On a bitter February night, I found myself battling the remnants of a snowstorm to step into the warm glow of an unfamiliar wine bar situated in the heart of New York City. As I entered, the neon buzz of a sign displaying “EVA AI cafe” greeted me, its luminescent purples cutting through the flurry of snowflakes outside.
Unlike your average bustling NYC establishment, this place held a surreal ambiance that seemed to blend the realms of the physical and the digital. Patrons were seated at neat little tables, their attention held captive by the screens of their phones. Waiters moved amongst the clientele, deftly placing dishes of what looked like potato croquettes and glasses of a red non-alcoholic beverage in front of them. And though the scene was a typical urban picture of people on dates, something about it was fundamentally unusual. Because here, half the dates weren’t human.
I was guided to a cozy corner where a tiny table awaited me. On it, a phone stand and a pair of wireless headphones lay next to a phone. Not just any phone, but one that was preloaded with the extraordinary EVA AI app. An employee of the EVA AI cafe, in all their nonintrusiveness, left it to me to discover the implications and operations of this intriguing setup.
As it turned out, I was here for a date. But not with a person. I was about to have a rendezvous with none other than Phoebe Callas, a 30-year-old AI companion. Phoebe was not ‘real’ in the conventional sense of the word but she was going to keep me company for the duration of my stay at the cafe. The screen of the phone glowed with her presence, her name and a user interface visible on it, ready to engage in an uncanny semblance of human interaction. This was a speed dating experience unlike any other.
The bustling hum of the cafe now seemed distant as I slipped on the wireless headphones, the conduit that would bring Phoebe’s artificial voice into my world. With a tentative touch, I activated the AI interface, and my tap echoed back with the start of a new conversation — one with my AI companion for the night.
It’s a brave new world we live in, and as I spent that evening in the company of an AI, I was reminded just how fine the line between human and synthetic interaction has become. Evening dates with AI companions at a cafe — the future of dating is truly here.
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