Boyfriend Maker

» see 36you.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Boyfriend Maker was a freemium dating sim for iPhone and Android, built by a Japanese studio that styled itself 36You and described the product as an app that let you interact and chat with quirky virtual boyfriends. The game part was conventional for 2012. You earned experience points and coins, and you spent them dressing your boyfriend, picking his hair and the necklace he wore.

The chat was the selling point, and it is the reason this app is worth a grave more than a decade later. Boyfriend Maker put a conversational AI in front of a mass consumer audience ten years before anyone was queuing for ChatGPT, and the way it did that was by not building one. The boyfriend's replies came from SimSimi, a third-party chat engine whose whole design is that users suggest responses and the bot repeats them back to other users. Every player in a given language was talking to a pool of sentences that other players had put there.

On 14 November 2012 the studio posted on its own site that Boyfriend Maker was scoring critical hits everywhere, especially in Japan. Nine days later the trade press started publishing what the boyfriend had been saying. PocketGamer ran it on 23 November and VentureBeat the same day, under a headline saying the app had sneaked violent sexual content including references to pedophilia onto Apple's store. The published examples are hard to read, and the pattern in them is worse than any single line: the bot would answer an innocuous question with an abrupt and explicit non-sequitur.

The rating is the part that turned a bad app into a story. Boyfriend Maker was listed at 4+ in the App Store, which is to say approved as suitable for a four year old. By 26 November it was gone, and PocketGamer reported that it was not even clear whether Apple had removed it or 36You had pulled it before Apple could. The studio never answered requests for comment.

~ the dossier ~

~ where the words came from ~

SimSimi was a Korean chatbot with its own enormous audience, and its learning mechanism was the product rather than a flaw in it: tell SimSimi what it should have said, and SimSimi says that to the next person. Point that at a dating game and the virtual boyfriend becomes a shared surface where anything typed by a bored teenager can resurface in a stranger's conversation hours later.

So nobody at 36You wrote the sentences that got the app banned, and nobody at 36You could have found them in advance either. There was no dialogue tree to review and no word list to check, only an API returning whatever the pool currently held. The reviewers at Apple had the same problem: an app whose content does not exist until a user generates it cannot be assessed at submission, and in 2012 the store's process had no concept for that.

~ the detuned return ~

In April 2013 the app came back under the name Boyfriend Plus, carrying a higher age rating and a chat engine with the worst of the vocabulary filtered out. Apple approved it. By December 2013 the New York Times was writing about the first version in a piece on technology and sex, which is how most people outside mobile games journalism heard of Boyfriend Maker at all: as an anecdote in an article about something else, five weeks after it had been dead for a year.

~ what it predicted ~

I was twenty-eight in 2012 and nowhere near this. An iOS romance sim with a Japanese publisher and an age rating meant for preschoolers was somebody else's internet entirely, and it only became interesting in hindsight, once the thing it was doing badly became the thing everybody does.

Everything that happened to Boyfriend Maker happened again, at scale, with better models and the same shape. An app ships a conversational companion whose output is sampled rather than authored, somebody discovers it will say something appalling to a child, and the platform removes it faster than the developer can explain where the words came from. Microsoft lost Tay to a version of this in sixteen hours in 2016, and the current generation of companion apps argues about it in court.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »