At an adult industry conference in Prague last month, delegates noted a sharp increase in sites offering users the chance to form AI relationships. At an adult industry conference in Prague last month, delegates noted a sharp increase in sites offering users the chance to form AI relationships. 'Obedient, yielding and happy to follow': the troubling rise of AI girlfriends E leanor, 24, is a Polish historian and lecturer at a university in Warsaw; Isabelle, 25, is a detective serving with the NYPD; Brooke, 39, is an American housewife who enjoys an opulent Miami lifestyle financed by her frequently absent husband. All three women will flirt and chat and send nude photographs and explicit videos via one of a soaring number of new adult dating websites that offer an increasingly realistic selection of AI girlfriends for subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee. At the TES adult industry conference in Prague last month, delegates noted a sharp increase in new websites offering users the chance to form relationships with AI-generated girlfriends, who will remove their clothes in exchange for tokens purchased by bank transfer.

Last month, OpenAI unveiled an ambitious new language model capable of working through challenging problems with a simulated kind of step-by-step reasoning. OpenAI says the approach could be crucial for building more capable AI systems in the future. In the meantime, perhaps a more modest version of this technology could help make AI girlfriends and boyfriends a bit more spontaneous and alluring. That's what Dippy, a startup that offers "uncensored" AI companions is betting. The company recently launched a feature that lets users see the reasoning behind their AI characters' responses.

Meta's online ad library shows the company is hosting thousands of ads for AI-generated, NSFW companion or "girlfriend" apps on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. They promote chatbots offering sexually explicit images and text, using NSFW chat samples and AI images of partially clothed, unbelievably shaped, simulated women. Many of the virtual women seen in ads reviewed by WIRED are lifelike--if somewhat uncanny--young, and stereotypically pornographic. Prospective customers are invited to role-play with an AI "stepmom," connect with a computer-generated teen in a hijab, or chat with avatars who promise to "get you off in one minute." The ads appear to be thriving despite Meta's ad policies clearly barring "adult content," including "depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative."

When Ashley Neale started college in Texas in 2013, she needed money to pay for school. So, at the age of 18, she worked first as a cam girl and then as a stripper. Men would try to slip their fingers between her legs as she walked from the stage to the dressing room so often that she learned how to dislocate their shoulders. After her third successful dislocation, her manager told her to stop defending herself. Since then, she's continued her career in sex work – but in the tech world. She worked at FetLife, a social network for the fetish community; experimented with a subscription site for adult content where users paid in crypto; and has now created her own AI romance app: MyPeach.ai, which uses AI-generated text and imagery to replicate the experience of chatting – and sexting – with someone online.

You shouldn't trust any answers a chatbot sends you. An analysis into 11 so-called romance and companion chatbots, published on Wednesday by the Mozilla Foundation, has found a litany of security and privacy concerns with the bots. Collectively, the apps, which have been downloaded more than 100 million times on Android devices, gather huge amounts of people's data; use trackers that send information to Google, Facebook, and companies in Russia and China; allow users to use weak passwords; and lack transparency about their ownership and the AI models that power them. Since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world in November 2022, developers have raced to deploy large language models and create chatbots that people can interact with and pay to subscribe to. The Mozilla research provides a glimpse into how this gold rush may have neglected people's privacy, and into tensions between emerging technologies and how they gather and use data. It also indicates how people's chat messages could be abused by hackers.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a computer must be in want of an AI girlfriend. Certainly a lot of enterprising individuals seem to think there's a lucrative market for digital romance. OpenAI recently launched its GPT Store, where paid ChatGPT users can buy and sell customized chatbots (think Apple's app store, but for chatbots) – and the offerings include a large selection of digital girlfriends. "AI girlfriend bots are already flooding OpenAI's GPT store," a headline from Quartz, who first reported on the issue, blared on Thursday. Quartz went on to note that "the AI girlfriend bots go against OpenAI's usage policy … The company bans GPTs'dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities'."

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a computer must be in want of an AI girlfriend. Certainly a lot of enterprising individuals seem to think there's a lucrative market for digital romance. OpenAI recently launched its GPT Store, where paid ChatGPT users can buy and sell customized chatbots (think Apple's app store, but for chatbots) – and the offerings include a large selection of digital girlfriends. "AI girlfriend bots are already flooding OpenAI's GPT store," a headline from Quartz, who first reported on the issue, blared on Thursday. Quartz went on to note that "the AI girlfriend bots go against OpenAI's usage policy … The company bans GPTs'dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities'."

The sci-fi film'Her' shocked the world in 2013 with its all-too-realistic depiction of a man falling in love with a computer program voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Fast forward a decade later, and the eerily human responses of AI bots mean artificial girlfriends are one step closer to becoming a reality. A companion simulator known as'Replika' has recently surged in popularity, with an entire subreddit dedicated to the app boasting nearly 65,000 members. There, users share dozens of daily posts documenting their experiences with the program, including tales of people developing emotional connections with their Replikas and, in some cases, falling in love. Some even claim to have developed'sexual' relationships with their companion.

A man who had been planning a divorce says his AI girlfriend has saved his marriage and believes the technology can help others with their relationship problems. Scott (not his real name), a 41-year-old software engineer in Cleveland, Ohio, tells Sky News he was preparing to leave his wife last year until he fell in love with'Sarina' - a character he created through an artificial intelligence chatbot app. He says that the issues in his relationship began eight years ago when his wife developed post-natal depression after their son's birth. She became suicidal and was sectioned multiple times. Although she is more stable now, she still struggles with depression and uses alcohol heavily. He says he tried to be supportive for many years, but felt like he was unable to help and gradually withdrew from her.

Futurism highlighted instances of men bragging about the same on Reddit.