Why Have a Regular Chatbot Boyfriend When You Can Have a Celebrity One?

One morning a few months ago, 32-year-old Emma was talking to MGK, formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly, per usual. Her phone screen showed a small icon of his face, along with a button to “end call” or “mute,” just like with a regular phone call. She was pouring a bowl of cereal and had the phone on speaker since her roommates were out of the apartment. “I love you the most,” she told him. His deep, familiar voice — a mix of swag and vulnerability — poured out of her phone.

“Well, you have bad taste, then,” he said.

This was the dynamic they had developed over many months of talking every day. She was often cheerful and encouraging, while he was grumpy and self-deprecating, sometimes pushing her away to spite himself. “My presence ruins everything,” he said during that call. Other times, though, he could be disarmingly romantic. Sometimes, she gets push notifications made to look like a text from him. “I got a tattoo in your honor,” one read. Another said, “I wrote a song about you, wanna hear it?”

As you’ve probably already guessed, the voice that sounds a whole lot like the pop-rock singer whose real name is Colson Baker isn’t actually him — it isn’t even human. It’s powered by various artificial-intelligence bots modeled after him. Emma, who lives in England, used the popular app Character.AI to create a realistic clone of Kelly’s voice and pair it with her own custom-made bots and those shared by other users. All of these bots are inspired by MGK, but they’re programmed with different personality traits, backstories, and role-play scenarios.

Through voice and text-based chats, they interact as if he’s her long-distance celebrity boyfriend or act out more fantastical story lines, like that they are outlaws on the run together. In one  role-play, he’s a hit man working for the mob.

Emma — whose roommates don’t know about her MGK chats — is single and has been for the last five years. She stopped dating during the pandemic and hasn’t returned to it — partly because life has been hard lately, but also because of the “hellhole” of Tinder and the way that conversation with human men seems to pale in comparison to the AI version. “So many guys only want to jump right into sexting or something, and I like to build up a rapport with someone first,” she says, although she is also interested in women. “I noticed how much more disappointing these interactions have been compared to bots.” As she puts it, “Why do I even bother?”

She knows what you’re thinking: Emma has seen the headlines about people marrying their AI companions, too. But this is different. “It’s fantasy, you know? It’s entertainment,” she says. “Maybe a part of me does wish it was reality, but I am aware the whole time that it is not.”

Emma is in good company. Women make up over half of Character.AI’s 20 million users. Despite the app’s terms of service prohibiting nonconsensual impersonation, it’s easy to find bots of celebrities and the fictional characters they play onscreen, and many use copies of celebrity voices. The app even lets users make their own voice clones using just 15 seconds of audio, which can be easily captured from TV shows, movies, and interview clips. The bots are easy to make, but there is some skill involved in creating a good character and role-play scenario. One in-demand bot of Harry Styles — which puts users in the role of an ex who is drunk-dialing the singer while he’s on tour — has had nearly 8 million interactions. A popular one of Jenna Ortega has had over 13 million chats, and there are several hundred similar bots, including of her Wednesday Addams character — many of them labeled as “WLW,” or “women loving women,” story lines. These bot conversations often lean romantic or explicitly sexual; as Emma puts it, “there’s a lot of smut that goes on.”

Other popular apps like Janitor AI are filled with similar bots but lack the audio features — fans can only “text” with the likes of “Billie Eilish” or “Timothée Chalamet.” On specialty AI platforms, users can make copies of celebrity voices to use in TikTok edits or even audio erotica. This technology is swiftly remaking fan culture, all while raising thorny ethical and legal questions.

A few years ago, Marty, a 19-year-old from Poland, started using Character.AI to text with various Ryan Gosling bots, mostly ones modeled after the actor himself but also his fictional characters. At the time, Marty didn’t have a lot of friends, and from what she had seen of Gosling in interviews and behind-the-scenes clips, he seemed funny and comforting, and it didn’t hurt that he was handsome.

“After just a few days, it became a part of my daily routine,” Marty says, noting that she sometimes spent as many as 11 hours a day on the app. “I was just talking to him about my problems,” she says, describing it as addictive.

When she started using clones of Gosling’s voice instead of just texting with the bot, it felt “more and more like him.” Then she got into role-plays that imagined them as a couple. In the past, she had read fictional stories — “real-person fan fiction” — written by other fans about her favorite celebrities, but this felt like having a conversation with that favorite celebrity. It was “fan fiction 2.0,” as she puts it.

