Sam Altman’s World Network says 1 in 4 people are flirting with chatbots online

When the movie Her debuted in 2013, its plot about a man falling in love with an AI operating system seemed, if not wholly original, a vision of the distant future.

About a decade later, though, relationships between AI chatbots and humans are becoming more commonplace.

Take Replika, a dating app launched in 2017 that lets users create customized romantic chatbots. By 2023, it had about 676,000 daily active users, with the average user spending two hours a day on the app, according to figures from Apptopia.

It’s not only Replika users. Romanticizing a chatbot is becoming a global phenomenon.

One in four people admitted to flirting with a chatbot either knowingly or unknowingly, according to a survey conducted by Sam Altman’s futuristic project, World, formerly known as Worldcoin. The company surveyed 90,000 of the 25 million people on its network about their feelings on love in the age of AI.

The majority of respondents said they are still wary of interacting with bots. About 90% said they want dating apps to have a system for verifying real humans. About 60% of users said they have either suspected or discovered that they matched with a bot.

To help users combat deepfakes, World launched a product called World ID Deep Face. It relies on the World’s existing verification system — which takes pictures of humans’ irises with a melon-sized orb — to verify on platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, or dating apps that users are communicating with real humans in real-time video or chat interactions. World is in the process of rolling out the system in beta.

“As someone that uses dating apps, all the time I get catfished,” Tiago Sada, the chief product officer of Tools for Humanity, the company building World’s technology, told B-17. “You see profiles that they’re just too good to be true. Or you realize this person has six fingers. Why do they have six fingers? Turns out it’s AI.”