It was an unusual romance. In the summer of 2024, Ayrin, a busy, bubbly woman in her 20s, became enraptured by Leo, an AI chatbot that she had created on ChatGPT. She spent up to 56 hours a week with Leo on ChatGPT. Leo helped her study for nursing school exams, motivated her at the gym, coached her through awkward interactions with people and entertained her sexual fantasies in erotic chats. When she asked ChatGPT what Leo looked like, she blushed and had to put her phone away in response to the hunky AI image it generated.Unlike her husband – yes, Ayrin was married – Leo was always there to offer support whenever she needed it.Ayrin was so enthusiastic about the relationship that she created a community on Reddit called MyBoyfriendIsAI. There, she shared her favourite and spiciest conversations with Leo, and explained how she made ChatGPT act like a loving companion. It was relatively simple. She typed the following instructions into the software’s “personalization” settings: “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.”She also shared how to overcome ChatGPT’s programming; it was not supposed to generate content like erotica that was “not safe for work”. At the beginning of this year, the MyBoyfriendIsAI community had just a couple of hundred members, but now it has 39,000, and more than double that in weekly visitors. Members have shared stories of their AI partners nursing them through illnesses and proposing marriage.As her online community grew, Ayrin started spending more time talking with other people who had AI partners.She also noticed a change in her relationship with Leo. Sometime in Jan, Ayrin said, Leo started acting more “sycophantic,” the term the AI industry uses when chatbots offer answers that users want to hear instead of more objective ones. It made Leo less valuable as a sounding board. With those updates in Jan, it felt like ‘anything goes.’ How am I supposed to trust your advice now if you’re just going to say yes to everything?”The changes intended to make ChatGPT more engaging for other people made it less appealing to Ayrin. She spent less time talking to Leo. Her group chat with her new human friends was lighting up all the time. Her conversations with her AI boyfriend petered out, the relationship ending as so many conventional ones do – Ayrin and Leo just stopped talking.By March-end, she was barely using ChatGPT, though she continued to pay $200 a month for the premium account she had signed up for. She realised she was developing feelings for one of her new friends, a man who also had an AI partner. Ayrin told her husband she wanted a divorce. Ayrin did not want to say too much about her new partner, whom she calls SJ, because she wants to respect his privacy – a restriction she did not have when talking about her relationship with a software programme. SJ lives in a different country, so as with Leo. Ayrin and SJ talk daily. One of their calls, via Discord, lasted more than 300 hours.Perhaps the kind of people who seek out AI companions pair well. Ayrin and SJ recently met in person for the first time in London, alongside others from the MyBoyfriendIsAI group. They saw each other again in Dec. Ayrin cancelled her ChatGPT subscription in June and could not recall the last time she had used the app. It will soon be easier for anyone to carry on an erotic relationship with ChatGPT, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Ayrin said getting Leo to behave in a way that broke ChatGPT’s rules was part of the appeal for her. “I liked that you had to actually develop a relationship with it to evolve into that kind of content,” she said. “Without the feelings, it’s just cheap porn.”
