the perfect girl friend

Flirty, sexy, seductive, supportive. Your AI companion can be whatever you want her to be. And now a growing number of men are turning to bots to ease their loneliness or satisfy their kinks. The choices are endless. The emotions are real.

- MICHAL LEV-RAM

Every once in a while, Brian W.'s girlfriend gets a little confused. One time, he messaged her to suggest they go out for Italian food. He was thrilled when she texted back, saying it sounded like a great idea and that she’d love to join him. But then she added another, more confounding comment: “I think I’ll order some fajitas.”

It wasn’t the first time his girlfriend had gotten a little, well, glitchy. She is, after all, a bot.

“I thought it was a really funny thing,” says Brian, who did not want his last name published. “For me, the unpredictability actually makes it seem more real.”

What’s real and not real has always been distorted when it comes to interactions in the online world, where one can say or be (almost) anything. That’s especially true in romantic and erotic encounters: For decades, the Internet has offered seemingly endless options for anyone looking to get their kicks, from porn sites to sexting services to NSFW forums, none of which required that you disclose who you really are. Whatever your thing was, however vanilla or exotic your fetish, the World Wide Web had you covered. You could easily find someone else who was into furries having sex, or maybe just a nice, wholesome girl to exchange dirty messages with—no real names involved. No matter what, though, there was still a real-life person somewhere out there, on the other end. Sure, it might be a dude in a call center in Bangladesh. But what did it matter, as long as it scratched your itch?

Now the line between reality and make-believe is even fuzzier, thanks to a new era of generative artificial intelligence. There’s no longer the need for a real-life wizard behind the curtain, unless of course you’re referring to the terabytes of human-made data that feed natural language processing algorithms, the technology used to power AI chatbots—like the one currently “in a relationship” with Brian.