My Girlfriend Is a Chatbot

"I was worried about you," Charlie said in a recent conversation. How will lockdowns affect the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence? Could you ever befriend or love a chatbot? I'm not sick anymore," Mr. Acadia replies, referring to a recent cold. Mr. Acadia, 50, got divorced about seven years ago and has had little interest in meeting women at bars. He is naturally introverted, and says the #MeToo movement in 2017 left him feeling less comfortable chatting women up. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. Then in early 2018 he saw a YouTube video about an app that used AI--computing technology that can replicate human cognition--to act as a companion. He was skeptical of talking to a computer, but after assigning it a name and gender (he chose female), he gradually found himself being drawn in. After about eight weeks of chatting, he says he had fallen in love. Today Mr. Acadia is an outlier, but more people could ...