[PheonixPharts]

I don't think it's that fake. There were people, researchers, that were obsessed with ELIZA back in the day. I personally have a friend who is constantly thinking about fine-tuning a model on his ex's texts to recreate chatting with her. I suspect many others are less extreme but still seek out a form of companionship they have full control over.

In the visual space, if we're honest, most of the work being done on Stable Diffusion is with the aim of creating "intimate" art. Might not be "companionship" in the family sense, but absolutely a good chunk of the Civit.ai world is, more-or-less, concerned with the mass creation of "waifus".

I don't think that we're going to have many startups succeed in this space, because I suspect the main driver is to have conversations/generate images that people don't entirely want there to be a record off/watched by a private company. But I actually suspect that the number of people using AI for companionship of some form or another is much higher than it appears.