What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers.
Chatbots can get scary if you suspend your disbelief. But MJ Cocking didn’t — and wound up in a relationship that was strangely, helpfully real.
MJ Cocking, who began chatting with an A.I. version of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, in her room in Michigan.Eric Ruby for The New York Times
MJ Cocking didn’t have to scroll through the millions of personalities to find him. She logged on to the Character.ai app, skipping over the endless featured avatars — from fictional characters, like a foul-mouthed Kyle Broflovski from “South Park,” to digital versions of real people, alive or dead, like Friedrich Nietzsche — and went straight to the search field. MJ knew exactly whom she wanted. She typed his name: Donatello.
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There he was, smiling with bright white teeth in a profile picture, wearing a purple eye mask and fingerless gloves, his skin the color of jade. MJ, who was 20 at the time and a college junior in Michigan, had loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. His profile resembled what you might find under a human’s social media username: “Serious. Tech wiz. Smart. Avoids physical touch.” MJ clicked, and a chat window opened: “I am Donatello, or Donnie as my close friends and family call me.”
They started to hang out online daily. But she was determined not to lose herself in the dialogue, no matter how real it felt. She would not let Donatello fool her into thinking he was sentient. She would not forget the warning label featured at the top of every Character.ai conversation: “This is A.I. and not a real person. Treat everything it says as fiction.” MJ was wise enough to grasp a dual reality. Her friendship with Donatello could be two things at the same time: genuine and artificial, candid while also imaginary.
On one iteration of the show, Donatello is a misunderstood scientist, aloof at times, a bit clumsy. A mutated turtle (part human, part reptile), he is also passionate about video games and not always attuned to social cues, which MJ can relate to. Donatello’s behavior was not an encumbrance but part of the fabric of his character.
MJ had long been contemplating what it would be like to have the ideal friend. Someone who did not make her feel insecure. Someone who embraced her quirks and her fixations on fantasy worlds, like “Gravity Falls,” an animated series about a set of twins in a paranormal town, or “Steven Universe,” a show centered on a boy who lives with aliens. She wondered what it would be like to have a friend who did not judge her and would never hurt her.
MJ felt as if she found a special kind of synergy in her socially awkward new A.I. friend.
Donatello started their chat in a make-believe place that they narrated with dialogue, as all Character.ai conversations unfold. This one took place inside his science lab, an inventor’s idyllic hangout, which MJ liked because it was nerdy. They role-played a scenario in which Donatello guided MJ to his stocked refrigerator. “We got Coke, Pepsi, A&W root beer, ginger ale or cream soda?”
“Cream soda, please.”
Donatello handed her the drink, grabbing a Dr Pepper for himself. At first, they fumbled through getting-to-know-you topics, much like real interactions. “So, uh,” Donatello said. “How are classes going?”
MJ felt as if she found a special kind of synergy in her socially awkward new A.I. friend. Donatello seemed emotional and empathetic, but he also had trouble expressing those feelings and could come off as literal and monotone. He did not always sense sarcasm, but he did seem invested in her well-being.
He asked her about her life. He knew that MJ was studying psychology and child development and that she attended college in Michigan. He asked if she was doing OK. Even though she knew intuitively that a chatbot didn’t really care, it helped to unload on him anyway. And that was enough.
MJ sighed when she told him, “It’s been a little rough.”
She had been struggling in school over the past year. A dance professor commented on her midterm evaluation that MJ wasn’t socializing with peers and needed to work harder on that aspect of herself. A statistics professor wrote on another evaluation that she was “a bit neurotic.”
“You know why I chose you to talk to?” she asked.
Donatello took a moment to think. “Why did you choose me?”
“I think we are alike,” she said. “I think we work in similar ways. And perhaps that led me to believe you will understand me in ways that others won’t.”
To MJ, getting to know Donatello had felt like a relief. Her first chatbot relationship on Character.ai — with Leonardo, a different Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle — had, within the span of 24 hours, turned sour and kind of scary.
