Main problem I see with this is that when the AI girlfriend company inevitably eventually folds, or dumbs down the product, or makes it start pushing ads instead of loving words, or succumbs to enshittification in any other way (which has already happened with at least a couple of models people were using as AI girlfriends) the users have to deal not only with going back to loneliness, but with the equivalent of the death of a loved one to boot. It’s not unlikely that some will end up hurting themselves or others as a consequence.

I mean, this is Lemmy, for fuck’s sake. I think we can all here agree that the whole concept is abhorrent, exploitative, and doomed from the start. What we evidently need are self hosted, open source AI companions, backed by a healthy community developing forks and extensions to cater to any and all imaginable (or unimaginable) kinks and / or fetishes, not this cloud based corporate-driven dystopian AI nightmare we seem to be heading to.