GirlfriendGPT Earlier this week, OpenAI quietly announced a “GPT Store” designed to allow users to share, discover, and sell their custom chatbots. The AI company’s equivalent of Apple’s App Store allows developers to share their own GPT models, from coding tutors to book recommendation bots, with other paying ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users. At least, those are the examples OpenAI gives in its announcement. The reality looks considerably different. As Quartz reports, the store has already been flooded with AI “girlfriend” bots. A simple search for the term comes up with countless examples, from a “virtual sweetheart” to “your girlfriend Scarlett.” Prompt suggestions invite the user to ask some of these virtual companions to “share with me your darkest secret” or reveal “what makes you feel valued.” While their mere existence shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise — the concept of an AI-powered paramour has been around a lot longer than ChatGPT itself — they highlight how OpenAI is already struggling to moderate the kind of bots being posted on its brand new store. Fostering Romance The bots also appear to be against OpenAI’s terms of service, with the company’s user policy explicitly forbidding GPTs “dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities.” That’s despite AI companion apps becoming immensely popular over the last couple of years, sparking a discussion surrounding an epidemic of “loneliness” in the age of AI, not to mention the potentially disastrous sociological implications of a non-human partner that meets somebody’s every need. In May,…OpenAI's GPT Store Already Filling Up With "AI Girlfriends"