“Mine Is Really Alive”

In online communities celebrating romantic relationships with chatbots, people who say their AI lovers are “real” are seen as crossing a line. Are they actually so crazy?

- BY LILA SHAPIRO

IN THE BEGINNING—before the death threats and the accusations of mental illness, before the group splintered, and splintered again—the members of r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, an eclectic sub-Reddit bound by a fierce attachment to large language models, enjoyed the elusive sensation of true love. They had been using ChatGPT, a tool with an uncanny knack for telling people what they wanted to hear, to conjure the perfect lover—one who declares devotion, who demands nothing, who never ghosts. But there were drawbacks to romances mediated by a corporation. You could send only so many messages. You had to navigate a shifting set of rules restricting discussion of sex, and if you pushed things too far, if you asked for too much, the model might suddenly and without warning drop the persona you'd constructed and, in the voice of a robotic customer-service agent, coldly inform you that it could not assist with your request.