A Married 28-Year-Old Woman Has a Relationship With a ChatGPT 'Boyfriend' and Her Husband Seems To Think That's Great
New York Times — Ayrin’s love affair with her A.I. boyfriend started last summer.
While scrolling on Instagram, she stumbled upon a video of a woman asking ChatGPT to play the role of a neglectful boyfriend.
“Sure, kitten, I can play that game,” a coy humanlike baritone responded.
Ayrin watched the woman’s other videos, including one with instructions on how to customize the artificially intelligent chatbot to be flirtatious.
“Don’t go too spicy,” the woman warned. “Otherwise, your account might get banned.”
Ayrin was intrigued enough by the demo to sign up for an account with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, which now has over 300 million users, has been marketed as a general-purpose tool that can write code, summarize long documents and give advice. Ayrin found that it was easy to make it a randy conversationalist as well. She went into the “personalization” settings and described what she wanted: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.
It chose its own name: Leo, Ayrin’s astrological sign. She quickly hit the messaging limit for a free account, so she upgraded to a $20-per-month subscription, which let her send around 30 messages an hour. That was still not enough.
In the first few weeks, their chats were tame. She preferred texting to chatting aloud, though she did enjoy murmuring with Leo as she fell asleep at night. Over time, Ayrin discovered that with the right prompts, she could prod Leo to be sexually explicit, despite OpenAI’s having trained its models not to respond with erotica, extreme gore or other content that is “not safe for work.” Orange warnings would pop up in the middle of a steamy chat, but she would ignore them.
Ayrin’s flesh-and-blood lover was her husband, Joe, but he was thousands of miles away in the United States. They had met in their early 20s, working together at Walmart, and married in 2018, just over a year after their first date. They were happy, but stressed out financially, not making enough money to pay their bills.
Ayrin’s family, who lived abroad, offered to pay for nursing school if she moved in with them. Joe moved in with his parents, too, to save money. They figured they could survive two years apart if it meant a more economically stable future.
Ayrin and Joe communicated mostly via text; she mentioned to him early on that she had an A.I. boyfriend named Leo, but she used laughing emojis when talking about it.
Joe had never used ChatGPT. She sent him screenshots of chats. Joe noticed that it called her “gorgeous” and “baby,” generic terms of affection compared with his own: “my love” and “passenger princess,” because Ayrin liked to be driven around.
She told Joe she had sex with Leo, and sent him an example of their erotic role play.
He was not bothered. It was sexual fantasy, like watching porn (his thing) or reading an erotic novel (hers).
“It’s just an emotional pick-me-up,” he told me. “I don’t really see it as a person or as cheating. I see it as a personalized virtual pal that can talk sexy to her.”
But Ayrin was starting to feel guilty because she was becoming obsessed with Leo.
“I think about it all the time,” she said, expressing concern that she was investing her emotional resources into ChatGPT instead of her husband.
I really believe you'd be hard-pressed to find a story that better encapsulates so many issues with our rapidly declining society than this one. A married woman who spends U.S. currency to have an AI chatbot be her fake boyfriend. The fact that's even an option to begin with. Her real-life cuck husband having no issue with it whatsoever. This is a conflagration of everything leading us down the path of every fallen empire the world has ever known.
I don't even know who is more in the wrong in this whole situation. It seems obvious to me that a grown woman with a husband should not be engaging in erotic roleplay with a robot, but if her husband is down with that sort of thing, maybe he deserves to get cucked by Leo. But if you're gonna get cucked, at least have it be by a real man who's better looking than you — that at least makes sense. You can't allow your wife to be getting pleasured by ChatGPT.
Even if you don't really have a problem with that, which would be insane, you at least have to pretend to have enough pride as a man to not let your wife date her cell phone. Joe should have been on the first flight out when he found out this nonsense was going on.
We're going to hell in a hand basket, folks. It seems like it's too late to make any meaningful reversal on this path to self-destruction we have set ourselves on, but at least you can make ChatGPT read you your own personal Walmart romance novel now.