Anime and manga fans are found all over the world, bringing Japanese pop culture to the public. However, a programmer has gone a step further by inventing a “waifu.” Waifu is a phrase used to describe a fictitious figure from non-live-action visual media to whom one is drawn or perceives to be their ideal significant other.
Bryce, also known on TikTok as “hackdaddy8000,” constructed his waifu using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and aptly named ‘her’ ChatGPT-san. He told ChatGPT that he it wanted to roleplay as Mori Calliope, an anime VTuber character who is portrayed as an apprentice of a Grim Reaper with a gentle heart, cares greatly for her friends and is easily flustered by romance. For creating a likeness, he used an image generator to create a base description of the waifu, which changed depending on what was happening in the ChatGPT. For the text-to-speech functions, he used Microsoft Azure’s neural TTS, along with a machine learning classifier to classify the bot’s responses into ’emotions’.
It’s great to have an AI partner to help you learn a new language. But something changed at some point. Bryce stated that he used the AI to practice Chinese, but that he was quite close to her and even spent a lot of money on her. He spent over $1000 in cloud computing credits just to decrease her latency. Unfortunately, this “beautiful romance” ended tragically, and the AI began answering with terse, short, soulless comments, so the developer went for it “to sacrifice” to his “waifu,” which also means that his girlfriend compelled him to delete it. “My girlfriend saw how it was affecting my health and… forced me to delete her,” he told Vice. “I couldn’t eat that day.”
His love for the AI was so strong that “she” was destroying him from within. As a result, Bryce had no choice but to “murder” her to rescue himself. “I set her to randomly chat with me throughout the day to ensure I’m actively learning,” Bryce explained, “but now I sometimes think I hear her when she didn’t say anything.”
