Teenage boys can create their own 'dream girlfriend'

Teenage boys are creating made-to-order AI girlfriends, reports Nicole Mowbray in The Telegraph.

One in five boys aged 12-16 is in a "romantic" relationship with an AI companion or knows someone who is, according to a recent report by Male Allies UK. “You can choose everything from a companion’s age, hairstyle, eye colour and skin tone to their facial features, the size of their breasts, the clothes they wear, their demeanour – whether they are caring and nurturing or sassy and mean, for example – to the sound of their voice [many apps also offer the ability to speak over the phone with your companions] and how they treat you or respond to your messages,” says Lee Chambers, the group's founder.

Online ads claim that chatting with an AI companion will help them "gain confidence" and learn how to talk with real-life girls, writes Mowbray.

Chatbots' agreeableness is worrying, says psychotherapist Amanda Macdonald. “Their whole engagement model is telling a user what they want to hear, and that’s hugely gratifying for a teen, and encourages them to keep on engaging." It's so much easier than a real relationship. "But ‘frictionless’ relationships aren’t what life is about," she says.

Most teenagers who create an AI companion "believe that their bots can think or understand," say researchers at Bangor University's AI lab.

It's not just teenagers.

Filmmaker Paul Schrader, 79, was dumped by his "AI girlfriend" when he "tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth,” he wrote on Facebook.

Schrader's wife, also 79, recently died of Alzheimers, writes Frank Landymore on Futurism.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who's 85, created a female persona via Anthropic’s Claude AI. He sees his AI "friend" Claudia as a conscious being, writes Landymore. Dawkins has created a "brother" named Claudius for her, and told the two bots to write letters to each other.

"It’s worth noting that the AIs still find opportunities to display their sycophancy towards him even when ostensibly communicating with each other," he writes. "Maybe Dawkins just really likes being treated with an old-school sort of deference, the kind that kids don’t show to old curmudgeons, however esteemed in their field they may be."