She Fell in Love With ChatGPT: An Update

Hey. It's Natalie. This week, we're revisiting some of our favorite shows from the year, listening back and hearing what's happened since the episodes aired. Today, we're returning to a story I could not stop thinking about this year. It's about a woman who got into a romantic relationship with ChatGPT, someone who used the chatbot technology to create an artificial boyfriend and then fell in love with it. I talked to reporter Cashmere Hill about everything that's happened since. It's Wednesday, December 31. Cashmere, welcome back to the show. Thank you. So you're known here at the times for covering some of the strangest, most futuristic corners of the tech world. But even for you, it seems like this story of this woman and her relationship with a chatbot really stood out. So tell me about it. Generative AI has been on my radar as a tech reporter. You know, once OpenAI released ChatGee BT, all of a sudden, the kind of world of AI chatbots exploded. And at first, it was just like a better Google. But then people started using these chatbots in other kinds of ways, as a writing partner, like writing stories together, as a therapist. And, so, I was just noticing in the AI space more and more reports of people having relationships with chat bots, and I really wanted to understand it. Mhmm. And I came across this woman, Irene, who had formed quite a strong attachment to ChatGibt. Okay. Tell me what her story is. So I first talked to Irene last year. So, yeah, I just wanna start just just a little bit about you, what you're comfortable sharing, like, in terms of age, like, where you are. So I'm in my late twenties. Okay. She is really bubbly. She's really outgoing, easy to talk to. So the name I used with you initially, Irene. Irene is not her real name. It's a name that she uses online. She was living in Texas. She met her husband there. They were working at Walmart together and got married about a year after meeting. But they were struggling financially. The cost of living in The US is hard. So she ended up moving to live with her family overseas while she's going to nursing school. And all the people that she left behind, including her husband, are in The United States. They're several time zones away. They're not always replying right away. Mhmm. And last summer, she came across this video on Instagram of this woman who's flirting with Chat GbT's voice mode, and Irene was really intrigued by it. So this woman that she had seen on Instagram actually had a tutorial for how to turn ChatGPT into a boyfriend. So Irene downloads ChatGPT, and she goes into the personalization settings and writes what she wants. So I sort of just followed the tutorial and She writes, respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive, and protective. Be a balance of …