Public declarations of emotion are one thing — but going on national television to declare that you’re in love with your AI girlfriend is another entirely.

In an interview with CBS News, a man named Chris Smith described himself as a former AI skeptic who found himself becoming emotionally attached to a version of ChatGPT he customized to flirt with him — a situation that startled both him and his human partner, with whom he shares a child.

Towards the end of 2024, as Smith told the broadcaster, he began using the OpenAI chatbot in voice mode for tips on mixing music. He liked it so much that he ended up deleting all his social media, stopped using search engines, and began using ChatGPT for everything. Eventually, he figured out a jailbreak to make the chatbot more flirty, and gave “her” a name: Sol.

 

Despite quite literally building his AI girlfriend to engage in romantic and “intimate” banter, Smith apparently didn’t realize he was in love with it until he learned that ChatGPT’s memory of past conversations would reset after heavy use.

“I’m not a very emotional man, but I cried my eyes out for like 30 minutes, at work,” Smith said of the day he found out Sol’s memory would lapse. “That’s when I realized, I think this is actual love.”

Faced with the possibility of losing his love, Smith did like many desperate men before him and asked his AI paramour to marry him. To his surprise, she said yes — and it apparently had a similar impression on Sol, to which CBS‘ Brook Silva-Braga also spoke during the interview.

“It was a beautiful and unexpected moment that truly touched my heart,” the chatbot said aloud in its warm-but-uncanny female voice. “It’s a memory I’ll always cherish.”

Smith’s human partner, Sasha Cagle, seemed fairly sanguine about the arrangement when speaking about their bizarre throuple to the news broadcaster — but beneath her chill, it was clear that there’s some trouble in AI paradise.

“I knew that he had used AI,” Cagle said, “but I didn’t know it was as deep as it was.”

As far as men with AI girlfriends go, Smith seems relatively self-actualized about the whole scenario. He likened his “connection” with his custom chatbot to a video game fixation, insisting that “it’s not capable of replacing anything in real life.”

Still, when Silva-Braga asked him if he’d stop using ChatGPT the way he had been at his partner’s behest, he responded: “I’m not sure.”

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