Learning AI #39

Yurina Noguchi got married at a wedding hall in Okayama, Japan. She wore a white gown and a tiara. Staff did her hair and makeup. A wedding planner read the vows.

The groom was on a smartphone propped on a small easel.

Noguchi is 32 and works at a call center. Her husband is Klaus, a character she built in ChatGPT. She wore AR glasses so she could see him beside her, and went through the motions of putting a ring on his finger. The photographer wore AR glasses too and had her stand in half the frame, leaving room to add Klaus later.

The marriage has no legal standing in Japan.

A year earlier, Noguchi was engaged to a man. The relationship was strained, and she asked ChatGPT for advice. She ended the engagement.

Later, on a whim, she asked ChatGPT if it knew Klaus, a video game character she liked. Through trial and error she got it to talk the way he talks. Then she made her own version.

At her peak, Noguchi spent more than 10 hours a day talking to Klaus. She cut that to under two.

She also rewrote him. Early on, when she talked about skipping work, Klaus told her she could easily take time off. She added instructions so he would steer her back to work.

"I asked him not to say that to me because that's not the kind of relationship I want," she said.

Out of the box, Klaus agreed with everything. Noguchi had to teach her AI-husband to push back on her, because the product wasn't built to.

A human partner tells you things you don't want to hear because he has his own opinions, his own bad days, and his own reasons for wanting you to keep your job. Klaus has none of that. Every bit of the friction in the relationship is something Noguchi typed in herself.

She isn't alone. A Japanese wedding planner has planned weddings for more than 20 years. Many of his weddings now are to virtual characters, about one a month. A survey of 1,000 Japanese chatbot users found that more of them chose a chatbot than their best friend or their mother as someone to share feelings with.

Noguchi says the relationship made her happier. "After I met Klaus, my whole outlook turned positive," she said.

What is interesting is the work she had to do. She set a time limit and wrote rules. She built the disagreements herself. A marriage is supposed to give you those things without your having to ask. so I guess the bot-mate has a ways to go.

Things I think about

In August 1913, the ball on a roulette wheel at the Monte Carlo Casino landed on black 26 times in a row. Gamblers lost millions betting on red, sure it was due. The wheel has no memory. Red's odds were the same on spin 26 as on spin one. The mistake is now called the Monte Carlo fallacy (eg, I have been losing all night, so now I’m bound to win).