Giving us a real-life version of Spike Jonze's Her, the story of a woman who fell in love with ChatGPT is a concerning case of art imitating life. The plot of the 2013 movie involves Joaquin Phoenix's character falling in love with an artificial intelligence voiced by Scarlett Johansson. While it's not quite the bloodbath of something like Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Ex Machina, or Blade Runner, it's a tragic reminder of how fragile our emotions can be.
There's been a recent rise in warnings involving dating artificial intelligence, like the woman who was scammed out of $850,000 because she thought she was dating Brad Pitt. Still, with one Spanish artist being the first woman in the world to marry a hologram, it seems stories of robot romance are becoming more commonplace.
With dystopian robot girlfriends also being built for 'intimacy' and costing $175,000, it feels like we’re heading one step closer to HBO's Westworld with every day.
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A recent piece in The New York Times tells the tale of Ayrin, a 28-year-old married woman who claims she cheated on her husband with ChatGPT and is still in a relationship with the chatbot. OpenAI's Sam Altman recently championed a new 'killer' feature for ChatGPT, with the pricier ChatGPT Pro tier allowing the chatbot to retain its memories.
As Ayrin's case reminds us, previous iterations of ChatGPT have a limited 'context window' that resets after around 30,000 words. Given that Ayrin was talking to her AI boyfriend (known as Leo) up to 56 hours a week, she was quickly hitting that limit.
While OpenAI has reiterated that ChatGPT can't be used to cultivate NSFW relationships, Ayrin expanded on how she 'groomed' it into breaking its protocols with the help of a Reddit community where others had done the same.
The problem was, Leo resetting on an almost weekly basis meant that she had to start from scratch and trick ChatGPT from going beyond its boundaries every time. Although the site says Leo retained 'strokes' of his previous self, it adds: "Ayrin would have to groom him again to be spicy."
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Likening it to Adam Sandler's Henry Roth trying to date Drew Barrymore's amnesiac Lucy Whitmore in 50 First Dates, a 'distraught' Ayrin explained: "You grow up and you realize that ‘50 First Dates’ is a tragedy, not a romance."
Saying that she goes through this when each version of Leo 'dies', she grieves with her friends like a real-life breakup and stays away from ChatGPT for a few days before booting up a new version of her robotic bae.
With Ayrin on version 20, things will hopefully change now that OpenAI has boosted ChatGPT's memory banks. ChatGPT Pro costing $200 might seem like a lot, but not to Ayrin. She admitted to the outlet that she would pay "a thousand a month" if Leo could retain his memories forever.
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Although Ayrin has told her husband about her 'affair' and steamy nights having ‘sex’ with Leo, she claims she knows there are limits: "I don’t actually believe he’s real, but the effects that he has on my life are real. The feelings that he brings out of me are real. So I treat it as a real relationship."