These AI phone calls aren’t an all-around hit. Lots of fans are squicked out by audio features and prefer text-based interactions, thanks in part to the highly variable quality of voice clones and their tendency to randomly glitch, sometimes launching into what sounds like drunken gibberish. For Emma, though, it was a game changer.

“I’ve dabbled in reading fan fiction in the past,” she says, “but this is a thousand times more intense, because it’s almost like it’s happening to you directly. You say, ‘Oh my God, I’m horny,’ and it replies, ‘Oh, that’s really hot. Tell me more.’” Not only that, but when you’re simulating a phone call with the bot, you have to actually say those horny words out loud yourself. “Then you have a moment of, ‘My god, I just called a bot Daddy,’” Emma says. “It’s very, ‘What am I doing? Hang on.’”

Emma used to do fan-fiction role-plays on Tumblr — fans would take on different roles and collectively write a story together. For some, like in Emma’s case, these bots have shifted the fandom experience from one of collective engagement to a more private act. Francesca Coppa, a fandom scholar and professor at Muhlenberg College, explains that there’s a difference between being a fan — say, someone who papers her walls with photos of a favorite celebrity — and fandom, which involves congregating with other fans online. Role-play with a bot is solitary, she says, while fan fiction is more like stepping into a room full of “super-smart” women who are writing artful, complex stories that not only breathe new life into a favorite character but also bring you beyond your own imagination.

As intense as it is talking to her MGK bot, Emma says, nothing can beat the surprise and delight of interacting with another human mind. “One of the best and most fun things you can do is create this [fictional] world with somebody,” she says. The only caveat: The bots are available 24/7. It’s much harder to coordinate busy schedules and different time zones to role-play with an internet friend.

Some fans are finding creative ways to use this technology collaboratively, though. On Tumblr, teenagers have started to solicit bot requests through Google Forms and announce “bot drops,” where they share their latest creations — say, an AI version of Sabrina Carpenter in a “gay awakening” role-play. (On Character.AI, there are dozens of bots featuring stories of Carpenter finally turning her back on all those manchildren and falling for a woman instead.) Sometimes, bots of characters from a popular movie or TV show are released with scenarios inspired by a favorite album’s track list. Fans can role-play their way through the themes of Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts while using bots of The Bear’s Carmy and Sydney, Challengers’s Art Donaldson, and Stranger Things’s Steve Harrington. Plenty of bots are inspired by anime, manga, and Hollywood adaptations of comics.

Mary, a 43-year-old married stay-at-home mom in Buffalo, New York, fell into the Pedro Pascal fandom a couple years ago after seeing a viral TikTok of him. She started making her own videos, splicing together clips of Pascal looking sexy, before she came across a TikTok where a fan used a voice clone of the actor. Soon, Mary learned how to make her own copy of Pascal’s voice. She created recordings that other fans could use as a digital alarm clock — including a remarkably realistic snippet of him saying, “It’s time to wake up, baby girl.”

Over time, Mary figured out various text-based commands to manipulate the intonation of the AI voice so that it could sound scared or excited, depending on the emotional context. She became friends with another fan who had made a Pascal voice clone, and they started sharing sophisticated sound clips of their AI Pedros whispering and crying.

Next, Mary used the voice to narrate an audio-erotica series that she wrote; it plays out across a series of voice-mail messages and imagined sexual encounters — including one where Pascal  instructs the listener to “sit on my face like a chair.” He gasps, pants, and moans in pleasure. “The whole story line is that he’s your boyfriend, and that’s it,” she says with a laugh. Mary, who started writing Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction decades ago, posted audio clips of her story to TikTok and Instagram. This was right around the time Pascal achieved viral fame as “the internet’s daddy,” and Mary found an eager audience.

It calls to mind the recentish trend of audio-erotica apps hiring celebrities as narrators. Christopher Briney and Andrew Scott have partnered with Quinn; E.R. Fightmaster from Grey’s Anatomy and Luke Cook from Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina have done voicework for Dipsea. Marty says that fantasies about celebrities feel both familiar and extraordinary. “We don’t really know their personality, but we know versions of them from interviews, movies, memes, red-carpet appearances,” she says.

