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Gather round, lonely guys who spend too much time on the Internet: I have great news. There's a new AI app designed to make you a little happier you're single. It's called AngryGF, and it's designed to teach members of the male species how to communicate with a woman when all she wants to do is forcibly remove your trachea. 

This is, I have to admit, a novel take on what has already become a hackneyed concept. There are dozens of AI girlfriends in the mobile app stores, and virtually all them are kittenish and compliant. The bots usually look like a cross between a Barbie doll and a Hooter's waitress, and their language models appear to have been trained on the entire corpus of Letters to Penthouse Magazine. They are 100 percent male fantasy vehicles. 

ICYMI: My AI girlfriend is smokin' hot, but also kind of shallow

Not this one. This AngryGF has a stick up her behind the size of a Saturn V rocket. It's your job to gently extract that stick by saying exactly the right things at precisely the right moments. With a premise like that, who could resist? I downloaded the app and gave it a spin.

To start, I picked a scenario that I am totally unfamiliar with: 

You and your girlfriend join a party. You keep staring at a beautiful girl from time to time. Your girlfriend notices and becomes angry.

The app now gives me 10 tries to mollify my angry GF — who, for the purposes of this post, I will call Molly — by responding in an appropriately empathetic way. 

For each test the AI's forgiveness level starts at 60 percent, which means that Molly and I are probably still in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, where my habit of leaving a trail of dirty socks behind me is part of my boyish charm, and she still giggles when I fart. 

The challenge is a little rough going at first. Molly doesn't actually believe me when I say I only looked at the woman a few times, and telling Molly she is so much prettier than that slutty little tramp doesn't buy me much good will either. I also promise to gouge out my eyes when we get home, so that Molly's face is the last thing I will ever see. 

She tells me I'm being a bit dramatic. Ya think?

Eventually though, with enough creative groveling, I manage to get Molly's forgiveness level all the way back to 100 percent in just nine tries.

The next scenario entailed me praising a female friend, in front of Molly, by casually mentioning how beautiful and talented she is. This also got Molly's knickers in a knot. First I responded with a series of sickeningly cute endearments. That landed about as well as you'd expect. Then I tried snarky humor. Hoo boy. I managed to drain my forgiveness account to zero in five tries.

Maybe I do need more practice at this.

Look at me look at me look at me

The app is the brainchild of Emilia Aviles, "a social media influencer, Instagram star, YouTuber and broadcaster" with a "bubbly personality" and a "positive and inspiring attitude." [1] She told Wired's Kate Knibbs she created the app to help teach men better communication skills by simulating arguments with their fuming girlfriends. Per Wired:

I called Aviles, the cofounder, to try to understand what, exactly, was happening with AngryGF. She’s a Chicago-based social media marketer who says that the app was inspired by her own past relationships, where she was unimpressed by her partners’ communication skills. Her schtick seemed sincere. “You know men,” she says. “They listen, but then they don’t take action.” 

AngryGF is really just a not-very-sophisticated front-end to ChatGPT, apparently with the added instruction "Act like a vexatious twatwaffle, and take offense at damn near everything."

In addition to being a mite oversensitive, AngryGF is also kind of stingy. You get one free scenario before you're asked to pony up $7 a week for a subscription. (The paid version also lets you ask it unlimited relationship questions — or questions on any other topic — just like you can do for free with most versions of ChatGPT.)

ICYMI: Looking for love in all the wrong algorithms (again) 

There are only ten scenarios in total. Others include prioritizing your friends over her, not being responsive enough when she's chatting with you online, ignoring her phone calls, being late for a date, forgetting Valentines Day, and opting to save your mother first when she and your angry GF both fall into a river at exactly the same moment. [2]

I can't tell you how many times that last scenario has happened to me. Now, whenever I go on a date with both my mother and my girlfriend, I make sure to bring two life preservers. [3]

The idea is you can keep re-doing these scenarios until you get very good at saying, "Yes dear, you're absolutely right, I am a worthless pile of offal. Will you ever forgive me?"

Which is excellent practice for being married, and a whole lot cheaper than a divorce. 

Days of whining and neuroses

Next, I decided to skip right to the master class: the Angry For No Reason scenario. Also known as the 'Walking on eggshells across a minefield covered in pissed-off rattlesnakes' scenario, or in my house, Tuesday.

The description is almost poetic in its simplicity: "You girlfriend gets angry for no reason and is mad at you. You don't know the reason." Now... go!

I decide to start with "Here, have a glass of wine." Strike one! Within moments I'm down to 10 percent forgiveness. I rally slightly by offering a neck rub — that gets me back up to 30 percent. I think, I'm starting to get the hang of this. 

Then I swing for the fences. I tell Molly she could do a better job of communicating her actual feelings, then make her an offer I feel almost certain she can’t refuse.

Oh well. It was worth a shot. Now I'm in the doghouse again. It's starting to feel like home.

Granted, this is not the most sophisticated application of generative AI technology. I think a properly tuned chatbot could be a useful relationship coach — modeling real-life scenarios and offering helpful guidance in terms of phrasing and approach. (And lord knows I could use it, as could pretty much every other guy I have ever known.) 

But this ain't it. Most of these scenarios fall into the 'You're not paying enough/all of your attention to me' — which, given that the app's creator is a 20-something social media influencer who feeds on attention the way the rest of us take in oxygen, feels very much on point. But I suspect there may be more nuanced variations of the male/female dynamic worth exploring.

Did the thought occur to me that perhaps this app is simply just a way for Emily to attract even more attention to her 'brand' while extracting a few ducats from her millions of followers? Yes. Yes, it did. But I'd never say that in front of Molly.

What are your secrets to a successful relationship? Share them below in the comments, or email me the dating advice I so obviously need: [email protected].

[1] Emily has 170K followers on Instagram and 1.2 million followers on TikTok. Only 98.2 percent of her posts are selfies. 

[2] That river scenario is so goddamned specific I have to wonder if this really happened to Aviles. I also wonder if maybe she was pushed. 

[3] I know, this is a variation on the old riddle about whom you would save if both were drowning and you could only reach one of them. One allegedly correct answer is: You save your mother, because you can always get another girlfriend. I take no position on this question. Please don’t @ me.

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