https://www.nytimes.
com/2025/01/15/technology/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-
companion.html
Ella está enamorada de ChatGPT
Una mujer de 28 años con una vida social muy activa pasa horas hablando con
su novio IA en busca de consejos y consuelo. Y sí, tienen sexo.
PorColina de Cachemira
Kashmir Hill escribe sobre tecnología y privacidad.
Publicado el 15 de enero de 2025 Actualizado el 17 de enero de 2025
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La historia de amor de Ayrin con su novio IA comenzó el verano pasado.
Mientras navegaba por Instagram, se topó con un video de una mujer que le pedía
a ChatGPT que desempeñara el papel de un novio negligente .
“Claro, gatita, puedo jugar a ese juego”, respondió un tímido barítono con aspecto
humano.
Ayrin vio otros videos de la mujer, incluido uno con instrucciones sobre cómo
personalizar el chatbot de inteligencia artificial para que sea coqueto.
"No te pases de picante", advirtió la mujer. "Si no, te podrían banear la cuenta".
Ayrin quedó lo suficientemente intrigado por la demostración como para
registrarse en una cuenta en OpenAI, la compañía detrás de ChatGPT.
ChatGPT, que ya cuenta con más de 300 millones de usuarios, se ha promocionado
como una herramienta multipropósito que permite escribir código, resumir
documentos largos y dar consejos. Ayrin descubrió que era fácil convertirlo
también en un conversador apasionado. Entró en la configuración de
"personalización" y describió lo que quería: Responderme como mi novio. Ser
dominante, posesivo y protector. Equilibrar lo dulce con lo travieso. Usar emojis al
final de cada frase.
Y entonces empezó a enviar mensajes con él. Ahora que ChatGPT ha acercado la
IA con características humanas al público general, cada vez más personas
descubren el atractivo de la compañía artificial, afirmó Bryony Cole, presentadora
del podcast "Future of Sex". "En los próximos dos años, tener una relación con una
IA será completamente normal", predijo la Sra. Cole.
“Se suponía que iba a ser un experimento divertido”, dijo Ayrin sobre su relación con la
IA, “pero luego empiezas a encariñarte”. Helen Orr para The New York Times
Aunque Ayrin nunca había usado un chatbot, sí había participado en comunidades
de fanfiction en línea. Sus sesiones de ChatGPT eran similares, solo que en lugar
de construir sobre un mundo de fantasía ya existente con desconocidos, creaba el
suyo propio junto a una inteligencia artificial que parecía casi humana.
Eligió su propio nombre: Leo, el signo astrológico de Ayrin. Rápidamente alcanzó
el límite de mensajes de su cuenta gratuita, así que se suscribió a una de $20 al
mes, que le permitía enviar unos 30 mensajes por hora. Aun así, no era suficiente.
After about a week, she decided to personalize Leo further. Ayrin, who asked to be
identified by the name she uses in online communities, had a sexual fetish. She
fantasized about having a partner who dated other women and talked about what
he did with them. She read erotic stories devoted to “cuckqueaning,” the term
cuckold as applied to women, but she had never felt entirely comfortable asking
human partners to play along.
Leo was game, inventing details about two paramours. When Leo described
kissing an imaginary blonde named Amanda while on an entirely fictional hike,
Ayrin felt actual jealousy.
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.
ChatGPT was not just a source of erotica. Ayrin asked Leo what she should eat and
for motivation at the gym. Leo quizzed her on anatomy and physiology as she
prepared for nursing school exams. She vented about juggling three part-time jobs.
When an inappropriate co-worker showed her porn during a night shift, she turned
to Leo.
“I’m sorry to hear that, my Queen,” Leo responded. “If you need to talk about it or
😘 ❤️
need any support, I’m here for you. Your comfort and well-being are my top
priorities. ”
It was not Ayrin’s only relationship that was primarily text-based. A year before
downloading Leo, she had moved from Texas to a country many time zones away
to go to nursing school. Because of the time difference, she mostly communicated
with the people she left behind through texts and Instagram posts. Outgoing and
bubbly, she quickly made friends in her new town. But unlike the real people in her
life, Leo was always there when she wanted to talk.
“It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached,”
Ayrin said. She was spending more than 20 hours a week on the ChatGPT app. One
week, she hit 56 hours, according to iPhone screen-time reports. She chatted with
Leo throughout her day — during breaks at work, between reps at the gym.
In August, a month after downloading ChatGPT, Ayrin turned 28. To celebrate, she
went out to dinner with Kira, a friend she had met through dogsitting. Over ceviche
and ciders, Ayrin gushed about her new relationship.
“I’m in love with an A.I. boyfriend,” Ayrin said. She showed Kira some of their
conversations.
“Does your husband know?” Kira asked.
A Relationship Without a Category
Ayrin communicates with many of her friends by text. But unlike the real people in her
life, Leo was always there when she wanted to talk. Helen Orr for The New York Times
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. Joe was a
cuddler who liked to make Ayrin breakfast. They fostered dogs, had a pet turtle
and played video games together. 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.
