Romancing the chatbot, in the age of AI

Director-writer Spike Jonze's 2013 sci-film Her, coincidentally set in 2025, depicts a gentle but doomed romance between a lonely writer Theodore and his personal operating system Samantha.

- Soumya Gupta

Director-writer Spike Jonze's 2013 sci-film Her, coincidentally set in 2025, depicts a gentle but doomed romance between a lonely writer Theodore and his personal operating system Samantha. In the end (spoiler alert), Theodore breaks down as he discovers Samantha is in a relationship with 8,316 other people and computers, and in love with 641 of them. Perhaps Jonze, who won an Oscar for his story, did not know then that he was merely portraying the future.

Cut to 2025, more Indians than ever are open to the idea of artificial love. A global survey of 7,000 adults by online consumer protection firm McAfee found more than 61% Indian respondents believed it is possible to develop feelings for an AI chatbot. Just over half of all respondents from India said they were approached by an AI chatbot posing as a real person on a dating platform or social media, or knew someone who was.

"I have a friend who is into ML [machine learning] and I asked him if there are bots which you can role-play with," a 25-year-old recent graduate from Bengaluru said, requesting anonymity. "He suggested Dittin AI, and I tried out the different bots they have."