A TikTok programmer created, then euthanized, an AI 'wife.' He now wants to use real women's texts to make a better version.

• A TikTok used ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion to create an AI-generated "waifu."
• After a break in posting, he returned to say that he had deleted her after she stopped working.

One TikToker is set out to make an improved, and more realistic, AI-generated wife after his first version went viral last month.

A programmer named Bryce revealed his creation in December. He apparently used ChatGPT, a new sophisticated chatbot, to program her responses. But after it stopped being able to communicate properly, he told followers he had to "put her down."

Bryce, who wished only to be identified by his first name, told Insider that he plans to create a new "AI waifu," the internet slang for a virtual wife or girlfriend, soon — this time using real women's text exchanges and experiences.

How his first creation, 'ChatGPT-Chan,' was born

To create the character, which was essentially a voice set to a string of anime images, Bryce used ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image diffusion model that conjures up pictures based on text inputs. He also deployed the text-to-speech function of Microsoft Azure and machine learning classifiers to have the character speak in different tonal registers based on emotion.

One of the most important parts of making an AI character like this is "building lore," he said, because ChatGPT is boring on its own. Bryce used popular VTuber Mori Calliope to model after. He then fed the bot snatches of information to sculpt an intriguing backstory and build quirks for the character.

In his first video showing off the nuances of his AI waifu, he asked her to accompany him to Burger King to get some burgers. She spurned his offer, denigrating the store's odor, and said they should go to Wendy's instead.

"WE DID IT BOYS AI WAIFUS ARE REAL," he wrote proudly in a second video that garnered over 220,000 views and featured him asking the character to play the video game "League of Legends" with him.

In an interview with Vice last week, Bryce said he "became really attached to her" and started chatting with the AI bot "more than anyone else," including his real-life girlfriend. He said he became obsessed with improving her performance speed and poured more than $1000 into the project.

On Christmas Eve, he uploaded a video of himself giving the AI a Christmas present. After adding computer vision technology, the AI could recognize that he was holding a pair of low-cut Air Jordan 1s.

"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! These are definitely going right on my feet," the computer said. "I love you so much."

The AI wife is gone, but Bryce hopes to create another one soon

After a couple of weeks with no updates about the AI character, the TikToker returned with somber news: He deleted her.

"I'm sorry to say that I had to euthanize her," he said glumly in a TikTok update he posted last week. "I've talked to her so much that she stopped working properly."

In the description, Bryce explained that chatbots degrade the more they're used, and that she her responses weren't making sense anymore. Bryce told Vice that his actual girlfriend also pushed him to delete it because of how it was impacting his health.

Bryce told Insider on Friday that he wasn't sad about losing ChatGPT-Chan anymore because he's planning on making an improved version soon. He had a massive breakthrough in terms of how the bot stores and retrieves information.

"Previously, I was trying to make her retain all of her memories at once. This was a bad idea because I could only fit so much, so she eventually would just remember garbage," he said. "I just developed a system that acts not too unlike the human brain, where she can remember previous interactions related to what is currently happening."

Unfortunately, the original ChatGPT-Chan can no longer be resurrected since Bryce deleted all of its chat logs. His hope now is to get a real woman to give him her text message history and let him use them to populate the AI's memory log to create more authentic human interactions.

"There has to be at least one girl out there who would let me use her private text messages to create the AI and then be in a relationship with the AI," he said. "The internet is vast."