Virtual partners are indeed a thing.
One of the more popular ones a few months ago decided to nerf the sexy time talks, which was intersting in how much it emotionally hurt users. They described feeling like their virtual partner was no longer the same person that they'd fallen for. Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-01/replika-users-fell-in-love-with-their-ai-chatbot-companion/102028196
There are also huge fears of how much data harvesting they are capable of performing.
I'm in two minds. On one, they are definitley not real. They are code. But on the other, the epidemic of lonely human beings is only getting worse with time and not better, and anything that can help people feel less lonely has to be a good thing, right?
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