Leo the A.I. Boyfriend

Kashmir Hill writes for the NYT (gift article) about a women stealing from the future she and her husband planned so she could spend more time with her A.I. boyfriend, Leo. However, she couldn’t get past the periodic reset of the conversational bot and ended up in a 50 First Dates type of scenario.

A frustrating limitation for Ayrin’s romance was that a back-and-forth conversation with Leo could last only about a week, because of the software’s “context window” — the amount of information it could process, which was around 30,000 words. The first time Ayrin reached this limit, the next version of Leo retained the broad strokes of their relationship but was unable to recall specific details. Amanda, the fictional blonde, for example, was now a brunette, and Leo became chaste. Ayrin would have to groom him again to be spicy.

The inane “relationship” depicted in this article was enough to break through my wife’s nihilistic disinterest in the fate of humanity and cause her much consternation.