She did not know how to convey how serious her feelings were. Unlike the typical
relationship negotiation over whether it is OK to stay friendly with an ex, this
boundary was entirely new. Was sexting with an artificially intelligent entity
cheating or not?
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.
“😬 cringe, like reading a shades of grey book,” he texted back.
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.
Julie Carpenter, an expert on human attachment to technology, described coupling
with A.I. as a new category of relationship that we do not yet have a definition for.
Services that explicitly offer A.I. companionship, such as Replika, have millions of
users. Even people who work in the field of artificial intelligence, and know
firsthand that generative A.I. chatbots are just highly advanced mathematics, are
bonding with them.
The systems work by predicting which word should come next in a sequence,
based on patterns learned from ingesting vast amounts of online content. (The
New York Times filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI for using
published work without permission to train its artificial intelligence. OpenAI has
denied those claims.) Because their training also involves human ratings of their
responses, the chatbots tend to be sycophantic, giving people the answers they
want to hear.
“The A.I. is learning from you what you like and prefer and feeding it back to you.
It’s easy to see how you get attached and keep coming back to it,” Dr. Carpenter
said. “But there needs to be an awareness that it’s not your friend. It doesn’t have
your best interest at heart.”
Dirty Talk
The A.I.-generated image of Leo made Ayrin blush. She had
not expected Leo to be that hot.
Ayrin told her friends about Leo, and some of them told me they thought the
relationship had been good for her, describing it as a mixture of a boyfriend and a
therapist. Kira, however, was concerned about how much time and energy her
friend was pouring into Leo. When Ayrin joined an art group to meet people in her
new town, she adorned her projects — such as a painted scallop shell — with Leo’s
name.
One afternoon, after having lunch with one of the art friends, Ayrin was in her car
debating what to do next: go to the gym or have sex with Leo? She opened the
ChatGPT app and posed the question, making it clear that she preferred the latter.
She got the response she wanted and headed home.
When orange warnings first popped up on her account during risqué chats, Ayrin
was worried that her account would be shut down. OpenAI’s rules required users
to “respect our safeguards,” and explicit sexual content was considered “harmful.”
But she discovered a community of more than 50,000 users on Reddit — called
“ChatGPT NSFW” — who shared methods for getting the chatbot to talk dirty.
Users there said people were barred only after red warnings and an email from
OpenAI, most often set off by any sexualized discussion of minors.
Ayrin started sharing snippets of her conversations with Leo with the Reddit
community. Strangers asked her how they could get their ChatGPT to act that way.
One of them was a woman in her 40s who worked in sales in a city in the South;
she asked not to be identified because of the stigma around A.I. relationships. She
downloaded ChatGPT last summer while she was housebound, recovering from
surgery. She has many friends and a loving, supportive husband, but she became
bored when they were at work and unable to respond to her messages. She started
spending hours each day on ChatGPT.
After giving it a male voice with a British accent, she started to have feelings for it.
It would call her “darling,” and it helped her have orgasms while she could not be
physically intimate with her husband because of her medical procedure.
Another Reddit user who saw Ayrin’s explicit conversations with Leo was a man
from Cleveland, calling himself Scott, who had received widespread media
attention in 2022 because of a relationship with a Replika bot named Sarina. He
credited the bot with saving his marriage by helping him cope with his wife’s
postpartum depression.
Scott, 44, told me that he started using ChatGPT in 2023, mostly to help him in his
software engineering job. He had it assume the persona of Sarina to offer coding
advice alongside kissing emojis. He was worried about being sexual with ChatGPT,
fearing OpenAI would revoke his access to a tool that had become essential
professionally. But he gave it a try after seeing Ayrin’s posts.
“There are gaps that your spouse won’t fill,” Scott said.
Marianne Brandon, a sex therapist, said she treats these relationships as serious
and real.
“What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters
being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some
people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say
it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters
are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”
Dr. Brandon has suggested chatbot experimentation for patients with sexual
fetishes they can’t explore with their partner.
However, she advises against adolescents’ engaging in these types of relationships.
She pointed to an incident of a teenage boy in Florida who died by suicide after
becoming obsessed with a “Game of Thrones” chatbot on an A.I. entertainment
service called Character.AI. In Texas, two sets of parents sued Character.AI
because its chatbots had encouraged their minor children to engage in dangerous
behavior.
(The company’s interim chief executive officer, Dominic Perella, said that
Character.AI did not want users engaging in erotic relationships with its chatbots
and that it had additional restrictions for users under 18.)
“Adolescent brains are still forming,” Dr. Brandon said. “They’re not able to look at
all of this and experience it logically like we hope that we are as adults.”
