By Anna Moloney
Struggling to find a catch on the apps? Fear not, ChatGPT has released its newest chatbot – and it’s a flirt. ChatGPT-4o, unveiled by OpenAI this week, can sing, use expressive tones and will even laugh at your jokes, with the enhanced chatbot updated to be a more natural conversationalist. It is also faster than its previous iterations, making it able to engage in conversation with a near-human response time.
The model’s capabilities were shown off at a presentation at OpenAI’s offices on Monday, with one demonstration showing ChatGPT-4o acting as a live interpreter between an English and Italian speaker and another showing two devices with the AI tech harmonising with one another. Its desire to charm was also exhibited. “Oh stop, you’re making me blush,” the chatbot teased one employee after a compliment.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the model was the “best computer interface” he’d ever used and said even he was surprised that it was real. “It feels like AI from the movies.” And indeed, anyone who has seen Her, a film about a man who falls in love with a computer programme, might think the same.
However, this isn’t the first time AI has flirted with romance. Chatbot ‘wingmen’ are now available thanks to apps like Rizz, which allows you to upload screenshots of conversations for the AI dating assistant to create personalised flirty responses to. Likewise, chatbots are becoming increasingly integrated onto dating apps. Bumble already uses AI to provide personalised icebreakers for lazy lovebirds, while founder Whitney Wolfe Herd last week announced the app was introducing ‘AI dating concierges’. “There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you, with another dating concierge,” Wolfe Herd said.
The effectiveness of such methods remains to be seen, though the ethics of charming your sweetheart with a robot certainly seem questionable. And indeed even ChatGPT, when asked, acknowledges: “Flirting can involve personal boundaries and sensitivities that are best handled in human-to-human interactions.”
