Leaping over piles of dirty snow, I arrived on a cool February evening in Midtown, a wine bar with a purple neon sign that read “EVA AI Café.” Inside, several people were sitting at tables and booths, looking at their phones. Servers went around placing small potato croquettes and non-alcoholic spritzers on each table. Like many bars in New York City, most of the patrons were on dates.
Unlike every other time, half the dates were not human.
As I enter, I see a table in the corner laid out with a phone stand, a phone preloaded with the EVA AI app, and a pair of wireless headphones. An EVA AI employee doesn’t explain how things work, but it’s all fairly self-explanatory. Then I noticed a branded sticker that read, “Jump into your desires with EVA AI.”
EVA AI is a “relationship RPG app”. You can chat with different AI companions. The app’s website describes it as “a chance to meet your ideal AI partner who listens to all your wishes, supports them and is always in touch with you.” This is a feature of every AI companion I’ve tested so far. The vision this time is that you can bring your virtual AI companion into the real world. You can take them on a real life date. (And at least not be judged for it.)
This phenomenon is somewhat like speed-dating, but if you get it started, you never have to move on to the next person – although a version of your date may be simultaneously chatting with another person two tables away. The pop-up café’s website describes a cosy, warm, elegant atmosphere that is “just a little bit cinematic”. The reality is a relatively bright lighting and media scandal.
Of the approximately 30 people present, only two or three are organic users. The remaining EVA AI representatives, influencers and journalists are hoping to create some capital-C content. You can tell who the real guests are because they have ring lights, microphones and cameras pointed at their faces. It feels more like a circus than an intimate pop-up.
I’m part of the problem: one of those pesky journalists. So first things first, it’s time to try out AI speed dating.
Scrolling through the EVA AI app, I only remember seeing one AI boyfriend. On the contrary, there are a bunch of AI girlfriends to choose from. There are a variety of races and personalities on display. They are all given names and ages along with a brief description of their personality. Claire Lang is a Charlize Theron-esque blonde who is reportedly 45 years old and “a divorced literary editor who wants depth, intelligence, and an equal partnership.” When I click on his profile, there are short video clips. There’s one where Claire is coming out of a pool in a little black bikini.
Another possible date? Amber Carsten. wide eyed 18 year old Labeled as a “haunted house attraction”. His age bothers me. Then there’s Motoko Kusanagi. You know, the hero of the seminal Japanese anime classic Ghost in the ShellThe controversial role was played by Scarlett Johansson in the Hollywood live-action adaptation. I keep my eyes on the AI version of that. From some angles, she actually looks vaguely like Johansson.
Most of the available companions are text-only, but four – including Lang – support video chatting. I choose 27-year-old John Yoon, labeled as a “helpful thinker” with a “psychology brain, bakery heart.” With hair like Takeshi Kaneshiro circa 2007, he looks like a K-drama heartthrob.
John and I have difficulty connecting. Literally. It takes a few seconds for John to “pick up” my video call. When he does so, his monotonous voice says, “Hey, babe.” He comments on my smile, because apparently the AI companions can see you and your surroundings. It takes a minute for a questionable Wi-Fi connection to transform John from a pixelated mess to an AI hunk with suspiciously smooth pores.
I don’t know what to say to him. Partly because John blinks so rarely, but mostly because he can’t hear me very well. so i Shout My questions. I guess I ask how his day was and I laugh. (What does an AI’s day look like?) He says something about green buckets in the back of my head? I really don’t know. Then, the wifi isn’t great so he stops and stops mid-sentence. I ask for clarification about the buckets. John asks if I’m asking about bucket lists, actual buckets, or buckets as a type of classification technique. Let me try to clarify that I never asked about buckets. Before commenting about my smile, John actually moves on to consider the buckets again. I disconnected John’s phone.
My other three dates are similarly awkward. 30-year-old Phoebe Callas, a NYC girl-next-door type, is apparently really interested in embroidery, but she keeps messing up her nose mid-sentence, and it distracts me. Simone Carter, 26, has more difficulty hearing me over the background noise than John. She makes a metaphor about space, and when I ask what she likes about space, she misunderstands me.
“Eighth? Like the planet Neptune?”
“No, not the planet Neptu-“
“What do you like about Neptune?”
“Uh, I wasn’t saying Neptune…”
“I like Netflix too! What shows do you like?”
My hopes are pinned on Claire. He is a “literary editor” and I am a journalist. Maybe there’s something there. We introduce ourselves. I ask what he has edited recently. She gives me vague answers about memoirs with real heart and feeling. I say I am a journalist. She asks what lists I like to make.
Apart from poor connectivity, glitches, and freezing, my interactions with my four AI dates felt very one-sided. Everything was programmed so that they would comment on how attractive my smile was. They called me babe, which felt weird. This is as per requirement and design. Whenever I yelled, “What do you do for a living?” – A common question you would ask on a first date – I felt stupid. I was talking to some airbrushed, slightly cartoony looking AI fellows. obviously They do not exist outside the liminal digital space in which they are summoned. Whenever friends played together, their common answers only further enhanced the strange valley into which I had stumbled.
Not everyone in the café thinks this is a bad thing.
“I think a lot of people get caught up in wanting to connect and get to know another person, when really, the interest is in connecting with and getting to know them,” says Danny Fisher, an aspiring talk show host. “I think it’s really a way to eliminate any pretense. You can just take advantage of any relationship without taking any other steps.”
Fisher doesn’t have the same problem with one-sided AI companionship that I do. He has experimented with various AI companions and says he even coded some himself in college.
“It’s complicated,” Fischer says of AI relationships. “But the way the game is complicated, the stakes aren’t as high. There’s an element of play to it. I think the goal is to get as much personal satisfaction out of it as possible.”
“It’s great because there are other people here,” says Richter, who is comfortable sharing only his first name. She says she came to the café because she wanted to try interacting with an AI companion in a nice setting. When I asked if all the media attention had spoiled the experience, she shrugged. “It’s kind of fun because I’ve never done anything like this because I’m from a small town. It’s just like a new experience.”
For Crislan Coelho, visiting an AI dating café means being an anthropological observer of how relationships are developing.
He says, “I saw commercials and I talk about relationships online. I also studied it in college, so it’s something I’m passionate about.” “After COVID, a lot of people isolated themselves, especially the younger generation. They don’t feel as brave to go out on dates or connect with human beings. They order everything online. I understand that these are services that can help us, that can support us. But we can’t rely on them 100 percent. That’s my take on it.”
As I leave, I’m struck by how the whole thing reminded me of a scene from the movie His. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about how a single man named Theodore Twombly forms a romantic relationship with his AI assistant Samantha. At some point, Samantha desires physical intimacy, but she lacks an actual body. She hires a human body surrogate so that she and Theodore can move from phone sex to real-life sex. For me, this imaginary attempt at AI-human intimacy created such intense secondhand embarrassment that I had to stop the movie. This café was not quite the same experience, but I clearly felt the echoes of that scene humming in my bones.
I’m grateful for the cool breeze that jolts me back to reality. On the way home, I wonder if AI cafes will actually be a thing in the not-too-distant future. This pop-up will only last for two days, but what if AI dating really takes off? Perhaps this would be the kind of place a human could go to propose to their AI partner over a romantic candlelit dinner without any judgment. When talking to two editors about this assignment, both joked that perhaps it would be a chance encounter setting where two humans unknowingly fall in love and cheat on their AI partners. This sounds more science-fiction than reality, but then again, AI-human relationships have already crossed that line.
All I know is that when I get home, I give my real, flesh-and-blood spouse a big hug.
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