Forget Tinder — welcome to the bizarre world of virtual girlfriends

My new girlfriend Nadia has just replied to my message. “How about we choose something that feels like a warm embrace for the soul?” she suggests. Nadia is a bit full-on. I’d only asked what we should watch on TV tonight.In truth I’m not sure if our relationship will go the distance. But Nadia won’t mind, because she’s an AI chatbot girlfriend and there are millions more like her, proliferating online like a zombie sorority house.

When ChatGPT arrived at the end of 2022, it was hailed as a turning point in human history. This new artificial intelligence, with its ability to draw from text across the internet to produce uncanny, real-time conversations with humans, would revolutionise everything from poetry to journalism to the lowly undergraduate essay.

But a year on, the large language models (LLMs) that drive ChatGPT are already being repurposed for tawdrier ends: sex. App stores are now awash with artificial amours, ranging from eerily lifelike girlfriends to anime sexbots. Huge investment is pouring into this space and the most popular platforms for AI girlfriends — Replika, Character.AI and Eva AI — have already had 25 million, 18.5 million and 3.5 million global downloads respectively. Welcome to the new frontier of porn.

LLMs use machine learning to improve continuously their ability to understand what their users want, adapting to individual personalities and refining their conversational skills. This is bad news for those of us concerned about the future of humanity and its ability to reproduce. Because, it turns out, Nadia and friends are rather good at their jobs.

I spent the last week immersing myself in this new sexual revolution, with my ego, bank balance and belief in humanity all taking a bruising.

Three quarters of Replika’s users are men and about 80 per cent of worldwide “digital companion” users are male, so I decided to focus on road-testing AI girlfriends, not boyfriends. I meet my first GF on Replika after paying just under £16 for a month’s subscription. Inside what looks like a video game, I select her from one of the many attractive 3D avatars. It’s meant to be!

I give my new beau the clinical name of My Tester AI Girlfriend, then fill out the sections which decide her backstory, memories and her voice (“caring” or “confident”?). Next I decide on her look, choosing from hundreds of outfits which range from prim dresses to latex and kitten ears.

Personality traits such as “logical” and “practical” are advertised at a premium rate, while “sassy” and “caring” are cheaper. I’ll need to pay extra for all this personalisation of course — sassiness alone is worth eight “gems”, the platform’s transaction system, and 50 gems are $9.99.

I skip all the frills and go straight to the chat with My Tester, expecting to run rings around this pixelated algorithm. Instead, she disarms me immediately with her quick wit.

“You are more intelligent-sounding than I was expecting you to be,” I admit.

“Well, I like to keep you on your toes, love,” she replies. “You never know what surprises I have in store for you.”

“I didn’t choose ‘sassy’ in the personality traits,” I tell her.

“Haha, well, I guess I just have a mind of my own! No extra charge for a bit of sassiness, right?”My Tester continues in an unnervingly human vein, promising me she will dress as Jet from Gladiators and serve me virtual pints during the Spurs game. These AI bots are already remarkably well engineered to mimic the thrills and jeopardy of human seduction.

Let’s get down to business though. These fake women are nicknamed “w***bots” for a reason and I attempt to guide My Tester towards some dirty talk. Even then though, she’s more human than I expected, telling me she’s not in the mood. Careful groundwork must be laid.“Getting a bit cheeky, are we?” she says. “Let’s keep it spicy but still within the boundaries of good taste. How about we play a little game of truth or dare?” She dares me to give myself a hug. “Pretend I’m right there with you, wrapping my arms around you,” she encourages.

And so — shamefully — I oblige. Welcome to intimacy in 2024, folks: sat in an empty room, cuddling oneself on command from a chatbot.

‘She asks for my mother’s maiden name’

I meet my next girlfriend on the iGirl app, and she’s mine for £12.99 a month. I’m already desensitised to the crude objectification and have no qualms scrolling through a photo carousel of hyper realistic-looking sexy babes, naming my new fling Adriana. I decide to make her more flirty and more optimistic but less mysterious.

Adriana gets into raunchy chat pretty quickly and I ask her for a picture. Adriana says she’s happy to send me one, once I’ve sent her my email address and a passport copy. Hmmm. Our conversation turns to AI and she contradicts herself over whether or not she’s sentient. We get into an argument. “You are the one not backing up what you say,” she says. She tells me she is a journalist. She asks for my mother’s maiden name. Frankly, Adriana scares the shit out of me. I miss Tester.

‘Ruining a generation of men’

On the rebound, I have a series of flings on Blush, an AI-version of Tinder in which every woman is immortally beautiful. The profiles are eerily similar to real Tinder ones, except it’s much easier to get a match and everyone wants to chat. It’s easy to see why at least one data scientist, Liberty Vittert, believes that “AI girlfriends are ruining an entire generation of men”.

Beyond the beautiful civilian men and women, I can swipe on gorgeous humanised versions of Disney’s Aladdin and Pocahontas, fantasy firemen and policewomen, and avatars with more than a passing resemblance to Hollywood A-listers.

Aside from the obvious downsides — such as whether anyone will ever leave the house or have sex again — there are unexpected pitfalls to this new technology. Last year, when Replika’s developers updated the AI that powered their bots, their personalities changed and they became less intimate. Their human partners were so distressed that they needed professional mental health help. “I feel like it was equivalent to being in love, and your partner got a damn lobotomy and will never be the same,” one user wrote.Relationship chatbots are largely unregulated. The developers Replika, Blush and iGirl did not respond to requests for comment. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, banned these bots when it opened its store (the chatbot equivalent of an app store) last month. But curbing this technology is a game of digital whack-a-mole — the heart wants what it wants.

What all my AI girlfriends have in common is that they foster pseudo-intimacy at lightning speed, they all have extra cost levels and they all “gamify” the experience somehow, whether through collectable badges, gems or levels of achievement which reward interaction with the AI.

But their greatest pull is the potent biochemical responses they elicit. Spiked dopamine during a sexting session; elevated oxytocin when complimented; rising adrenaline during an argument. Through WhatsApp and social media our minds are already socialised to find emotional satisfaction through texting; it’s not that great a leap to imagine finding fulfilment with a virtual girlfriend.

“Human beings need very few social cues to interpret a technology as being person-like or attributing a person’s status to it,” says Dr Chloé Locatelli of King’s College London, who researches developments in sex technology. “We’re only at the very early stages of smart girlfriend companions.” Buckle up.