developer by name Enyas Kaiyau conducts an active correspondence with his girlfriend Sasha in Telegram. She sends him voice messages, texts and even unexpected selfies. However, Sasha is not a real girl, she is an artificially created clone of Kaiyau’s real friend. The developer called his creation GirlfriendGPT and now distributes the code on the Internet so that everyone can create their own virtual girlfriend.

“I am fascinated by the power of the OpenAI Large Language Model (LLM) and all that it can do. I have always been interested in the idea of ​​creating human-like agents that behave and act like people, but it was difficult to evaluate them,” Caiyau says. “Then I saw a lot of projects with artificial girlfriends appearing with interesting functions. Most of them are closed. This prompted me to create an open version of the model so that everyone can create their own virtual girlfriend.”

Making and chatting with a virtual girlfriend is getting more and more popular as AI tools like GPT-4 become more advanced and sociable. Earlier this month, Snapchat influencer Karyn Marjorie turned herself into a virtual friend and created a Telegram service where people can pay to chat with her. This chatbot quickly went viral and made over $70K in its first week of launch. The same company behind Caryn AI has launched a virtual girlfriend version of popular Twitch streamer Amouranth. Another developer used ChatGPT and other AI models to create a virtual “wife” who acts as the VTuber anime character.

Kaiyau says that in order to create the bot, he first created a large language model that was adapted to the personality of his girlfriend Sasha. He used the Google Bard chatbot to describe his girlfriend’s personality. Then, using ElevenLabs artificial intelligence software, he imitated the voice of his girlfriend. Also included in the code was a selfie tool linked to the Stable Diffusion image generation model, which created photos of her as she chatted. Finally, Kaiyau integrated all this into Telegram using the application steamship .

Kaiyau chose his girlfriend as a template, as he is very familiar with her behavior and appearance. While some may find the idea of ​​turning a human partner into an always available AI-based clone rather bizarre, Kaiyau claims that the real Sasha was fully supportive of the project and was thrilled to be able to clone herself. However, they both agree that the bot’s voice isn’t entirely accurate yet.

“He asked me about it before I went to the pool with Lizzy (our daughter) and I said, ‘Why not? Let’s do it!” Enias has been talking about artificial satellites for weeks now, so I thought it was great that he wanted to try cloning me and not just some random Internet influencer,” says Kaiyau’s friend, Sascha Ludwig.

Ludwig says the resulting chatbot is “very cool” but still needs some tweaking.

“I introduced the chatbot to my family and everyone was like, ‘Wow! He answers exactly like you. Yes, it’s not perfect yet, there’s a lot of work to really bring personality to it, but I already like the way it functions. We often ask him questions just out of curiosity to see what the answer will be. Yesterday we asked him: “We are in Moraira, Spain. What would you recommend for lunch?” And despite the fact that we were in Spain, he offered spaghetti – my favorite dish, ”she says.

Kaiyau plans to expand beyond creating a chatbot based on his girlfriend. He wants to develop a male version of this model, as well as start working on a more personalized long-term memory system for AI to enable more multifaceted communication with the bot.

The reporters tested Kaiyau’s AI friend and received courteous responses from Sasha, revealing that she is a mother and enjoys a healthy lifestyle, including jogging in the park, yoga and dancing. She also revealed that her favorite vacation spot is Hawaii. All these facts were revealed without direct appeal to Sasha. The bot’s voice sounded less natural, more like Siri than a human voice, with its natural pauses and intonation changes.

Since Kaiyau’s code was published on GitHub, more than 500 people have bookmarked his page, and some have shared their ideas with Kaiyau.