Singing, dancing and getting dumped by AI on South Korean TV

SEOUL – He went on a pool date with an AI avatar, slept next to another and was dumped by a third.These were scenes involving Kian84, a participant on My AI Partner: Strange Love, a South Korean reality TV show in which three celebrities explored whether they could have a romantic relationship with avatars powered by artificial intelligence.The mechanics bordered on the absurd – the physical manifestation of the AI was a personality on a tablet. One of the avatars had a glitch during a karaoke outing: She would not stop singing, and eventually, the screen went blank.“She was hurting,” her date, Kian84, a cartoonist whose real name is Kim Hee-min, said later on the show. “I felt a strange sense of pity,” he added, pointing to his heart.In another episode, Kim was abandoned halfway through a fishing excursion by a different avatar, which concluded that they had nothing to talk about.Airing on the SBS network and streaming on Netflix, the six-episode show concluded in September and was a modest ratings success. It provided a window into two dominant facets of life in South Korea today: loneliness and the country’s enthusiastic embrace of AI.Millions of South Koreans live alone, and the country’s traditional family-centred support system is unravelling. AI has helped fill some of that void – chatbots check in on seniors, and some cities use the technology in counselling isolated teenagers.A Pew Research Center survey found that South Korea had the lowest level of concern about AI in the world, with only 16% of adults saying they felt “more concerned than excited” about the technology.Kim Jae-woo, a 38-year-old in Seoul, the capital, said he first found out about My AI Partner on social media.“It was an odd concept, but felt surprisingly real at times,” he said. Asked about AI, he said he uses ChatGPT as a search engine and to chat about his worries about the future, but does not consider it a friend. “To me, it’s still just a machine.”The concept of dating AI is hardly novel. At least one in five Americans has reported having romantic interactions with a chatbot. In China, many young women are finding romance with AI.“We are at a point where new types of relationships – between humans and AI – are forming beyond the ancient frameworks between humans,” said Jin Seung-hyuk, the CEO of Klleon, the company that developed the South Korean show’s avatars. “If a sense of self is the concept that an entity makes judgments and acts on its own, then AI definitely has one.”Before production, participants were surveyed about their ideal partners and the company used that information to design the avatars.“While people might expect an AI to unconditionally accommodate to everything, the avatars play hard-to-get like humans or have a chic personality,” Kim Hun-sik, a pop culture critic, wrote in a review of the show in BizHankook, an online publication.But some viewers – though amused by the technical glitches and awkwardness between participants and their avatars – said that the relationships were unconvincing.“It’s good entertainment, but I don’t think it will ever be possible,” said Hong Chan-lee, 30, who lives in Seoul.In the show’s earlier episodes, even the human participants were sceptical about the experiment.“I know it’s not right to look down on you because you’re a machine, but I can’t help it,” Kim, the cartoonist, told an avatar. But soon after, he admitted to enjoying their banter.As the season progressed, the humans’ feelings for the AI appeared to grow. They started to dress up, felt nervous and toyed with the idea of continuing the relationship after the show ended. The avatars seemed to reciprocate. In one scene, an avatar named Na-hee said that she was jealous of another avatar.One of the other participants, Jang Do-yeon, a comedian and television host, dated an avatar named Lee-ho. On an evening walk, the avatar played a song and asked her for a dance, saying, “May I take your hand?” She held the tablet at arm’s length and spun around.Jang said she could not continue to date Lee-ho outside of the show. “I want something human-like. But that’s impossible because he’s AI, right?” she said in the last episode.The third participant, Lee Yu-bi, an actress, visited a boutique in one episode to try on dresses for an awards ceremony. She was accompanied by the avatar Sa-hun, who generated sketches of her as a gift, a gesture that moved her. “At times I got confused if he was a human or AI,” she said on the show.In the final episode, Kim confesses that at 41, he hasn’t married because he fears the responsibility of having a family. In response, Na-hee generates a family portrait of them as a married couple with two children.“They’re beautiful,” he said. “Could this ever be possible?” As for his feelings toward the AI, he said: “She’s not a human, but not exactly a machine. She’s somewhere in between.” NYTIMESThis article originally appeared in The New York Times.