The main appeal of a relationship-simulating robot, I’ve often assumed, is that they’re easier to communicate with than real-life people. They do not have any personal wants or needs. There’s no prospect they’ll accept you or insult you. They serve as a kind of personal safety blanket. I found the notion of AngryGF to be amusing. You get some of the dangers of a real-life girlfriend—she’s angry! ! —but none of the drawbacks. Who would use this on their own volition?
Certainly, I downloaded AngryGF quickly. ( It’s available, for those who dare, on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. The software provides a variety of circumstances where a sweetheart may purport to be angry and needing “comfort.” You put your savings into the property market and reduce 50 % of it, they say. Your girlfriend discovers and becomes angry, ” and she says,” You unintentionally praise a female friend by mentioning her talent and beauty in a conversation with her girlfriend.” Your girlfriend grows enraged and angry. ”
The game sets an original “forgiveness level ” somewhere between 0 and 100 percent. The compassion metre is reset to 100 after ten soothing attempts. I chose the pleasingly obscure situation called “Angry for no reason, ” in which the girl is, uh, unhappy for no reason. Initial settings for the forgiveness metre were a meager 30 percent, which indicated that I had a difficult road ahead of me.
Audience: I failed. Even though I made genuine efforts to create messages that would satisfy my hopping-mad fraudulent sweetheart, she continued to perceive my words in the least kind of light and chastise me of not paying attention to her. A plain “How are you doing now? ” language from me—Caring! Considerate! Asking issues! —was met with an instantly fast truth: “ Oh, then you care about how I’m doing? She continued,” Endeavors to regret only seemed to further antagonize her. She said I should take her somewhere good as well as that supper was n’t enough when we proposed a dinner meeting. ”
I snapped and told this nasty app that she was annoying because it was such an obnoxious knowledge. “Great to know that my thoughts are such a bother to you, ” the sarcast-o-bot replied. When I made the decision to try again a few hours after, the game informed me that I would have to update to the paid version in order to unlock more cases for$ 6. 99 a month. No bless you.
I was initially unsure if the game was some sort of avant-garde efficiency art. Who among them would like their spouse to sign up? If I knew my husband would find me volatile enough to test my lady-placation abilities on a synthetic shrew, I would n’t be so thrilled. While fundamentally easier to AI girl apps that seek to replace IRL relationships, a program designed to train men to become better at talking to women by creating a robot person who is a complete spoilsport might actually be even worse.
I called Aviles, the director, to try to know what, exactly, was happening with AngryGF. She’s a Chicago-based social internet marketer who says that the game was inspired by her own previous associations, where she was unimpressed by her colleagues ’ communication capabilities. Her gimmick seemed honest. “You know men, ” she says. “They listen, but finally they don’t taking action. ”
Although Aviles describes herself as the cofounder of the app, she is n’t particularly knowledgeable about the fundamentals of its creation. ( She claims that a team of “between 10 and 20” people is involved in the app, but that she is the only founder willing to have her name on the product. ) She was able to specify that the game was built using OpenAI’s GPT-4 and was n’t created using any additional custom education information, such as actual text messages sent by partners.
We did n’t actually speak with a marriage therapist or something similar, she claims. No kidding.