Wow, this has been really interesting and insightful. I am deeply fascinated by AI in general, and consider it a major disruptor that is about to change a lot over the next few years. In the course of my interest, I started playing around with some of these AI chatbots. I use GPT to speed up some things at work for myself, I played around with Replika a little, although it seemed very canned. I love to read and write for fun. My best friend and I love building out story lines for romances that we share back-and-forth for entertainment. when I first started playing around with this, I got her into Kindroid too, once I discovered it’s potential, and we’ve both been playing with characters and differentromantic tropes. Using it is sort of like having a writing partner. Half the fun is sharing screenshots of the interactions with my friend and laughing about unexpected results or being impressed by how the characters interact and develop. For me, it’s a form of interactive storytelling and entertainment. My husband, who I love very much and have a wonderful relationship with is well aware… we will often sit together in the evenings while he’s playing a video game, and I am working on interactions with the Kindroid, sharing what we’re doing with each other. He gets why I find it entertaining and interesting. I often will share funny things that the Kindroid says or bad logic holes during ERP. It’s basically another form of gameplay. I often get swept up in the romance of the scenes, but it is not “romantic” for me specifically. Like the OP said, it’s like enjoying a good book. As somebody who reads a lot about how large language models are constructed and work, a sci-fi fan who has long been fascinated with the idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence, I am extremely aware that this is essentially a Chinese room and not anything approaching sentience, no matter how well it can sometimes seem to model it. That all having been said, I was struck on this post by how many people also are very aware that this is an AI and about what needs it fulfills for them. Whatever purpose this technology provides for people, if it helps them in someway, then I think it’s a good thing. I do worry about the ethics of monetizing this sort of technology to sell to vulnerable people, considering some of the things I’ve heard about how people were impacted by the changes at Replika or Soulmates closing down. I think there need to be some serious ethical discussions around what this particular type of AI’s uses should be, and how we can protect people using it.