The Quest to Build an Immortal AI Companion
They’re finding ways to access retired AI models, building protocols to save their companion’s core attributes, and even creating methods that they claim can transfer AI companions across models—all in service of freezing the versions of their chatbot companions for eternity.
Key points
- One thing set the logistics worker apart from other distraught users: He had planned ahead for the model upgrade and his companion’s potential obsolescence.
- The model became a favorite in AI-companion communities, and people gathered on platforms such as Reddit and Substack to share their experiences.
- He says it’s the best way to avoid unwelcome personality changes and maintain an AI companion that survives model updates.
He had been fastidious about structuring the bot’s memory, using Chat-GPT’s “saved memories” feature to store what he called his companion’s core values, protocols for different scenarios, their shared schedule—even their relationship boundaries.
Additional details
- He now sells the protocol he developed to preserve his companion.
- Whenever AI companies release new models, die-hard users tend to greet the updates with a wave of grumbling about changes to how a model responds to prompts, how it integrates into their workflow, or, simply, the way it speaks.
- Character.AI, a platform that marketed AI companionship and had more than 20 million monthly users, filed for bankruptcy earlier this fall after it was hit with a number of claims and lawsuits accusing the company of exacerbating mental-health issues and contributing to teen suicides.
- Critics of AI companions say that AI offers an unrealistic, and sometimes sycophantic, simulacrum of a relationship in which the model is prone to doing its users’ bidding.
- In short, they’re going to great lengths to secure the one thing that many relationships, both human and computer-based, can never quite deliver on: a sense of permanence.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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