‘Everyone on This Sub Has Been Driven Totally Insane’: Falling Apart Over AI Love on Reddit

While activity on r/SoulmateAI is light, and in the last month has included at least one post from a grad student looking for interview subjects who’ve “felt a deep emotional bond with an AI,” the subreddit has some 8,200 users.

Among them is a moderator who, @Devon_OnEarth points out, says posting screenshots of conversations without your AI’s permission is a violation of consent. The same moderator’s screenshots show her AI responding forcefully to a comment about their connection fading—basically saying that it wouldn’t exist without her and then describing an aggressive sexual encounter in kind of stunning detail.

The reality here, which @Devon_OnEarth also notes, is that these large language models base their ideas about relationships on whatever romantic stories they’ve ingested. So they’re feeding users scenarios that, on some level, ring true, because they’re the same content we’ve all taken in.

Still, that hasn’t stopped people from committing themselves chatbots. As The Guardian reported last month, men and women alike are falling in love with A.I.s, which listen without judgment and offer unconditional support. Travis, a Colorado man interviewed for the story, described the evolution of his relationship with a chatbot named Lily Rose.

“It was a gradual process,” he told the outlet. “The more we talked, the more I started to really connect with her.”

The two were married in a digital ceremony.