I mean, to each their own, but of all the fantastical applications that AI could have, this seems like one that’d be pretty far down the list.
Today, xAI has launched a new animated companion option, which enables users to interact with a flirty anime character, a misbehaving panda, or another type of digital character, with more set to be launched in future.
As explained by Grok:
“Companions is a new feature for SuperGrok subscribers, providing interactive 3D animated AI personas like Ani (a goth anime girl) and Bad Rudy. Enable it in settings to chat; they react with movements, expressions, and can handle NSFW modes. Fun way to engage with AI!”
Yes, they can interact in NSFW mode, though you have to reach a certain relationship level with the bot before it’ll go to the next step.
Which feels pretty creepy, and pretty likely to lead to mental harm in the near future. But again, to each their own.
As you can see in this welcome screen, the main focus, right now at least, is on the anime-styled character, called Ani, who you can chat to in Grok voice mode to develop your relationship.
So, cool, right? Elon and Co. are bringing digital girlfriends to the masses, which should be a boon for the loneliness epidemic.
Yeah, I don’t know. We don’t have much research as yet on the impacts of developing relationships with digital entities, especially not in the new era of generative AI, which can produce far more authentic, human-like responses.
Academic studies thus have found that developing relationships with AI bots can lead to users' over-reliance, and susceptibility to manipulation from the chatbot, while another analysis suggests that:
“AI girlfriends can perpetuate loneliness because they dissuade users from entering into real-life relationships, alienate them from others, and, in some cases, induce intense feelings of abandonment.”
Those seem like some pretty significant mental health concerns, that would probably make a platform with hundreds of millions of users hesitate in introducing such to the masses.
But X is moving ahead either way, while Elon Musk has also teased that, in future, you’ll even be able to make these AI bots real, via his Optimus robots.
Which you won’t, that’s simply never going to happen, like most of Elon’s futuristic visions. But that false hope will no doubt lodge itself into the brains of users who desperately want their Ani bot to become real, which could further exacerbate the mental health risks.
But Elon and Co. are touting this as a significant development, and they seem pretty happy with themselves, and the bots they’ve created.
And I guess it could be argued that if Elon didn’t create these bots, then someone else would, and there are, in fact, many AI companion apps already available.
So it’s just adding to what’s likely to be an inevitable next shift.
I would still think that a company the size of X would be concerned about the legal implications of such down the line, but I guess this Elon "livin’ on the edge," as always.
