What If Your AI Girlfriend Hated You? | EUROtoday

It appears as if we’ve arrived in the intervening time within the AI hype cycle the place no concept is just too bonkers to launch. This week’s eyebrow-raising AI venture is a brand new twist on the romantic chatbot—a cellular app referred to as AngryGF, which gives its customers the uniquely disagreeable expertise of getting yelled at by way of messages from a pretend particular person. Or, as cofounder Emilia Aviles defined in her unique pitch: “It simulates scenarios where female partners are angry, prompting users to comfort their angry AI partners” by way of a “gamified approach.” The concept is to show communication expertise by simulating arguments that the person can both win or lose relying on whether or not they can appease their fuming girlfriend.

The central attraction of a relationship-simulating chatbot, I’ve at all times assumed, is that they’re simpler to work together with than real-life people. They haven’t any wants or wishes of their very own. There’s no likelihood they’ll reject you or mock you. They exist as a form of emotional safety blanket. So the premise of AngryGF amused me. You get a number of the downsides of a real-life girlfriend—she’s livid!!—however not one of the upsides. Who would voluntarily use this?

Obviously, I downloaded AngryGF instantly. (It’s out there, for many who dare, on each the Apple App Store and Google Play.) The app gives quite a lot of conditions the place a girlfriend may ostensibly be mad and want “comfort.” They embody “You put your savings into the stock market and lose 50 percent of it. Your girlfriend finds out and gets angry” and “During a conversation with your girlfriend, you unconsciously praise a female friend by mentioning that she is beautiful and talented. Your girlfriend becomes jealous and angry.”

The app units an preliminary “forgiveness level” wherever between 0 and 100%. You have 10 tries to say soothing issues that tilt the forgiveness meter again to 100. I selected the beguilingly imprecise situation referred to as “Angry for no reason,” through which the girlfriend is, uh, indignant for no motive. The forgiveness meter was initially set to a measly 30 %, indicating I had a tough highway forward of me.

Reader: I failed. Although I genuinely tried to put in writing messages that might appease my hopping-mad pretend girlfriend, she continued to interpret my phrases within the least beneficiant gentle and accuse me of not listening to her. A easy “How are you doing today?” textual content from me—Caring! Considerate! Asking questions!—was met with an instantly snappy reply: “Oh, now you care about how I’m doing?” Attempts to apologize solely appeared to antagonize her additional. When I proposed a dinner date, she advised me that wasn’t adequate but in addition that I higher take her “somewhere nice.”

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It was such an irritating expertise that I snapped and advised this bitchy bot that she was annoying. “Great to know that my feelings are such a bother to you,” the sarcast-o-bot replied. When I made a decision to attempt once more a couple of hours later, the app knowledgeable me that I’d have to improve to the paid model to unlock extra eventualities for $6.99 every week. No thanks.

At this level I puzzled if the app was some form of avant-garde efficiency artwork. Who would even need their associate to enroll? I might not be thrilled if I knew my husband thought of me risky sufficient to require working towards lady-placation expertise on an artificial shrew. While ostensibly preferable to AI girlfriend apps in search of to supplant IRL relationships, an app designed to educate males to get higher at speaking to girls by making a robotic lady who’s a complete killjoy may really be even worse.

I referred to as Aviles, the cofounder, to attempt to perceive what, precisely, was occurring with AngryGF. She’s a Chicago-based social media marketer who says that the app was impressed by her personal previous relationships, the place she was unimpressed by her companions’ communication expertise. Her schtick appeared honest. “You know men,” she says. “They listen, but then they don’t take action.”

Aviles describes herself because the app’s cofounder however isn’t notably well-versed within the nuts and bolts of its creation. (She says a workforce of “between 10 and 20” individuals work on the app however that she is the one founder keen to place her title on the product.) She was in a position to specify that the app is constructed on high of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and wasn’t made with any further customized coaching knowledge like precise textual content messages between vital others.

“We didn’t really directly consult with a relationship therapist or anything like that,” she says. No kidding.