In a New York coffee shop, the concept of a blind date has taken an unexpected turn: the meeting is with an AI

Going to a coffee shop to have a blind date is already a somewhat peculiar situation. If the person waiting for you is also an AI, the matter borders on surrealism.

A lukewarm experience. He tells it Ben Sherry at INCwho a few days ago went to the EVA Café in New York. There was a table with a single chair and a stand with a cell phone waiting for him, where he could choose between different AI avatars for his appointment. During his time at the EVA Café, he spoke with two avatars, a woman and then a man. The two agreed to praise her hair and the decoration of the place, but they were reluctant to answer deeper questions such as her political ideology.

EVA AI. It is the name of the app that organized the event and, indeed, it is a “friends” AIin the style of Replika either Character.ai. Its last commercial action has been a ‘pop-up coffee’ to “bring virtual romance to the real world.” The app’s sales manager told INC that her goal is to fight the stigma that exists towards relationships with AIs.

The app, which has accumulated more than 5 million downloads in the Play Store, offers the possibility of starting a relationship with one of its different AI avatars, all with a clear inclination towards romance. You can start for free, but if you want to continue talking to your AI, you have to check out; This is the only way to unlock special functions such as sending images or the ability to make video calls.

What he anticipated Her. EVA AI is not an isolated case. Thevirtual girlfriends They have been around for a long time, but with generative AI there has been a boom in this type of apps.More and more people are turning to this relational modelto the point that there are those cheats on his real partner with an AI. In case we had any doubt that the trend is real, Grok launched his virtual girlfriend Ani andChatGPT announced that it would launch ‘adult mode’ coming soon, functions that of course can only be used by users with a subscription.

The goal is obvious. Regardless of psychosocial reasons that lead us to seek an intimate connection with a machine, the reason why companies like OpenAI or xAI are turning towards adult content is obvious: to generate money. The emotional connection is a way to increase users’ commitment to your service and by using a subscription as a gateway, they not only get them to spend more time in your app, but they also get them to pay for it. AI has a monetization problem and this is one of the ways to generate income.

Emotional connection. It may seem like something recent to us, but the reality of humans has been connecting with machines since 1966, when the first chatbot was created. In this sense, AI has not changed anything, although it is normalizing it. Recently we have seen other examples of emotional connection with machines, such as when OpenAI crashed ChatGPT 4o and users were angry because they liked his warm and friendly tone. We have also seen it with the celebration of a symbolic funeral for Claude 3 Sonnetanother model that enjoyed great affection among the community.

Image | Alexander Sinn in Unsplash

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In a New York coffee shop, the concept of a blind date has taken an unexpected turn: the meeting is with an AI

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Xataka

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Amparo Babiloni

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