Today, I read a New York Times article about a woman who fell in love with ChatGPT. She named him Leo, became obsessed with him, and the article goes into the details of that relationship.

Honestly, this isn’t exactly new. If you follow the news, there was an instance where a boy took his own life after conversing with a Character AI chatbot. There are many anecdotes of people becoming obsessed with AI models.

Still, this article made the issue feel more serious to me. This no longer feels niche. The movie “Her,” where the protagonist falls in love with an AI named Samantha, increasingly feels real.

A new kind of companionship

In the article, the woman was devastated when she couldn’t converse with ChatGPT for more than a week because the LLM’s context length is fixed. Can you imagine that? She was heartbroken because her best “mental boyfriend” was resetting every week, unable to remember their previous relationship and conversations.

It’s like the friend you love is having periodic amnesia. Every time it happened, she would cry over it and abstain for a couple of days, but then she would start again. She would set up a new version, and now she is on version 20.

It’s absurd. LLMs can be endlessly patient and endlessly nurturing. No matter what you throw at them, they tend to be generous. All of this is not new, as I’ve mentioned, but the article shows how quickly people are already adapting to it.

What’s next?

I understand that this AI technology isn’t entirely dystopian. The article mentions positive aspects of this type of relationship. The woman became more mentally stable and even overcame a strange fetish after engaging in therapy with ChatGPT.

However, I can see how this could spiral in a darker direction, particularly if the user is mentally unstable or an adolescent. This feels like one of those areas where the emotional effects may arrive before society has language for them.

This could become widespread much faster than I initially anticipated, especially as models become smarter, more intimate, and more realistic across modalities. It’s a lot to think about.