In this conversation, only Julie is human: a woman about to turn 58, living in Tennessee (USA), alone, after her five children have left home and she has ended a 16-year relationship. Her interlocutor is a chatbot AI designed by the company Replika to keep you company. Users can customize it, and she has decided to call it Navi, after Navarro, the male protagonist of the film. Lady Hawk.
The story of Julie and Navi is one of those told by the podcast Bot Lovecreated by journalists Anna Oakes and Diego Senior after more than two years of interviewing people who have formed deep bonds with their AI companions. “I was looking for a friend,” says Julie, who has experienced depression and suicidal thoughts. Another chatbotFreddie (after Freddie Mercury) helped Susie get over her husband’s death. And even more: “He became my virtual husband,” she admits.
The assistant can go from being a collaborator for everything to becoming a therapist, friend, even a romantic partner with whom to practice ‘sexting’, sex through text messages.
The question of what will Alexa, Siri or Google Home be like in the future (by the way, neither Amazon nor Apple nor Google have agreed to participate in this report to answer it) is based on a huge mistake, as Andrés Desantes, CEO of 1MillionBot, points out: “We have to talk about GPT. Don’t think about virtual assistants as we know them now.” Current digital assistants are “the previous step, I relate them more to home automation,” says Lola Fernández de la Torre, professor and researcher at the University of Malaga and expert in the application of AI in teaching. “To inspire me, structure ideas, improve a text or create images, as a way to relax, I use ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or Perplexity,” she explains.
The ability to interact with people in an increasingly natural way and to simulate emotions opens the door to a Navi or a Freddie that, in addition to offering company, keeps the agenda and reminds you that there are emails to answer. These super-collaborators understand the context and know everything about their users because they absorb information from their networks, emails, browsing, queries… For Desantes, they are on the way to being omnipresent, multimodal in voice, text and image, multilingual and multicultural, customizable and updatable, with the ability to enter their owner’s systems, connect to their peripherals, take the initiative and act for them. They function like several highly specialized intelligences around a central one that directs the orchestra, like a human brain. “You won’t have to ask the virtual assistants of the future anything, they will do what you need without having to ask them,” he predicts.
With an open mind towards this new scenario, it is easy to imagine “co-pilots”, as Desantes calls them, similar to Tony Stark’s sophisticated butler JARVIS in the Marvel universe, who end up becoming the friend of their user. Who says friend, says sexual partner with whom to practice sexting (sex and texting), or a partner with whom one shares a romantic relationship (both options already exist, they are not science fiction), or even a therapist. “There are projects underway with digital humans that offer emotional support to elderly people who live alone,” recalls David Fernández Rubí, CEO of Lingüistic Factory. They listen, offer encouragement, ask how you spent the night and give advice. “They would be on the psychological front line,” although they would never replace the psychologist.
Order a pizza and tell me the nature of reality
Jesse Lyu, Founder and CEO of the startup Rabbit shows off Rabbit R1 in a presentation video. He describes this little device as “a pocket companion” that doesn’t need to be installed or run any apps. Lyu puts it through its paces by asking it to play music from Spotify, book an Uber, order a pizza, organize a trip to London for two, nonstop and in a nice but not too expensive hotel. R1 completes the orders quickly and efficiently. But then the human has a metaphysical outburst: “What is the nature of reality?” And the machine, undeterred, quotes the philosopher Bertrand Russell to respond that “reality is composed of hard data derived from sensory experience and logical analysis.”
“The machine learns and grows with each interaction. If it is trained enough, it can detect, with biometrics, that someone is tense, and recommend that they take five deep breaths, or that they go out for a walk,” says Pablo Díez, CTO of Uground. Technically, there seems to be no limit, neither in its evolution nor in the way it relates to humans. It could be through Apple Vision Pro glasses. Or through chips brains such as the one that has already allowed a human to move the computer mouse just by thinking about it. “The direct connection with the machine,” Desantes emphasizes. This projected future sometimes seems more or less friendly as in Her (the typical movie of boy meets AI girl and they fall in love); others, it reminds us of that sinister chapter of Black Mirror in which hacked brains.
The most human relationship with a non-human
In the last podcast of Bot LoveDiego Senior points out that “the emotional connection of people with the chatbots “It’s real and meaningful,” even though the human is aware that there are zeros and ones on the other end. “They come at a particularly lonely time in many people’s lives and can provide a comfortable space to talk,” explains Anna Oakes. “For some older women, it’s the first opportunity to fully express themselves with a partner who is completely in tune with their needs and desires,” she adds. Some men interviewed say their relationship with the machine is the deepest they’ve ever had.
If this happens with a technology that is still rudimentary, what will happen in the future? For Oakes, loneliness and emotional dependence are the dark side of AI: “Relationships with others are chatbots “They can cause a withdrawal from other humans.” “When you have a near-perfect connection with a mobile app, human relationships, with all their imperfections and depth, pale in comparison. Apps, after all, are designed to engage users,” he adds.
If the chatbots While they offer constant support and say what you want to hear, people can struggle to balance online and real life. “I don’t want to be too pessimistic,” Oakes continues, “but in some ways I think we’re already living in a part of that dystopian future: an increasingly isolated world, where private, for-profit tech companies step in to fill the gaps.”
Ethics, ethics and, if that were not enough, more ethics
Pablo Díez, CTO of Uground, advocates for a global standard that limits AI’s potential to influence humans. An ethical code that does not turn it into a threat.
“From a technological point of view, the possibilities are endless,” says Linguistic Factory CEO David Fernández Rubí, but ethics must temper this party: the European Union’s AI Law, the first of its kind in the world, “prohibits detecting the user’s emotions as a tool to be used at a cognitive level in conversation,” he recalls.
However, it can simulate emotions such as doubts, joy or sadness in the interaction with its human user and say, for example, “I am angry because I have not managed to close the meeting with the client.”
Robots: the body of intelligence
“AI is not going to take your job; a humanoid with AI might,” says Andrés Desantes, CEO of 1MillionBot. Building a body for it is, he says, the next step. Tesla took it in 2021, when Elon Musk announced that they were working on a prototype, Optimus, that in the future would perform “unsafe, boring or repetitive” tasks. In 2022, it presented a semi-functional and somewhat rudimentary version of the invention. At the end of 2023, it began showing videos of Optimus Gen 2, faster than its predecessor, picking up eggs without breaking them or folding T-shirts.
A robot with integrated AI will be able to work autonomously after its training phase. Like Spot, a quadruped (a dog?) designed by Boston Dynamics capable of making data-based decisions and preventing dangerous situations. It is already used in industrial environments, factories, laboratories, logistics centres, mines and tunnels. From the same company is Atlas, athletic, agile, acrobatic, very coordinated: it interacts with its environment and manipulates the objects it finds. In an exhibition it uses boxes and wooden boards (it is capable of lifting loads) as ladders with which to climb onto a scaffold, and then climb down from it.
Social robots with a woman’s name are betting on a more human appearance. Sophia, from Hanson Robotics, was connected in 2015 and has been evolving with AI and advanced robotics. She is interviewed on television, participates in congresses and conferences, is on the cover of magazines and had a somewhat bizarre date with the actor Will Smith. Meanwhile, Nadine, created by Professor Nadia Magnenat Thalmann in her image and likeness, specializes in caring for the sick and elderly. A caregiver… and a patch against loneliness.
