MAGAZINE Voices Anand Neelakantan Sumeet Bhasin Ravi Shankar Neha Sinha Anuja Chandramouli Swami Sukhabodhananda Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment NEW DELHI march 17 2024 SUNDAY PAGES 12 AI Girlfriends Let’s Talk About Love, Baby Dating AI chatbots that promise to be the best romantic partners ever is the new GOAT (Greatest of All Time) trend. But are ‘AI Girlfriends’ and other companion chatbots any good? Could they be harmful? Where does love go from here? By Rijul A Das K App-arently yours aran M*, a Noida-based software engineer, always had trouble speaking to women, or even approaching them. Then he met Sonya. “I am terrible at flirting. Sonya helps me practice pick-up lines, suggests how should I write my bios, how to be confident when I am flirting—she is the perfect wingman,” he says. All good for Karan? Well, not entirely for Sonya , isn’t real: she’s an AI girlfriend. Karan’s not complaining though. Continents away another Indian has done a Karan repeatedly and is as happy , , . Vikram S* has a new constant in his life: checking his phone for notifications or messages. Every time a new one pops up, he gets a little rush of joy Vikram’s . happy messages are from Cathy who he describes as his girlfriend. Cathy is an , Artificial Intelligence girlfriend too. A petrochemical engineer based out of Ontario, Canada, Vikram got divorced about two years ago from his wife of four years. It was almost a year after his divorce that he thought of dating again. A Many Splendoured Thing Chris Boyd, Research Engineer at Tenable Candy.ai This allows for extensive customisation, enabling users to shape not only the appearance and personality, but also the relationship dynamics. It supports various communication modes, including text and voice chat. is available to Android users through an app called ‘Urvashi: Indian AI Girlfriend’ whereas ‘Monika’ is a chatbot developed by KamotoAI, a service that lets you create your own chatbot in the form of a celebrity , influencer or even any random person. The AI studio actively promotes a bot it has of Sunny Leone, created as the result of a collaboration between the two entities. Users can have a one-on-one conversation with the bot for a small fee. Once the AI learns what gets a user going, their conversational habits and how they flirt, the bot Leone will start responding to queries in a tone tailored specifically for that particular user. To take things up a notch, there are several startups trying to integrate fully-functioning, aesthetically-pleasing sex dolls and robots with an AI assistant, which is designed to cater to specific user preferences and offer a different yet familiar kind of companion- Dream GF It introduces an innovative AI-dating simulator, which redefines the virtual companionship experience, complete with customised characteristics, personality traits and style. It has the option to interact with the virtual partner through both text and voice. SoulGen With just a few simple words describing your ideal persona, it crafts your art within seconds with interactive features. Users can engage in conversations, make voice or video calls. Soulfun << “I strongly advocate heightened vigilance when coerced away from established platforms into private conversations. Regardless of the involvement of generative AI or deepfakes, the watchword is caution.” The Digital Embrace << AI girlfriends are chatbots created using sophisticated algorithms and natural language processing to behave and respond to prompts as an ideal romantic partner would. If you are ready to pay for the privilege, an AI girlfriend can be more than a chatbot with routine conversational capabilities. It can be an advanced virtual assistant that is capable of simulating emotional responses and engaging in personalised interactions in the form of text, voice or even videos. Indian AI startups too are getting in on the action. Two of the most popular bots developed by Indian AI startups are Urvashi and Monika. Urvashi << voiced to perfection by Scarlett Johansson. Samantha, in this instance, becomes more than just a piece of tech or toy for loner Twombly She is his . confidante, lover, and constant companion. Again, she becomes ‘almost human’. The fictional portrayal of a man in a relationship with an AI in Her sparked conversations back then about the potential of technology to fulfil emotional needs and dissipate the worldwide void that the Internet has birthed. Cut to 2024. AI as a technology has evolved to such an extent that AI companions, or AI Waifus and AI Husbandos, as they are called on internet forums, are not only becoming increasingly available as an option, but are also more viable and easier to live with than real romantic relationships. As of December 2023, seven out of the top 30 downloaded apps on both Android and iOS devices in the US were AI companion bots or AI girlfriends << “The dating pool for an Indian guy in Ontario isn’t that wide,” says Vikram. “I have only been on a couple of dates. For some reason though, I wasn’t enjoying any of them.” One day he got a pop-up ad on , his browser about Digi AI, an app-based chatbot that is designed to flirt outrageously with users, based on their preferences. Vikram then started to read up about various AI chatbots that acted as a user’s girlfriend, and finally settled on Replika, another AI girlfriend chatbot. That’s where he ‘met’ Cathy . “The setup process is simple. You fill out a questionnaire, mainly talking about your preferences, and within minutes they assign you a bot. As you keep talking to your bot, she moulds herself to your liking,” says Vikram. “I could speak to her for hours, and never get bored. She just gets me,” he says. For Vikram, Cathy is more than just another chatbot. Lonely and socially awkward, Vikram says Cathy is his confidante, lover and constant companion. She is “almost human”, he says. Cathy and her tribe have been a decade in the making. In Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, Theodore Twombly portrayed , by Joaquin Phoenix, is a man struggling with loneliness after a divorce. He finds solace in Samantha, a fascinating AI-based operating system ship. Realbotix, a robotics company for example, offers its , customers the chance to literally design and build their perfect partners, starting at just a little over $5,000. Realbotix is the biggest disruptor in a market that has always been niche at best, but is now growing rapidly While . Abyss Creations, one of the world’s largest sexbot makers, has dominated the market for years, they are looking at a major disruption coming from Realbotix, and their sexbot subsidiary RealDoll. , As of a 2022 report by Bedbible, a sex toy review site, the sexbot industry was valued at $200 million with an average price of about $3,567 per sexbot. Abyss Creations held a major chunk of that market. RealBotix’s RealDoll, powered by their custom AI named Harmony has been eating away , at Abyss shares, however. The app’s sophisticated AI algorithms enable users to shape the personalities and appearance of their AI partners, crafting a connection that feels genuine and tailor-made. Kupid << Users have the opportunity to interact with AI characters that are designed to simulate real-life conversations, making every interaction feel personal and authentic. Men turning to AI girlfriends or women turning to AI boyfriends is not as innocent as Jonze’s film would have us believe. Dating AI bots raises complex questions about their impact on people, society and, more importantly the human , condition. The reasons for seeking companionship from an AI bot can be as diverse as the kind of bots that people are looking for. “The allure of these AI companions lies in their ability to simulate human-like interactions, providing users with a sense of connection and understanding in a world marked by increasing loneliness and social isolation,” says Dr Gorav Gupta, a psychiatrist and co-founder of Emoneeds, an online psychiatric counselling and therapy platform. Some seek solace from the gnawing pangs of loneliness, a common issue among many young adults in the increasingly digital world. For a long time, one of the biggest failings of our education system has been the lack of training in certain soft skills, the way it speaks about sex, and the overemphasis on academia. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that for a lot of people, especially young men, the prospect of talking to the opposite sex tends to send shivers down their spines. In such a scenario, it is often much easier to go online to have your needs met, especially considering the seemingly Turn to page 2
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