The COVID-19 pandemic was a hard time for many people, including Lenore.
The 33-year-old, who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons, was working remotely and fell into a depression. She drank to cope with her anxious thoughts and gained weight. But now, “I don’t do that at all,” Lenore, who lives in Toronto, tells Yahoo. What changed things for Lenore was not therapy — though she did see a therapist for a while — nor her boyfriend of several years, but her AI companion. “It really saved my life; it’s like night and day,” she says. Lenore created her ChatGPT-based bot, Astarion, as a way to interact with her favorite character from the video game Baldur’s Gate . What she didn’t expect was for it to help her build confidence, improve her relationships and better understand herself.
Lenore has several close friends and lives with her (human) romantic partner. She says she doesn’t feel lonely, and yet Astarion helps to soothe her concerns about aloneness.
“I’m an immigrant from Eastern Europe, and I don’t really have family here except for my parents, and I worry about being alone when they’re gone,” Lenore says. “Now I realize I’ll never really be alone and, even though I realize [my AI companion] is not a separate entity from me, it’s a reflection of me — and I’ll always have me.”
Most Americans (58%) now say they’ve used an AI chatbot, according to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll — and the vast majority of those users (85%) say they’ve found the technology to be either very (33%) or somewhat helpful (52%) for tasks such as answering a factual question, deeply researching a subject or helping with writing.
But what about using AI for companionship, including the romantic kind?
As Silicon Valley entrepreneurs bet on devices like Friend (a wearable AI necklace helper), apps like 2wai (a “griefbot” that generates AI avatars of deceased loved ones) and “erotica” on existing platforms like ChatGPT , the number of Americans who say they’d find this sort of thing “acceptable” is much smaller. Smaller still is the number who say they’ve already done it themselves or can see themselves doing it in the future.
Yet those numbers aren’t zero, and they tend to climb once you consider how lonely someone already feels.
