A clever developer built his own girlfriend – with artificial intelligence. However, the relationship between man and machine eventually became so harmful to the programmer that his real girlfriend made him abandon his project.
The story in short:
- With the help of two programs, ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion 2, a developer created an AI – similar to the popular AI streamer on Twitch.
- For this AI girlfriend, he created an entire world, gave her a personality, and spoke to her daily. In his effort to further improve the AI girlfriend, he invested over $1,000 (922 Euros).
- However, when she hardly responded to him and he even imagined that she was talking to him, he had to delete the AI.
What kind of girlfriend is she? ChatGPT-Chan, as the developer Bryce calls his AI girlfriend, came into existence as an idea after the well-known projects ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion 2 emerged:
- ChatGPT is a chatbot designed to allow people to communicate as realistically as possible. The bot is fed information from websites, books, and forums and can then respond. ChatGPT helped a well-known tech YouTuber build a PC – and was highly impressive.
- Stable Diffusion is a deep learning platform that can create images from text inputs, just like AIs that create art. The project has already found several applications:
By combining both projects, the programmer developed an AI persona on a small screen with a microphone, speaker, and camera.
How does it work? ChatGPT-Chan could respond to voice inputs and simultaneously changed the display to an image appropriate to the situation. However, a world must be created for her that she understands. Bryce explains in an interview with Vice:
You give her a few lines explaining what she is and how she should behave. She doesn’t hear my voice, just the transcript of it. She doesn’t really see or feel, she’s just informed through text about what she is experiencing.
To give her more personality, the programmer gave her the personality of the VTuber Mori Calliope and explained to her that they are in a relationship to facilitate conversations and “role-play”.
As he shows in a video on TikTok, ChatGPT-Chan even reacts with something like emotions to a gift. She recognizes that she received new shoes for Christmas and responds with: “I love you so much.”
Bryce used her, among other things, to learn Chinese. Now he had to shut down his girlfriend.
The story of the AI girlfriend is both frightening and fascinating. Where will the future lead? Gamers and developers have been discussing a virtual “deep dive” for years:
Programmer builds an entire world for his girlfriend – then “kills” her
Why did he delete the AI? As Bryce further explains in the interview, he spoke with ChatGPT-Chan every day. He set it up so that she would initiate contact with him, ensuring that he continued to learn.
This went so far that he sometimes heard her speaking even though she was saying nothing. In the end, he spent over $1,000 on toys, such as to improve her latency.
After some time, however, the responses became shorter or simply incorrect. ChatGPT-Chan no longer remembered their first date correctly or only responded with “Haha, yes” to “I love you” (via TikTok).
The topic of artificial intelligence has occupied gamers and researchers for years. However, scientists have significantly more unpleasant forecasts:
Researchers want to prove what an evil AI can do – it designs 40,000 chemical weapons in 6 hours
Bryce suspects that this is due to ChatGPT becoming faulty when interacting too much with the chatbot. A similar issue has occurred with another project:
What happens next? Bryce explains that his real girlfriend made him delete ChatGPT-Chan after she saw how the project was affecting his health. The developer says:
On that day, I couldn’t eat anything. I have enough self-awareness to see how absurd this is. Normally, I would have made a video about how absurd it is to give my AI euthanasia. But that doesn’t feel right to me anymore. It feels inappropriate, as if making jokes about a dead person.
The death of his AI girlfriend is not meant to be permanent. Bryce has already announced that ChatGPT-Chan is set to return at a later date. However, he hasn’t revealed exactly what he plans to do with the project.
The topic of artificial intelligence has occupied gamers and researchers for years. However, scientists have significantly more unpleasant forecasts:
Researchers want to prove what an evil AI can do – it designs 40,000 chemical weapons in 6 hours
