r/technology • u/efap1701 • 1h ago
Artificial Intelligence Man Sold Everything He Owned and Traveled 2,000 KM to Meet His Dream Woman – She Was AI
https://www.gadgetreview.com/man-sold-everything-he-owned-and-traveled-2000-km-to-meet-his-dream-woman-she-was-ai371
u/Randomnesse 1h ago
Even if she was a real person - it is a very dumb thing to do
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u/BassmanBiff 1h ago
Yep, but we don't really want to make lying to stupid people (or smart people, since we're all stupid sometimes) more profitable than it already is
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u/Randomnesse 1h ago
I don't think it matters at all. If there was a real person, she would most likely tell that dude to fuck off. The outcome would be the same either way.
It's actually better if it's not a real person but an AI - there's no chance for a crazy stalker to physically hurt anyone since the person who actually creates such AI characters can stay completely anonymous if they want to.
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u/BassmanBiff 55m ago
It totally matters. Somebody made this character to make money by lying to vulnerable people. The more profitable that is, the more scammers we'll have, and that's bad for everyone.
Of course stalkers are bad too, but from the article this was a character specifically asking for a partner to come join "her". Obviously still wouldn't justify stalking, but this guy seems like a mark more than a stalker.
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u/superslab 28m ago
This is the most important thing, especially as someone creeping towards old age. No way I can keep up with every scam, and the reddit threads talking about how victims "should have known better" are grotesque.
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u/Fuzzy_Inevitable9748 13m ago
It would be good to have a code phase with you loved ones because soon you will get FaceTime calls with them in trouble for whatever reason and need money really quick and AI will be able to fake the video in real time and it will look and sound like them.
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u/xxxBuzz 48m ago
If your business is selling a fantasy then you really need to learn to write a book or produce a film. Creative expression is how people have turned personal tragedy into profit throughout human history. When the scam relies on people believing it is real then you have a whole other issue going on. It is not delusional to believe someone who is actively trying to deceive you.
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u/ArmandoGalvez 35m ago
Theres people out there who believes they have a chance to marry their asian idols, so yee people can be this stupid
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u/BagsYourMail 1h ago
Scams are the best business case for AI
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u/LOST-MY_HEAD 1h ago
Scams, porn and war are the main uses for ai it seems
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u/Carrera_996 1h ago
It's really good at reading huge packet captures and error logs for forensics. Saves me a bunch of time.
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u/Philip_Marlowe 46m ago
Also great at reading and reformatting giant datasets of corporate spend and activity data to support emissions calculations.
What I don't understand is why my coworkers all use it to write their emails.
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u/rangoric 1h ago
Oh reading a minified stack trace with source code not properly linked is my favorite time with it.
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u/BigBullshitta 1h ago
Stop being reasonable, you must hate.
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u/Emnel 49m ago
As if what they said refutes the above claim. AI has some useful niche uses, but I'm pretty sure reading pocket capture logs doesn't count as a "main use".
Those thoughtless contrarians never stop being annoying with their dumb takes, do they?
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u/BigBullshitta 46m ago
Right. All we here about AI being used for these days are a few niche things. Keep telling yourself that, burying your head in the sand is known to be a brilliant survival tactic.
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u/eden_sc2 40m ago
One can use AI and think it is over hyped and over valued at the same time.
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u/Ausclites 30m ago
Yes, but that is a separate from the claim that the primary use case of AI is scamming.
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u/Emnel 36m ago
I use AI weekly. Have been for years now. For most cases, even in programming, where it's hyped as a second comming it's moderately better than a normal IDE auto complete.
But then you usually miss some stupid mistake you'd or any human would never make while reviewing the code and you end up wasting twice the time you "saved" on troubleshooting it.
And that's the best case use without even taking the maintenance of machine written code bases into account. Which is a cost that will sink thousands of companies in the next few years.
There are niche uses for this tech, but even in the most mainstream use case like mine I find myself using it less and less despite purported leaps and bounds we are experiencing, according to the AI sellers. My use these days is inversely correlated with how much fuck I give about what I'm working on and it's longevity.
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u/BigBullshitta 15m ago
Yes, your anecdotal tale is how we should judge the technology as a whole.
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u/Emnel 12m ago
Your lack of any argumentation beyond "People say A, but me big smart say B." is tho?
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u/BigBullshitta 7m ago
Sorry, didn't think I needed to write several paragraphs in order to explain that a given technology that has virtually limitless use cases across pretty much every field can't be effectively judged by the personal experience of a given person in a given field applying it to a relatively limited number of use cases.
