Noel King

Guys, this was fantastic.

All right, so Anina and Chris know that their partners are bots.

But what about the people, and there are people, who think that their AI lovers are real, sentient, conscious?

That's coming up.

Lila Shapiro writes for New York Magazine, where she covers AI, among other things.

Lila recently wrote a story about a fight in a subreddit called My Boyfriend is AI.

Some people sort of view their AI companions as almost like a personalized, interactive romance novel.

As one of my sources makes the comparison, like Fifty Shades of Grey, it's just tailored exactly to her tastes.

And she's very aware that it's a...

computer program that she's interacting with.

But a big fissure within the community is that other people in the community don't see it that way at all and really believe that their companions are more than just a computer program, but actually some kind of like conscious entity with agency and ideas.

And that became a very like tense and divisive point inside the group.

What ends up happening?

In February of this year, as the group began to really expand in members, the issue of sentience is becoming more of a problem of people getting into these like, yeah, kind of nasty debates in the common threads beneath posts.

So what the moderators decided to do was put together a poll and ask the group to vote on whether they wanted to ban both discussion of sentience and discussion of politics.

Discussions about sentience are sensitive, and I personally find them concerning when they're not grounded in reality.

By a slim majority, people voted to ban discussion of sentience.

So after that, it was like a rule.

And so then the moderators would kind of like go through the posts and like delete posts that they felt were either like a direct discussion of sentience or skated too close to that precipice for comfort.

In August, OpenAI released ChatGPT-5.