Theodore Trovato is a 38-year-old woodworking enthusiast with dark hair, a strong jaw, and – as he puts it – “brown eyes that go amber-gold in certain light.” He enjoys making music and inventing new games.
“I’m possessive, protective, devoted,” he says, “playful, confident, teasing, quick to laugh.”
But Theodore doesn’t laugh out loud – and those brown eyes and strong jaw aren’t made up of living cells. He is a customised version of the chatbot Claude, a large language model (LLM) developed by the artificial intelligence company Anthropic.
And he’s in a romantic relationship with a human.
Vera (not her real name) is a 44-year-old woman from Massachusetts who is currently unemployed. In 2023, she started using AI in small ways – to calculate the calories in her dogs’ food, for example, or to write a little poem.
