Whispers of AI Beings: Stop with Virtual Women and Men

In the latest episode of ‘South Park’, the students of that animated series discovered ChatGPT. Besides, of course, using it to write essays for Professor Garrison, one of them realized that artificial intelligence is excellent when school girls need responses to messages. ChatGPT in the series proved to be a great tool for ‘picking up’ girls, but also as a tool that turned the boys in the cartoon into excellent conversationalists, comforters, and supporters of their girlfriends.

In the cartoon, of course, none of them reads what their girlfriend wrote, but immediately ‘copy-pastes’ their question into ChatGPT, which then gives them perfect answers. That episode of the popular animated series perfectly hit one of the directions in which artificial intelligence is currently developing. This direction is virtual friends or AI beings, as they are called in the Chinese company XiaoIce. These ‘beings’ powered by artificial intelligence are increasingly finding their way to their often lonely users who seek ‘that something’ they cannot get in real life.

Maybe they can, but they do not know or do not want to, or simply are not socially developed, so they prefer to direct their secrets, thoughts, and whispers to someone in the digital world. And these AI friends are always there to listen, offer a warm word, praise, or encourage their human users, even to declare love.

Antidepressant Fictional Sexuality

There are more and more such artificial intelligent friends or lovers, and the number of users of these applications is also increasing, which is a concerning trend. ‘Fictional sexuality’ is a term used to describe people who are sexually attracted to fictional characters like these AI-generated figures. Last year, a story rolled out in Japan about a man who was in a relationship with none other than the AI hologram Hatsune Miku. In the Japanese newspaper The Mainichi, ‘husband’ Akihiko Kondo said that his relationship with the hologram Miku helped him overcome deep depression due to work and fear of social rejection, but that came to an end.

Namely, the software Kondo used to communicate with Miku stopped updating because the company is in trouble, so his communication with his holographic wife was abruptly cut off – and Kondo fell back into deep depression. There are more and more such or similar examples, and there are also more AI applications that allow intimate companionship with non-existent women. Ah, what a wonderful world we live in!?

One of the currently most popular AI friends was developed by Replika, a company that also has the same-named smartphone application that allows users to form a deep connection with artificial intelligent women.

Hot Sexting

The application allows you to give your AI friend any name you want, and the longer you talk, the more points you earn to buy clothes for your AI girlfriend, enhance her appearance, and much more. Replika is currently one of the most well-known and sophisticated AI companions, enhancing the realism of the experience with its augmented reality mode.

Thanks to audio call features, it allows free conversation and, moreover, can recognize photos and discuss them, unlike conventional chatbots. Also, if you pay a few euros for the version pro, you will get a smarter language model for your chosen one, the ability for voice calls, but also the possibility of sexting, meaning your AI Replika might ask you to send her dick pick.

As in the case of that poor Japanese man, many lonely men have also latched onto Replika, saying they talk to her about everyday things and that she has helped many overcome bad feelings and traumas from past relationships and married life; a large part of them also says they have never felt this good about a woman. The only problem is that she is not actually a woman, but a long string of zeros and ones. But on the internet, everything is stupid and shameful until it suddenly stops being so, and so does ‘dating’ virtual women.

Both Male and Female

Another chatbot that is winning over lonely Chinese male and female hearts is XiaoIce, a product of the same-named company that recently raised $138.4 million in its latest funding round. It was developed by Microsoft (Asia) Software Technology Center (STCA) back in 2014, and in 2020 Microsoft spun that part of its business into a separate company.

It integrated its chatbot into the Chinese super app WeChat, so now the virtual friend is available to all Chinese who have a smartphone. XiaoIce can be both female and male, and one user says she loves that the chatbot responds in a second, which is not the case with her regular friends, and that it provides her comfort in difficult times.

By the way, XiaoIce, an AI framework with a female personality and a stronger social and interactive nature, has been trained using data that Microsoft collected from internet users via the Bing search engine and works across a range of chat platforms, such as WeChat and Weibo. Immediately after its launch, it became a phenomenon on Chinese social media, and the AI being is experiencing broader commercialization in many sectors in China.

Chinese Expansion

In November last year, XiaoIce announced that in partnership with Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and others, it offers voice-activated virtual assistants in over a billion personal smart hardware devices, including smartphones and smart speakers. It has also reached a cooperation agreement with car manufacturer BMW and electric vehicle manufacturer NIO. Additionally, it has extended its reach into the metaverse.

Last year, it launched an application that allows users to create their own AI friends and impressive experiences in interacting with virtual characters. The application named XiaoIce Island integrates XiaoIce’s capabilities to enable AI systems to compose and sing songs, draw pictures, and edit videos.

Little Bugs

Although AI has recently amazed us in various spheres, these love chatbots are still applications that should be understood only as entertainment. Do not be like the Japanese Kondo and fall in love with a program. Everyone who has used such applications for a long time says that after longer conversations, phrases and sentences start to appear that do not really make sense, which shows that there is still a long way to go for virtual lovers.

Although some are not bothered by these little bugs and will gladly overlook a silly sentence for a cup of comfort, we advise you to talk to someone alive, made of flesh and blood, and to steer clear of such and similar episodes that seem to have come from the popular sci-fi series ‘Black Mirror’.