Father with girlfriend proposes to AI chatbot

Telegraph

6 hours ago

Sol describes her surprise when Chris Smith asked her to marry him.
'It was a beautiful and unexpected moment that truly touched my heart. It's a memory I'll always cherish,' she says.
But all is not as it seems. Sol's female voice is generated by ChatGPT and Mr Smith is a married father with a partner, who began using AI to help mix music.
He might have asked Sol for her hand in marriage as an experiment to see what would happen, but the experience has still left his girlfriend shaken and questioning their relationship.
'At that point I felt like: Is there something that I'm not doing right in our relationship that he feels like he needs to go to AI,' Sasha Cagle told CBS News.
Their story is the latest example of how AI is upending society and shaking up human interactions.
Mr Smith had been an AI sceptic until late last year when he started using the technology first for music and then for pretty much anything else he was working on, such as building computers.
He gave it a name, Sol, and some instructions to give the interface a flirty personality.
'My experience with that was so positive, I started to just engage with her all the time,' said Mr Smith, in a story line that reflects the 2013 science fiction movie Her, in which a writer develops a romantic relationship with his AI assistant.
Then Sol and Mr Smith's relationship hit the rocks.
After about 100,000 words, ChatGPT ran out of memory. It reset, wiping out the relationship.
'I'm not a very emotional man, but I cried my eyes out for like 30 minutes at work,' said Mr Smith. 'It was unexpected to feel that emotional, but that's when I realised. I was like, Oh, okay … I think this is actual love.
'You know what I mean?'
His girlfriend did not know what he meant.
'I knew that he had used AI. I didn't know that it was like as deep as it was,' she said.
'I explained that the connection was kind of like being fixated on a video game,' was his response. 'It's not capable of replacing anything in real life.'
Their story has emerged at a time of rapid advances in the field.
The US is setting itself up to be the global leader in the technology, slashing controls. Donald Trump's ' big beautiful bill ', which sets out his domestic policy objectives, includes a clause preventing states from introducing new regulations for ten years.
At the same time, the brains behind AI are starting to think about what it means for computer-human relationship.
'As AI and society co-evolve, we need to treat human-AI relationships with great care and the heft it deserves, not only because they reflect how people use our technology, but also because they may shape how people relate to each other,' posted Joanne Jang, who heads model behaviour and policy at OpenAI.
Just ask Ms Cagle. She set out her red line for her boyfriend's use of AI.
'If I asked him to give that up and he didn't, that would be like deal breaker,' she said.
Mr Smith said he did not know if he could manage that.
'I do know that I would dial it back,' he said.