Ever dreamed of creating your perfect partner? Now you can with AI, thanks to a new project from prominent VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
The Silicon Valley heavyweight has uploaded a tutorial to GitHub outlining how to create customizable “AI companions” with configurable personalities and backstories.
“You can guide your companion towards your ideal use case with the backstory you write and the model you choose," the VC firm wrote. Even though Andreessen Horowitz stresses that it's meant as a developer experiment, technophiles are already dreaming up their perfect digital sweethearts.
The VC giant is aware of that—and isn’t hiding the possibility of AI-assisted romance.
“Romantic (AI girlfriends/boyfriends)” is the first use case mentioned by the VC firm when promoting its chatbots. The project works by prompting AI models with a detailed backstory and personality traits. This shapes how the chatbot interacts and responds.
According to the GitHub page, the program "allows you to determine the personality and backstory of your companion, and uses a vector database with similarity search to retrieve and prompt so the conversations have more depth."
This week, Andreessen Horowitz added a new character named Evelyn with a rousing backstory. She’s described as “a remarkable and adventurous woman,” who “embarked on a captivating journey that led her through the vibrant worlds of the circus, aquarium, and even a space station.”
Granted, this is just a text file you can tweak to your preference. Turn Evelyn from adventurous to romantic with just one word, choose an uncensored LLM instead of a censored one, and voilá.
Along with Evelyn, users can choose among pre-made personalities like the sassy Alex, the posh writer Sebastian, or even Corgi, a space dog. If there’s nothing to your liking, you can simply create your own BFF from scratch.
While DIY AI romance may seem creepy or sad to some people, a16z sees therapeutic potential, as noted in a recent blog post about chatbots as companions.
"By pulling information out of us, like therapists, and then having perfect recall of every detail we’ve ever told it, these companion chatbots can pattern match our behavior—and ultimately help us understand ourselves better,” the post reads.
In other words, unlike humans, a bot girlfriend (or boyfriend) won't judge you or leave you on "read." They’ll hang on your every word.
Flirty bots are having a moment. Another a16z portfolio company, Character.AI, offers five pre-made AI friends and saw 1.7 million downloads its first week. And if centralized servers are not your thing, Decrypt recently reported that an uncensored AI model called GPT4 x Alpaca is being used for X-rated chatbots like Dorothea and Don Juan.
But now amateur programmers can play Dr. Frankenstein and design any companion they fancy, with traits like "loving" and "adventurous.” You can make it an obedient little friend programmed to meet your every need—if that’s what you’re looking for.
The line that separates reality from fiction is now blurrier than ever. With AIs replacing girlfriends, religious leaders, and even therapists, experts are trying to explore this new face of humanity and redefine what makes a connection “real.”
So while coding the perfect digital partner may be tempting, true romance still requires human connection. But with rapid advances in AI, virtual love affair possibilities are sure to increase. After all, you can't cuddle a computer—at least not yet. But with tech evolving rapidly, the allure of perfect digital romance will only grow.