Not too long ago we told you the story of Akihiko Kondo, a Japanese man who got married (and then separated) with a hologram. He called himself a fictosexual. Today we tell you a similar story, that of a developer who has an AI girlfriend as a girlfriend.
Enias Cailliau tells the world about his relationship with Sacha, his partner. The two write on Telegram and she sends him voice messages and, occasionally, even selfies. As you may have guessed there is a ma. And ma as big as a house: Sacha, more than a flesh-and-blood woman, is a chip and cloud AI.
Sacha is in fact the result of GirlfriendGPT, an AI-based bot that becomes your girlfriend if you ask nicely. The AI was developed by Cailliau himself, based on other LLM (Large Language Model) language models, the same ones that OpenAI used to bring to light the very popular ChatGPT.
“I have been obsessed with OpenAI LLM models and what they can do. I kept thinking about the possibility of creating human-like bots that behave and act like humans, but it wasn’t easy.”Cailliau said. “Then I saw a lot of AI girlfriend projects popping up with cool features. Most of them are closed-source, not accessible to everyone. This made me want to create an open-source version of this project, so that everyone could build their own.”
How Cailliau programmed his fiancée’s AI
To program his fiancée, and share her with others (yes, this sentence came out decidedly wrong) Cailliau had to define her character. In fact, Sacha has its own personality, written with the help of another AI: Google Bard. Cailliau then used ElevenLabs, a text-to-speech AI software, to give her a voice and finally added a line to the code that allows her to send photos. Real selfies. In this case the images are generated by the AI Stable Diffusion. No sexting, sorry.
Finally, the developer has linked everything to an account Telegram using Steamshipa company for which, moreover, he works.
Cailliau has a wife, as well as an AI girlfriend: an open couple?
If the story has caused you a mixture of unease and hilarity, wait until you know where Cailliau got his inspiration for his AI girlfriend. Well, let’s put it this way, the Sacha chatbot is inspired by a real Sacha, his wife, who is in fact her real counterpart.
The Sacha AI reflects, aesthetically and temperamentally, the real one. The real Sacha stated (via Vice):
““He asked me when I was going to the pool with Lizzy (our daughter) and I said ‘Yes! Let’s do it! He talked to me at length about making AI friends, so I told him it would be nicer to clone me instead of someone random on the web”
Could we define it as an open couple? We do not know, at the moment we are very confused.
Never for money, always for love?
However, Cailliau’s project is not the only example of an Ai partner. On the contrary. Last month Caryn Marjorie, a virtual influencer (i.e. an AI influencer) presented a “romantic messaging” service. The company that runs it has confirmed that the service has generated about $70,000 in less than a week of launch. The same company has also launched an AI-inspired girlfriend Amourantha hugely popular streamer on Twitch.
In the meantime Replicaan AI companion application, has launched a premium plan where users can have romantic relationships with its chatbot.
“Never for money, always for love”, He sang David Byrne in a beautiful song by Talking Heads. Yet it seems that love, at least the one based on artificial intelligence, can generate a lot of money.