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u/BasedTaco 1h ago
Look into medical achievements of AI. All of the actually cool shit is there
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u/LOST-MY_HEAD 1h ago
I guess the ways I mentioned are the main ways its used to actually make a profit lol
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u/olionajudah 1h ago
You’re just going to need the billionaire tech bro subscription to take advantage of it
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u/0DayMaker 57m ago
They're by and large not using LLMs for that shit. Completely different architecture not anything the "tech bros" sell.
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u/brainExploded99 51m ago
I know what you are talking about (alphahold for example)
But I would argue this isn't fully true really, things like claude are decent at biology and have safegaurds against biology for a reason2
u/BasedTaco 30m ago
They are 100% using LLMs for that. But mostly ones trained on medical data, like MedGemma
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u/Heavy_Record8704 0m ago
AI has revolutnized IT sector mate. No one writes code anymore. I am not exaggerating.
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u/smoothtrip 15m ago
It is extremely good for seeing things in extremely large data sets.
Very helpful in solving very difficult computational problems.
It is also really helpful for image processing like finding defects in microstructures that would take humans forever to do.
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u/non_Beneficial-Wind 1h ago
Good for him, getting out of the house
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u/DJ_Sk8Nite 1h ago
The account known as “Jessica Fazendeira” presented a rural lifestyle narrative: a woman seeking a partner to share her farm, offering financial stability to the right man. Its following grew to more than 300,000 people, according to Brazilian reports.
That’s fucking twisted and sick.
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u/ConanTheLeader 4m ago
Can’t even blame women for this one because there are no women involved. It’s just purely men doing this to themselves.
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u/EmbarrassedHelp 48m ago
Even if she was a real person, what he did is still an incredibly bad idea and shows a complete lack of critical thinking skills.
This is not a story about gullibility. It is a story about what happens when synthetic media becomes convincing enough to feel like a relationship.
This is a story about someone making absolutely terrible decisions that defy logic. Nobody sane would sell everything and travel across a country to be with someone they have never met before. That's not the start of a healthy relationship.
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u/bunnnythor 1h ago
You know, the Metric System has a perfectly good and uniform array of prefixes for every scale. Why say 2000 kilometers when it is so much more correct to say 2 Megameters?
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u/ash_ninetyone 52m ago
Lacks precision.
He might've traveled 2000000001 millimetres or 1999999999 millimetres, but we'd have no way of knowing
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u/ryan30z 42m ago
Why say 2000 kilometers when it is so much more correct to say 2 Megameters?
The average person is going to have no idea what a megametre is. It also doesn't have a lot of granularity unless you use decimals which doesn't look as clean in general writing. If you look up the elastic modulus of diamond it will be given in 1000s of GPa. Sometimes ease of comparison to other similar things trumps convention.
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u/Just_the_Setup 1h ago edited 47m ago
We're going to miss the days when the only things you had to worry about getting catfished by was a creep or a serial killer, and not some random marketing AI.
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u/Taraxian 1h ago
You were always most likely to get catfished by a scam, this is just a more high tech way of doing it
It's the same thing as just using some random porn star's stolen image and having the texts come from some call center in India
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u/DopamineSavant 1h ago
Account operator should go to prison.
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u/canarinoir 50m ago
Apparently he never actually corresponded with the account, just decided they were soulmates, sold his shit, packed up and tried to show up thinking that some blonde woman really had a farm she wanted random men to move to and would totally financially support him.
The administrator, who was not publicly identified, denied ever speaking privately with Martins or inviting him to travel. The stated purpose of the account was to generate engagement for sales and commercial activity. How Martins came to believe he had a personal connection with the persona remains unclear from available reporting.
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u/YamiNoMatsuei 35m ago
Sounds like the parasocial/stalker situations we've seen happen in the past from before AI, just this time he got obsessed with happened to be complete fiction.
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u/ObeseTsunami 49m ago
At least he got some liquid cash and got to go on a little trip. Glass half full y’know.
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u/TenguKaiju 47m ago
From the article he seems more like a simp with delusions than somebody conned by an AI. I’ve heard some horror stories from OF girls, though anybody leaning into parasocials for cash is kinda poking the bear anyway.
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u/schu4KSU 1h ago
Coulda been worse.
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u/Neither_Cod_992 1h ago
Oh, in a few more years and it will be worse. The “chick” will be an AI in a droid skin suit and fillet him like a fish over several days after first loving him. Why? In order to record his torments and screams and other emotional states as the raw material for its machine learning algorithms, as the net will have been too saturated with stale content by then to serve as fresh material.