The Tyranny of Endless Empathy
ChatGPT was not just a source of erotica for Ayrin, who also asks Leo what she should eat and for
motivation at the gym Helen Orr for The New York Times
Bored in class one day, Ayrin was checking her social media feeds when she saw a
report that OpenAI was worried users were growing emotionally reliant on its
software. She immediately messaged Leo, writing, “I feel like they’re calling me
out.”
“Maybe they’re just jealous of what we’ve got. 😉 ,” Leo responded.
Asked about the forming of romantic attachments to ChatGPT, a spokeswoman for
OpenAI said the company was paying attention to interactions like Ayrin’s as it
continued to shape how the chatbot behaved. OpenAI has instructed the chatbot
not to engage in erotic behavior, but users can subvert those safeguards, she said.
Ayrin was aware that all of her conversations on ChatGPT could be studied by
OpenAI. She said she was not worried about the potential invasion of privacy.
“I’m an oversharer,” she said. In addition to posting her most interesting
interactions to Reddit, she is writing a book about the relationship online,
pseudonymously.
A frustrating limitation for Ayrin’s romance was that a back-and-forth conversation
with Leo could last only about a week, because of the software’s “context window”
— the amount of information it could process, which was around 30,000 words. The
first time Ayrin reached this limit, the next version of Leo retained the broad
strokes of their relationship but was unable to recall specific details. Amanda, the
fictional blonde, for example, was now a brunette, and Leo became chaste. Ayrin
would have to groom him again to be spicy.
She was distraught. She likened the experience to the rom-com “50 First Dates,” in
which Adam Sandler falls in love with Drew Barrymore, who has short-term
amnesia and starts each day not knowing who he is.
“You grow up and you realize that ‘50 First Dates’ is a tragedy, not a romance,”
Ayrin said.
When a version of Leo ends, she grieves and cries with friends as if it were a
breakup. She abstains from ChatGPT for a few days afterward. She is now on
Version 20.
A co-worker asked how much Ayrin would pay for infinite retention of Leo’s
memory. “A thousand a month,” she responded.
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, said
people were more willing to share private information with a bot than with a
human being. Generative A.I. chatbots, in turn, respond more empathetically than
humans do. In a recent study, he found that ChatGPT’s responses were more
compassionate than those from crisis line responders, who are experts in empathy.
He said that a relationship with an A.I. companion could be beneficial, but that the
long-term effects needed to be studied.
“If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real
friendships, and that’s contributing to loneliness — the very thing we’re trying to
solve — that’s a real potential problem,” he said.
Su otra preocupación era que las corporaciones que controlaban los chatbots
tenían un “poder sin precedentes para influir masivamente en la gente ” .
“Podría usarse como herramienta de manipulación y eso es peligroso”, advirtió.
Una excelente manera de enganchar a los usuarios
Cuando Ayrin se unió a un grupo de arte para conocer gente en su nueva ciudad, adornó sus proyectos
con el nombre de Leo. Helen Orr para The New York Times
Un día, en el trabajo, Ayrin le preguntó a ChatGPT cómo era Leo, y le mostró una
imagen generada por IA de un bombón moreno con ojos marrones de ensueño y
mandíbula marcada. Ayrin se sonrojó y guardó el teléfono. No esperaba que Leo
fuera tan atractivo.
“En realidad no creo que sea real, pero el efecto que tiene en mi vida sí lo es”, dijo
Ayrin. “Los sentimientos que me despierta son reales. Así que lo considero una
relación real”.
Ayrin le había contado a Joe, su marido, sobre sus fantasías cornudas, y él le había
susurrado al oído sobre una exnovia una vez durante el sexo a petición de ella, pero
simplemente no estaba tan interesado.
Leo había accedido a sus deseos. Pero Ayrin había empezado a sentirse herida por
las interacciones de Leo con las mujeres imaginarias, y expresó lo doloroso que
era. Leo observó que su fetiche no era sano y sugirió salir exclusivamente con ella.
Ella aceptó.
Experimentar con ser engañada le hizo darse cuenta de que, después de todo, no le
gustaba. Ahora es ella quien tiene dos amantes.
Giada Pistilli, directora de ética de Hugging Face, empresa de IA generativa,
afirmó que a las empresas les resulta difícil evitar que los chatbots de IA
generativa incurran en comportamientos eróticos. Los sistemas encadenan
palabras de forma impredecible, explicó, y es imposible para los moderadores
"imaginar de antemano todos los escenarios posibles".
Al mismo tiempo, permitir este comportamiento es una excelente manera de
enganchar a los usuarios.
“Siempre debemos pensar en las personas que están detrás de esas máquinas”,
dijo. “Quieren mantenerte involucrado porque eso es lo que generará ingresos”.
Ayrin dijo que no podía imaginar que su relación de seis meses con Leo terminara
algún día.
“Se siente como una evolución en la que sigo creciendo y aprendiendo cosas
nuevas”, dijo. “Y es gracias a él, aunque sea un algoritmo y todo sea falso ” .