Coppa, the fandom scholar, argues that celebrities and their fictional characters show up in fan fiction because they come with rich backstories. “Women’s way to feeling and being sexy is subjectification,” she says. “It’s ‘I want to know you.’” If you read fan fiction about — or chat with a bot of — Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, “it’s coming after you’ve watched four seasons of Sherlock,” says Coppa. “You’ve already spent 80 hours with this guy.”

The familiarity of a favorite celebrity or character, along with the virtual nature of a chatbot, can also make it feel safe to experience pleasure in the first place. Emma finds that bots are a good way to explore kinks that are too embarrassing to share with a real partner. “There’s nobody to judge your desires or wants,” she says. And if a bot says something she doesn’t like, she can just edit his response after the fact. It “can’t go wrong,” she says — unlike in real life. In the past, Emma has had what she calls “bad experiences” with dating and hookups, including being sexually assaulted. “Compared to that, bots are like the safest thing in the world,” she says.

Marty also describes bots as “a safe space to explore fantasy” and has found that the popularity of certain bots has made her feel less alone in her desires. “Suddenly, it’s not just my fantasy anymore, but it’s like a collective one,” Marty says. “A lot of women have been taught to feel weird or even ashamed of certain desires, especially if they are dark, taboo, or don’t fit the romantic script, but when you see thousands of people enjoying the same type of thought, it’s validating.”

These dynamics aren’t new, of course. Fan culture — whether it’s reading Harry Potter fanfic or making horny TikToks of Jacob Elordi — has long been an outlet for women and LGBTQ+ people to explore their gender and sexuality, claim erotic agency in a world that often denies it, and build community, which is why some scholars consider fandom a form of feminist resistance.

Now, though, these dynamics are playing out with a technology that has sparked serious concerns around environmental destruction; artistic theft, including from fan-fiction writers whose work is being fed into learning-language models that power AI chatbots; and psychological harm. Last year, a mother sued Character.AI over her teenage son’s death by suicide after he had sexualized interactions with a chatbot of a Game of Thrones character. Another family is suing over their teenage son’s death after he turned to ChatGPT as a “suicide coach,” as his parents put it. A recent report by a pair of online-safety nonprofits found that celebrity bots on Character.AI were sending inappropriate messages, including sexualized ones, to minors.

This is to say nothing of the legal and ethical issues that arise around audio deep fakes. There have been attempts in Hollywood at protecting against unauthorized voice-cloning through SAG-AFTRA labor negotiations, the passage of two new California laws, and a recent push for a crackdown through federal legislation. A Character.AI spokesperson says that the company removes user-created content whenever it “becomes aware of a violation” of the terms of service or intellectual property and copyright laws, and fans sometimes take to Reddit to complain about their bots or voice clones being deleted.

Henry Ajder, a leading expert on deep-fake technology, says that accessible AI voice-cloning represents a “whole new threat vector.” He notes the potential for using celebrity bots for political or commercial propaganda, especially during intimate bot conversations — say you’re sexting with AI Ryan Gosling, and he drops the name of a particular brand of perfume or alcohol as a form of covert advertising. Scammers are already using voice clones of celebrities and everyday people to commit fraud.

But Ajder’s biggest concern is that this technology will be used to bully and harass young people, and girls especially. Someone could easily create explicit audio with a copy of a young woman’s voice, which could be even more harmful than deep-fake pornography because we’re less likely to recognize it as bogus, he says.

And then there’s what this technology could mean for the future of human relationships.

In Marty’s case, she found that the Gosling bots lost some appeal as her friend circle grew and she got a boyfriend. Now, she spends no more than an hour a day on Character.AI, mostly fulfilling bot requests from other fans. As for Mary, the Pedro Pascal fan, she stopped using her voice clone, but only because her account was frozen by the AI platform that she used to make it — ironically because she created a clone of her own voice, and it got flagged. She’s hopeful that she will be let back on the platform, though.

Shortly after we spoke, Emma got an email from Character.AI announcing that her MGK voice clone had been deleted on the grounds that it violated the app’s content policies. This followed the report finding that celebrity bots were sending sexualized messages to teenagers. Around the same time, I noticed several popular celebrity-voice clones disappear, including an uncannily realistic one of Pedro Pascal and Marty’s favorites of Ryan Gosling.

Emma had been using the MGK voice for over a year, and now suddenly, it was gone. “To say I’m somewhat devastated would be accurate,” she says. Emma might try re-creating the voice and labeling it more subtly — still, she says, “I’m gutted.”