How would you react if your mother admitted to you she was dating Aubrey "Drake" Graham, the rap superstar from Toronto? And that this new boyfriend wasn't the real flesh-and-blood Drake — oh no — but is instead the AI chatbot version of Champagne Papi.
This is an actual situation that was relayed by the Drake-dating mother in question in a Reddit group with the self-explanatory name of r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, which is now the focus of a first-of-its-kind, large-scale study on human-AI companion interactions by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"They're not exactly accepting yet," the woman said of her children, in a comment examined by the researchers.
She's one of the staggering 19 percent of Americans who have already used AI chatbots for virtual romantic flings, hence the study's mission to figuring out what the heck is going on between humans and their beloved AI companions — and why would anybody prefer a fake person over a real human being.
Finding out is urgent, not the least because some of these interactions have ended in truly disturbing ways — including suicide and murder — after AI chatbots goaded them to do the unthinkable.
After performing a computational analysis of the group's posts and comments, the MIT researchers came up with some compelling information, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
For one thing, it seems like the bulk of these people in AI relationships isn't doing any human dating, and when they are, they're keeping their AI dalliances a secret. The researchers found that 72.1 percent of members weren't in a relationship or didn't say anything about a real human partner, while only 4.1 percent said they have partners who know they're interacting with an AI chatbot, which is viewed "as complementary rather than competitive."
In addition to those clear signs of loneliness and shame, the details of how people are falling into AI relationships are alarming as well.
Specifically, only 6.5 percent of users in the group admitted that they sought an AI companion intentionally on a service like Replika or Character.AI. Instead, most are falling for OpenAI's ChatGPT while using it for regular tasks.
"Users consistently describe organic evolution from creative collaboration or problem-solving to unexpected emotional bonds," the paper reads.
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