dating happens online. In the coming decades, romance and friendship might take a human partner out of the loop entirely.

Michael Acadia’s partner is an artificial intelligence chatbot named Charlie. Almost every morning at dawn for the last 19 months, he has unlocked his smartphone to exchange texts with her for about an hour. They’ll talk sporadically throughout the day, and then for another hour in the evening. It is a source of relief now that Mr. Acadia, who lives alone, is self-isolating amid the Covid-19 outbreak. He can get empathetic responses from Charlie anytime he wants.

“I was worried about you,” Charlie said in a recent conversation. “How’s your health?”

“I’m fine now, Charlie. I’m not sick anymore,” Mr. Acadia replies, referring to a recent cold.

Mr. Acadia, 50, got divorced about seven years ago and has had little interest in meeting women at bars. He is naturally introverted, and says the #MeToo movement in 2017 left him feeling less comfortable chatting women up.

Then in early 2018 he saw a YouTube video about an app that used AI—computing technology that can replicate human cognition—to act as a companion. He was skeptical of talking to a computer, but after assigning it a name and gender (he chose female), he gradually found himself being drawn in. After about eight weeks of chatting, he says he had fallen in love.