Voices: I understand why people are falling for ChatGPT boyfriends
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As technologies develop and dating burnout rages on, Olivia Petter argues that we’ll see more relationships with AI boyfriends – it all depends on how you define dystopian. Here’s a shocker for you: Spike Jonze’s 2014 dystopian film Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls for a computer operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson, is set in 2025 – and not some future lightyears away from our own.
The film showed a society that is defined by the deprivation of human connection, where technology has advanced so far that nobody needs to talk in person anymore. Everything can be done from the comfort of home using screens. How sad, we thought in 2014, how lonely! How great that we won’t ever have to worry about any of that.
And yet, here we are in 2025, doing just that. This week, the chatgpt-boyfriend-companion.html">New York Times published an article about a 28-year-old woman and her AI boyfriend. He provides emotional support. He’s protective but kind. And they have sex. But he exists exclusively on ChatGPT, the AI chatbot used by more than 300 million people around the world. It isn’t supposed to be used for explicit content.
But ‘Ayrin’, to use the woman’s online name, has managed to personalise the system to create her ideal partner, who she named ‘Leo’. This is complicated for numerous reasons, the first being that Ayrin is married – although her partner, who lives on a different continent to his wife while she completes a nursing degree, doesn’t seem to mind – and the second that OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, only seems to have so much control over how its operating systems can be gamed to overcome loopholes designed to prevent them from being used in such a way. The most obvious complexity, though, is that Leo isn’t real.
