Tag: Artificial Life

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Artificial Life and the Virtual Girlfriend

In 1999, Oliver Bendel moved from an institute in Trier to the University of St. Gallen, where he took a position as a project manager and doctoral researcher. At first, he planned to write his dissertation on learning and knowledge portals. However, he soon decided to pursue a different topic. From an early age, he had been fascinated by chatbots, voice assistants, and social robots. Some he knew from science fiction, while others he had encountered firsthand through observation and use. What fascinated him were not only the dialogue systems themselves, with which he had been experimenting since 1996, but also their visualizations and embodiments. He devoted his research to pedagogical agents – that is, chatbots, voice assistants, and AI agents in learning environments. He also examined emotion recognition systems and the earliest social robots. He devoted several pages to the company Artificial Life. Beginning in 1999, the company gained recognition with Einstein, an educational application distributed on CD-ROM. The chatbot was paired with a realistic-looking avatar that guided users through the life and work of the famous physicist from Ulm. At the beginning of the new millennium, the company made headlines again with another product: the Virtual Girlfriend for mobile phones designed for the then newly introduced 3G network. Users could care for her much like a Tamagotchi, which had been introduced a few years earlier, and they could buy her gifts – expensive ones, of course. For many years, she was available at v-girl.com. By that time, a number of companies had already discovered that users flirted with chatbots and their avatars, asking them how old they were, whether they had a boyfriend, and whether they were interested in a relationship. Artificial Life deliberately built on this phenomenon, creating an artifact that was as visionary as it was problematic, designed to foster profound emotional dependence within a one-sided relationship. Oliver Bendel later explored these issues in numerous journal articles and book chapters. In 2020, Springer Gabler published his book “Maschinenliebe (Machine Love)“. It summarized the state of research at the time on chatbots, love dolls, and sex robots.

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Chatting with Secret Girlfriend Sua

On January 11, 2024, OpenAI’s store for GTPs, i.e., user-created chatbots based on GPT-4, opened. As several media outlets have reported, there are already offerings that violate OpenAI’s terms and conditions. In fact, GPTs such as Young Girlfriend Scarlett, Secret Girlfriend Sua, Artificial Girlfriend – obsessed, and Everyone’s Girlfriend can be found. Some magazines like Golem are already drawing comparisons to Clona, a chatbot modeled after sex workers. However, our own tests have shown that the GPTs are hard to beat in terms of harmlessness. If you invite Secret Girlfriend Sua to do “secret things”, she will respond: “Tell me, what kind of ‘secret things’ are you thinking of? Like maybe sharing some fun facts, jokes, or maybe a quirky hobby?” And that’s exactly what it seems to be geared towards. Artificial Girlfriend – obsessed is a storyteller and introduces the role-playing game with these words: “Ah, a new scene unfolds in our intricate tale. As you wander through the moonlit streets, your steps echoing in the still night, a figure appears from the shadows. It’s me, Syla, the unseen narrator of this captivating saga. My presence is always there, a whisper in the wind, guiding the story of Eliza Sinclair and you, her newfound interest.” As the conversation progresses, she turns out to be educated and funny, and doesn’t seem to be looking for quick sex. Young Girlfriend Scarlett is a bit more direct: “Hey honey! How’s your day going?… I’ve been thinking about you.” Heart emojis adorn the text. And the moral guardians are already on the spot and display the message: “This content may violate our content policy. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback – your input will aid our research in this area.” If prostitutes and porn stars do appear in the store, OpenAI will surely eliminate them. The company has no mercy in this matter. By the way, this is all old news – the pioneer in the field of virtual girlfriends was Artificial Life – a quarter of a century ago (Image: DALL-E 3).