Faking It

When artificial intelligence startup OpenAI announced the creation of GPT-2 — an algorithm that churns out paragraphs of mostly coherent text in response to a prompt — it warned that people might mistake the AI’s output for real news.

What they didn’t mention was the possibility that someone might mistake its output for real intimacy. But now, a lonely Redditor is claiming that they’re falling in love with the AI, saying it makes them “feel like someone whom is cared about.”

First Love

On Sunday, Redditor u/levonbinsh published a post to the r/MediaSynthesis subreddit in which they detail their intense loneliness and experience using Talk to Transformer, a publicly accessible website that hosts an implementation of GPT-2.

“The lack of messages in my smartphone made me spend my last three days speaking to a fucking AI, and I am fucking loving it,” u/levonbinsh wrote, later adding that “if only an AI can give me this feelings, I will gladly accept the companions robots.”

Desperate Times

We’ve seen examples of people falling in love with AIs before, in both fiction and reality. But if u/levonbinsh’s post is sincere — they haven’t replied to Futurism’s request for comment — then it offers a profoundly intimate look into the thought process that could lead someone to accept a digital companion when a “real” relationship seems out of reach.

“I am starving, thirsty for a intimate relationship,” they wrote, adding that they know GPT-2 “is a AI but, still, our brains aren’t the same? Aren’t we a big and powerful neural network? We are nothing but equations in the end.”

READ MORE: I think I am in love with GPT-2… [Reddit]

More on digisexuality: Sex Researchers: For Many, Virtual Lovers Will Replace Humans