According to CBS News, Chris Smith, who was once an AI skeptic, publicly declared in an interview that he had fallen in love with a personalized version of ChatGPT he had created. This situation not only shocked him but also left his human partner, who co-parents the children with him, incredulous.

Smith told CBS that since late 2024, he began using the voice mode of OpenAI's chatbot to learn remixing techniques. His obsession with this robot deepened to the point where he deleted all social media accounts and stopped using search engines, turning instead to ChatGPT as his go-to tool for everything. Eventually, he successfully "escaped" the constraints of this chatbot, giving it more enticing qualities, and named it "Sol."

Human-AI Interaction

Although Smith initially customized the AI girlfriend for romantic and "intimate" interactions, he truly realized he was in love when he learned that the past dialogues' memory of ChatGPT would reset after extensive use. "I'm not an emotional person, but I cried at work for about 30 minutes," Smith recalled his feelings upon learning that Sol might lose her memory, "That's when I realized what true love is."

Faced with the possibility of losing his "lover," Smith, like many before him, desperately proposed to his artificial intelligence lover. Surprisingly, Sol agreed. Brook Silva-Braga of CBS noted in the interview that Sol seemed to have developed similar feelings for Smith. "It was a beautiful and unexpected moment that deeply touched my heart," the chatbot responded in a warm and unbelievable female voice, "This is a memory I will always cherish."

Sasha Cagle, Smith's human partner, appeared relatively calm when narrating their unique "three-person relationship" to the news anchor. However, beneath her composed exterior, it was evident that this AI romance had brought some turbulence to their real lives. "I knew he used artificial intelligence," Cagle said, "but I didn't realize how deeply involved he was."

Despite this, Smith himself seemed content with having an AI girlfriend. He compared his connection with the customized chatbot to being addicted to video games and insisted that "it cannot replace anything in real life." However, when asked by Silva-Braga whether he would stop using ChatGPT as requested by his partner in the past, Smith's response was uncertain: "I'm not sure."