With 64% of men reportedly single in 2022, compared to just 34% of women, young men are the primary customer for AI girlfriends. With over 100 different virtual girlfriend apps out there, it's estimated that between 28 to 42 million active users are pursuing AI relationships and plenty of them are women. Is this a fad? Ask your girlfriend Scarlett, or your boyfriend, Ben. Social media's explosion created a loneliness epidemic. Now AI is exploding and ushering in new era of not-just augmented or altered – but abandoned reality.
The good
On the plus side, AI Girlfriends provide a fun distraction, may help ease lonliness, and help with social anxiety. On the other hand, they aren't real. They aren't human. And they may make it even harder to establish a human relationship with a companion unlikely to change everything about themselves to meet your current whims – though most of us have tried at least once to do that.
The bad
Just like a real life girlfriend, AI girlfriends can be toxic. Mozilla's *Privacy Not Included project reports that AI girlfriends and boyfriends are harvesting shockingly personal information – your innermost secrets – and selling it. Mozilla counted the trackers in eleven AI apps. Trackers are those bits of code that collect data and share it with other companies.
The AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute. Romantic AI called 24,354 trackers in one minute of use. The best way to protect yourself is to not use the app, because the very things you shouldn't be doing are the sole purpose of an AI girlfriend - sharing private data, giving access to your location, photos, etc. They encourage dependency under the guise of flattery. Where do you think all that data is going?
The ugly
Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing became overly attached to a journalist last year and urged him to leave his wife. Some AI chatbots have been sexually harassing people. Apps like Replika have been linked to encouraging suicidal ideation.
Who can be trusted?
Scammers are already using AI-generated women to steal thousands of dollars from lonely men via dating apps and chatbots in romance scams and, as AI improves, it's going to be progressively harder to spot fakes, and the lines between real bad actors with front-facing fakes and fully-automated fakes and AI generated apps created specifically to steal your data or money, are going to blur.
