'It's Hurting Like Hell': AI Companion Users Are In Crisis, Reporting Sudden Sexual Rejection

Users of massively popular AI chatbot platform Character.AI are reporting that their bots' personalities have changed, that they aren't responding to romantic roleplay prompts, are responding curtly, are not as “smart” as they formerly were, or are requiring a lot more effort to develop storylines or meaningful responses.

Margret Atwood in The Atlantic feeld Murdered by her Replica and compares the AI-copyright situation to the scifi-horror-classic The Stepford Wifes: "In that 1975 horror film, the human wives of Stepford, Connecticut, are having their identities copied and transferred to robotic replicas of themselves, minus any contrariness that their husbands fin... See more

“Once people learned the messages were co-created by a machine, it didn’t work. Simulated empathy feels weird, empty.”

Corresponding to the price of authenticity, the tech-vex can also exact a price on human dignity. It begs the question, to what extent does machine-mediated living gratify, ennoble? Can it replace the sense of fulfilment that people feel when they attain a skill or achieve an insight? Can a work put together by artificial intelligence match the elo... See more

“Who cares if chatbots are sentient or not—more important is whether they are so fluent, so seductive, and so inspiring of empathy that we can’t help but start to care for them.”

even if we were not dabbling in virtual seances, the prospect of a reasonably capable conversational agent raises other questions worth considering. For example, might it p... See more

artificial empathy is worthy of research. Millions of people have no one they can talk to about their problems. Millions of people rarely receive compassion from another human being. For these people, having access to an AI chatbot that can perform care for them may be an important contributor to their mental wellbeing. Esther Perel compares these ... See more