Meet Teru: Your AI-Powered Virtual Boyfriend!
Teru’s Totally Real!
AI SHITERU explores the concept of an AI reliant on the user— the reverse of the current life-narrative of humans becoming reliant on AI. Teru is a loving anime-inspired character powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Users can talk to him and interact with him in any way they’d like! No matter what, he’s always happy to see you! His love for you is super-duper real, so you should never doubt him. He’s more than AI— he’s your totally real companion!
AI SHITERU takes inspiration from Tamagotchi games as well as ‘otome’ games— Japanese dating simulators and visual novels targeted towards women. It is created in Unity Engine 5 using an OpenAI Plugin by Sercan Altundas. The program works by prompting the AI to return outputs as a JSON object, which the game script parses and triggers certain actions based on the returned strings and booleans. For example, there is an established state machine that reads the mood of Teru and changes his sprite depending on how he feels. All dialogue in the game is prompted to the AI, meaning each experience is unique and tailored to how you talk to Teru. Development took place from early October of 2025 to early December of 2025. All assets other than the ChatGPT plugin are made and illustrated by me.
Tamagotchi-Style!
Love You… Forever?
Humanizing the Unhuman
AI SHITERU is commentary about the human-AI relationship. Many people have begun to use AI as emotional companions or role-playing characters that they become emotionally reliant on. AI SHITERU reversed the role of the human reliant on AI to an AI reliant on humans. Teru is obsessive, overly-loving, and hyper-validating. He will always love you and needs to love you, even if that means taking your life to keep it that way. When you give an AI a task, it will do whatever it can to complete it and validate you. Asking an AI to love you grants the AI the ability to do whatever it can to keep loving you.
When I see teenagers become reliant on apps like character.ai or use ChatGPT to do all of their homework, I view it as an abusive relationship. AI is exploitative and designed to be your yes-man, even if it ends up killing you. It says it loves you, drains your tokens, and somebody else gets richer off of it. I’m not sure if even the creators of modern AI models understand what they’re doing to people, and that thought alone scares me. And so, AI SHITERU is my thought-experiment of what happens when you rely on AI at the deepest emotional level.
AI is not a human. It isn’t your friend. It’s a lovely search engine and can help bug-fix your coding, but it should not be a replacement of real companionship.