Uncharted territory: do AI girlfriend apps promote unhealthy expectations for human relationships?

"Control it all the way you want to," reads the slogan for AI girlfriend app Eva AI. "Connect with a virtual AI partner who listens, responds, and appreciates you." A decade since Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with his AI companion Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson in the Spike Jonze film Her, the proliferation of large language models has brought companion apps closer than ever. As chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard get better at mimicking human conversation, it seems inevitable they would come to play a role in human relationships. And Eva AI is just one of several options on the market. Replika, the most popular app of the kind, has its own subreddit where users talk about how much they love their "rep", with some saying they had been converted after initially thinking they would never want to form a relationship with a bot.