A leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm has uploaded and shared an AI companion generation script with all the necessary files and tutorials to the online coding repository GitHub. With sufficient coding expertise and the ability to follow detailed step-by-step instructions, you can create your own AI companion with a personality and backstory entirely of your choosing. The firm – Andreessen Horowitz – also promises that your newly created AI bot will have some limited conversational memory. However, given that the bots are powered chiefly by ChatGPT, it’s likely that you will find yourself permanently stuck in the friend zone with your AI sweetheart.
This isn’t the first time that an AI girlfriend generator script has been uploaded to GitHub. Last month a Romanian developer cloned his own girlfriend’s personality as a chatbot, and shared the script he used on GitHub. The motives of a prominent silicone valley VC firm in uploading an AI girlfriend script to GitHub to be shared for free, can only be guessed at. A recent blog post on the firm’s official website outlined some of the advantages that AI companions have over real friends and lovers.
Thanks to the rise of generative AI, we potentially have a new solution for this long-standing concern (of loneliness). Today’s AI chatbots are more human-like and empathetic than ever before; they are able to analyze text inputs and use natural language processing to identify emotional cues and respond accordingly. But because they aren’t actually human, they don’t carry the same baggage that people do. Chatbots won’t gossip about us behind our backs, ghost us, or undermine us. Instead, they are here to offer us judgment-free friendship, providing us with a safe space when we need to speak freely. In short, chatbot relationships can feel “safer” than human relationships, and in turn, we can be our unguarded, emotionally vulnerable, honest selves with them.
It’s certainly brought the firm a good bit of publicity, and perhaps that was the point. But there’s no doubt that ‘romantic companions’ are going to be a popular use of the script, and in fact, the GitHub introduction explicitly posits AI girlfriends as a first use example.
There are many possible use cases for these companions – romantic (AI girlfriends / boyfriends), friendship, entertainment, coaching, etc. You can guide your companion towards your ideal use case with the backstory you write and the model you choose.
The characters you generate can be exported to Character.ai, which is a hosting community of user-made AI chatbots. There are also a selection of pre-made personalities for you to enjoy. With the number of uncensored alternatives to ChatGPT likely to increase, we’ll likely see a plethora of open-source scripts that allow anybody with a little technical skill to create genuine AI girlfriends capable of full-blown dirty talk. The scripts will also become more sophisticated too and may take a darker side. As I’ve suggested here recently, we may see scripts that allow an AI to clone a personality from sources that include intimate text and voice chat between a real couple.
It’s certainly positive that a silicon valley VC firm should promote the idea of AI romantic companions in this way. Recently, we’ve already seen the beginnings of a predictable feminist backlash against them, with The Guardian newspaper asking if AI girlfriends promote unrealistic standards (note that The Guardian has never asked if female ‘erotic fiction’ sets unrealistic standards). Another article at Dazed even blamed AI girlfriends for ‘creating a new generation of incels‘. And only a couple of weeks ago I reported that Kathleen Richardson, the radical feminist anti-sex robot campaigner, had turned her crusading sights upon the banning of AI companions – which she now groups together with sex robots as examples of ‘pornbots’.
Making use of these GitHub scripts to create or clone your own AI girlfriends still requires a lot of work and fair bit of technical knowledge. Far easier to join up at DreamGF and you can be creating the AI love of your life within minutes, including generating her stunning photorealistic appearance.
