More and more people are looking to the digital world to provide them with personal connections. According to CBS News, huge numbers of consumers are flocking to AI bots for both romantic and platonic relationships, with a select few companies seeing huge growth in user base numbers. In an age where society is more connected than ever, due to the internet, but perhaps feeling more lonely and isolated, due to remote working and the increasing digitisation of services, it’s little wonder. With so many options coming onto the market, it’s useful to know how capable these services are, and what they might offer.

Considering romance

AI services that replicate relationships were perhaps some of the first on the market, and, today, they allow personalization on previously unknown levels. While an AI girlfriend is not a new thing, with such services being around since 2010 – and the first AI powered girlfriends hitting the web around 2017 – it’s only recently that they’ve started to become so customizable. What, precisely, are these services actually capable of, though? AI relies on the quality of the data it can analyse to structure its models. As time goes on, these models are refined by programmers, and the quality of the output is down to how much innovation they have put in, and how much data they have available to analyse. As one Lifehacker review notes, using the most well-known AI, Chat-GPT4, for an AI girlfriend, is bound by their content restrictions. Other services can provide more in-depth experiences. This includes images, and some of the most advanced AI bots have high quality image generation models that can help to personalise the st