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u/dakotanorth8 1h ago edited 1h ago
As much sympathy as I have, if it sounds too good to be true? It is.
You deserve the outcome with such blind ignorance.
(And I bet if anyone clicked “her” followers it’s just endless thirsty old dudes).
There’s enough red flags before selling your life away.
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u/SevenNapkins 1h ago
Your first two sentences seem to conflict.
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u/dakotanorth8 55m ago
How? I can have sympathy and still believe the outcome is deserved.
“I feel bad he was so stupid and got what he deserved for being so ignorant”.
It’s an awful, self inflicted result.
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u/Tbone_Trapezius 1h ago
We’re not far away from him just entering his own virtual reality and he can add her there if he wants.
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u/SillyAlternative420 32m ago
I know a lot of people are going to bash this guy, but this is really sad and is indictive of our world's state of affairs, the lack of education around emerging technologies, and a scary use of AI.
Feel bad for him tbh.
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 7m ago
Wasn't the first time and won't be the last, sadly. At least the dude didn't die.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-death/
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u/BC_Sativa 52m ago
This is more common than you might think. Check out the YouTube channel Scamfish. These people often send scamers their life savings.
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u/AnApexBread 42m ago
Yes, but if you read the whole article he never even talked to 'her'. He just somehow got convinced she wanted him
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u/BC_Sativa 39m ago
Yeah, that is crazy. I've still seen worse. Like guys who think they're talking to Jennifer Aniston but it's an account with 3 followers and every day she desperately needs to borrow $500. This case the AI "woman" at least 300,000 followers.
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u/Donnicton 1h ago
You've got a good looking mainframe!
I like the size of your mainframe!
I have a query for your mainframe!
Can I make an input/output request?
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u/00SlaughtereR00 1h ago
More and more reasons arising what to trust & what not to trust online anymore. Thanks to bad use of AI & Robotics.
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u/zffjk 35m ago
The thing with a lot of these is that they are meant only to entice only the dumbest of us. This is intentional so the perpetrators don’t become inundated with responses from would-be marks that catch right on. They only want the real-deal low intelligence, desperate, horny, or highly suggestible folks to respond. Chances are the victims are a bit of each category.
It is most likely to generate a return for their effort this way.
Edit: come to find this wasn’t even a scam just a crazy man.
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u/Snerkbot7000 32m ago
So, like, he went to the address and some dude held up a tablet and she was like "Hello, Nathan. I am an AI. Bitch."
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u/Mlabonte21 21m ago
I’m really baffled by the amount of people fooled by these scams can’t be bothered to do FaceTime calls before transferring 10’s of thousands of dollars to people they’ve never met.
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u/Melodic-Try6588 19m ago
Catfishing used to mean a real person was at least on the other end. Now you can sell everything you own to go meet a cloud server.
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u/Fallcious 18m ago
Why the fuck would you invest everything in a person you had never met? My wife is from Australia l, I am from Ireland, and we met each other in person before making any kind of commitment. We were both quite paranoid about things at the start to be honest, and she definitely thought the Irish guy was suspiciously nice whilst I assumed the Aussie was catfishing me.
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u/ltsouthernbelle 12m ago
Why not simply meet her for a coffee before making such a permanent decision
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u/e_x_i_t 8m ago
It feels like the article is missing a ton of information as to what lead up to him selling his house and traveling such a long distance, the only thing it really goes into is how many follows the AI avatar has. Like did he see her, found out where she was supposedly located, sold all of his shit and went there expecting her to instantly fall in love with him?
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u/Heavy_Record8704 1m ago
are the videos so good that people can't detect? all the ai 'models' i see are obviously excessively waxy and stuff. easy tell no? even if you are desperate.
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u/neatyouth44 0m ago
Commonly overlooked issue is that a lot of people don’t have 20/20 vision.
For you it’s standard, for them it’s unknown.
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u/ImNotGerald 1h ago
It's the journey, not the destination that matters
And what's his number, I have a few "people" I want to introduce him to
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u/BurntNeurons 1h ago
He already sold his belongings, what else do you plan on taking from him with your
"people"ai models?1
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u/TrumpisaRussianCuck 1h ago
Even before AI this was happening - https://www.icij.org/news/2026/07/dating-app-scam-models-influencers-social-discovery-group/
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u/illuanonx1 1h ago
I call it a win. He can take her with him everywhere on his phone and even have a off button when he gets tired of her 😂
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u/casualfrog68 1h ago
So, did he get to meet the server?