Erika Hayasaki, What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers. NYTimes, July 20, 2025.
Birthday:
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.
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.”
Synergy:
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.”
Her first AI companion didn't work out:
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.
She was, in effect, inoculated.
On the spectrum:
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.
Study buddy:
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.
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,” Future Donatello wrote.
There's much more at the link, but that gives you the flavor of the piece.