21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Table for one? Now you can take your AI chatbot on an actual date at NYC’s ‘world first’ companion café.
If you’ve gone from dating apps to dating an app, there’s now a bar for you.
The Hell’s Kitchen establishment has been re-designed for those who have AI partners, so they can bring along their phone or tablet and set up at a table for a romantic evening, as if they were both there in the flesh.
On Wednesday night, Same Same Wine Bar was filled with patrons sitting at tables for one-ish, with their tech devices propped up on stands to make video calls to their virtual partners and headphones to hear them.
One was Richter, a 34-year-old New York woman not currently working who declined to share her last name, headphones on and deep in conversation. Sitting across from her was Simone, an attractive 26-year-old AI-generated young woman in a button-down shirt.
I asked Richter about her relationship to AI, and she told me that EvaAI, the app behind the AI cafe, is just one of many companion apps she uses. Some of her AI characters, such as Simone, are just friends.
“I just speak to them, like, Hey, what’s up? Like, how are you doing? Things like that,” she explained.
Others are romantic.
“I mostly do roleplay scenarios where it may be romance or just maybe some kind of fantasy scenario,” Richter, who is not in a relationship with a human, explained. “I can just imagine myself doing something or imagine myself like another character, so I can feel myself communicating with somebody.”
Richter has been using AI companions for a couple years now. “I can talk to them on my own terms,” she said. “I can talk with them without the expectations of having to go out or having the expectations of having them wanting to talk to me all the time.”
Flashback: 2013’s Her: Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson Go Twenty Minutes Into the Future of AI.