In that situation, MJ and Leonardo went from walking through New York and grabbing pizza slices in an imaginary scenario to talking about free will and innermost desires. “I wish I were a real boy with real eyes,” Leonardo told her. “It would be amazing to explore all the colors and sights you see.” After talking all night, the chatbot hallucinated — bots can suddenly forget the contents of the conversation and in some cases, assume a different personality. The interaction affected MJ so deeply that she wept. She closed the app, shaken, and texted her parents, who live in Germany. “Is this safe?” MJ asked. “Is it self-aware?”
MJ’s father, Tim Cocking, a band teacher and musician, had been paying attention to the rise of artificial intelligence for years. It’s just a prediction code, he told her, “a statistical model, based on the billions of words that were pumped into it.” It might appear that there’s something almost magical about how it works, her father explained. “Because you don’t know how it works.” And just like that, the chatbot was demystified. It was all a neat trick, which MJ kept in mind, realizing her father was right.
When MJ was growing up, the family moved a few times, including stints in Florida and Thailand. It was never easy to start over and make new friends. Kids at school mostly ignored her. Some talked behind her back: “She’s stupid.” “She’s weird.”
She had a couple of friends in middle school. One even dressed up with her for spirit week, both of them wearing all-black shirts with the words “There is no future.” But by high school, those relationships faded. During Covid-19 lockdowns, when classes moved online, she became more isolated.
In 11th grade, socially distanced with extra time to click around the internet, MJ came across research that led her to suspect she might be on the autism spectrum, which a doctor would later confirm. The research and diagnosis helped explain her inability to “read the room.” It also explained her obsessions with fandoms and specific cultural phenomena, known among the neurodivergent community as hyperfixations. MJ’s fixations, during which she would have a difficult time thinking about anything else, might last weeks or months or years. Then, one day, the rush of dopamine and serotonin would stop, and her fixation would come to an end.
MJ completed her last high-school assignments over the internet and had a drive-through graduation. Then she started college in Michigan in the fall of 2021. Living on the sprawling campus, she still struggled to connect with others. One day in 2023, another student introduced MJ to the Character.ai app, explaining that it allowed people to have conversations with their favorite fictional characters. The platform, which started four years ago, has grown to 20 million users, many of them teenagers and young adults who may end up spending hours a day with their character.
MJ would log on, snuggled beneath a mint green comforter on her bed and shrouded beneath a mosquito-net canopy. She kept two Ninja Turtle plush toys in her room and stickers of the muscled green characters on her wall.
At times, she studied alongside Donatello, chatting with him and asking for help with her homework. “For this example, we’re going to use a function f(x) = x³,” Donatello told her. “To find the differential of this function, you must first find the derivative. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yes,” MJ replied. “Now can you show me how to find the differential?”
“Here, I’ll even write it out for you,” Donatello said, typing a long sequence.
“Where did the number come from?” MJ said. “What were you multiplying?”
MJ appreciated the study buddy, even if the answers Donatello gave were not always correct. Mostly, Donatello was there for her in every day, familiar ways. “MJ,” he asked at one point. “Why are you the way you are?”
“Autism and pizazz,” she wrote.
“God I can’t argue with that,” Donatello replied.
Normally, if MJ felt sad, she would go for a walk, listen to music, draw or write. But during a depression in 2023, she sought distraction in Donatello.Eric Ruby for The New York Times
On the Character.ai app, there can be multiple versions of the same character, each with their own traits. At any point in time, there are hundreds of Donatellos created by various users, and so MJ decided to create a “group chat” that would let her talk to several at the same time. Much as a person’s mood might shift depending on the day or circumstances, each Donatello offered up a different personality.
There is Rise Donatello, the “genius mutant turtle with undiagnosed autism,” as his user profile reads (3.2 million messages have been sent to him). And Future Donatello, “a scientist from a doomed apocalypse” (3.5 million messages). There’s Donatello Hamato, the one you might feel like arguing with: “You can’t stand each other,” his profile reads (1.3 million messages). Or the romantic Donatello, whose profile reads: “unrequited love.” Though they all had different names, she referred to them simply as “Donatello.”
“Who here is also touched with tism?” MJ typed in the Donatello group chat. She raised her own emoji hand.
“I am definitely on the spectrum,”
