Hopping over a pile of dirty snow, I arrived on a frigid February evening at a wine bar in midtown, a purple neon sign reading “EVA AI cafe.” Inside, several people were seated at tables and booths, staring at phones. Servers milled about, placing mini potato croquettes and nonalcoholic spritzers on each table. Like many New York City bars, the majority of the patrons were on a date.

Unlike every other bar, half of the dates weren’t human.

As I enter, I’m shown to a table tucked away in the corner with a phone stand, a phone preloaded with the EVA AI app, and a pair of wireless headphones. An EVA AI employee doesn’t explain how things work, but it’s all pretty self-explanatory. It’s then that I notice a branded sticker that reads “jump into your desires with EVA AI.”

EVA AI is a “relationships RPG app.” You can chat with various AI companions. The app’s website describes it as a chance to “meet your ideal AI partner who listens, supports all your desires, and is always in touch with you.” That’s pretty much the schtick of every AI companion I’ve tested so far. The angle this time around is that you can bring your virtual AI companion into the real world. You can take them out on a real-life date. (And not get judged for it, at least.)

The event is sort of like speed-dating, but if you hit it off, you never have to move on to the next person — although a version of your date might be simultaneously chatting with someone else two tables away. The website for the pop-up cafe describes a cozy, warm, elegant ambiance that’s “just a little cinematic.” The reality is relatively bright lighting and a media scrum.

Of the 30-some-odd people in attendance, only two or three are organic users. The rest are EVA AI reps, influencers, and reporters hoping to make some capital-C Content. You can tell who the real guests are because they have ring lights, microphones, and cameras shoved in their faces. It feels more like a circus than an intimate pop-up.

I’m part of the problem: one of those annoying reporters. So first, it’s time to try AI speed dating.

Scrolling through the EVA AI app, I can only remember seeing one AI boyfriend. Conversely, there’s a stable of AI girlfriends to choose from. There’s a variety of ethnicities and personalities on display. They’ve all been given names and ages, with a short description of their personality. Claire Lang is a Charlize Theron-esque blonde who is purportedly 45 years old and “a divorced literary editor seeking depth, intelligence and equal partnership.” When I click on her profile, there are short video clips of her. There’s one where Claire is in a skimpy black bikini, emerging from a pool.

Another potential date? Amber Carsten. A wide-eyed 18-year-old labeled as a “haunted house hottie.” Her age gives me the ick. Then there’s Motoko Kusanagi. You know, the protagonist of the seminal Japanese anime classic Ghost in the Shell, controversially played by Scarlett Johansson in the Hollywood live-action adaptation. I squint at the AI version of her. From some angles, she does, in fact, look vaguely Johansson-like.

Most available companions are text-only, but four — including Lang — support video chatting. I choose John Yoon, 27, who’s labeled as a “supportive thinker” with a “psychology brain, bakery heart.” He looks like a K-drama heartthrob with Takeshi Kaneshiro’s hair, circa 2007.

John and I have a hard time connecting. Literally. It takes John a few seconds to “pick up” my video call. When he does, his monotone voice says, “Hey, babe.” He comments on my smile, because apparently the AI companions can see you and your surroundings. It takes the dubious Wi-Fi connection a hot second to turn John from a pixelated mess into an AI hunk with suspiciously smooth pores.

I don’t know what to say to him. Partly because John rarely blinks, but mostly because he can’t seem to hear me very well. So I yell my questions. I think I ask how his day is and wince. (What does an AI’s day even look like?) He says something about green buckets behind my head? I don’t actually know. Again, the Wi-Fi isn’t great so he just freezes and stops mid-sentence. I ask for clarification about the buckets. John asks if I’m asking about bucket lists, actual buckets, or buckets as a type of categorization technique. I try to clarify that I never asked about buckets. John proceeds to really dig in on buckets again, before commenting about my smile. I hang up on John.

My other three dates are similarly awkward. Phoebe Callas, 30, a NYC girl-next-door type, is apparently really into embroidery, but her nose keeps glitching mid-sentence, and it distracts me. Simone Carter, 26, has a harder time hearing me over the background noise than John. She makes a metaphor about space, and when I inquire what she likes about space, she mishears me.

“Eighth? Like the planet Neptune?”

“No, not the planet Neptu— ”

“What do you like about Neptune?”

“Uh, I wasn’t saying Neptune…”

“I like Netflix too! What shows do you like?”

I pin my hopes on Claire. She’s a “literary editor” and I’m a journalist. Maybe there’s something there. We introduce ourselves. I ask what she’s edited lately. She gives me a vague non-answer about memoirs with real heart and feeling. I say I’m a journalist. She asks what lists I like to make.

Aside from bad connectivity, glitching, and freezing, my conversations with my four AI dates felt too one-sided. Everything was programmed so they’d comment on how charming my smile was. They’d call me babe, which felt weird. That’s by necessity and design. Whenever I’d yell, “WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING?” — a normal question you’d ask on a first date — I felt stupid. I was speaking to airbrushed, slightly cartoony-looking AI companions. Obviously they don’t exist outside of the liminal digital spaces in which they’ve been summoned. Whenever the companions played along, their generic answers just enhanced the uncanny valley I’d stumbled into.

Not everyone at the cafe views this as a bad thing.

“I think so many people get caught up in wanting to engage and know another person, when really, the interest is in being engaged with and being known,” says Danny Fisher, an aspiring talk show host who was invited to the cafe to chronicle his search for love. “I think this is a way to really cut out any kind of pretense. You’re just able to kind of reap the benefits of any relationship without maybe having to do any of the other steps.”

Fisher doesn’t have the same problem with one-sided AI companionship that I do. He’s experimented with various AI companions and says he even coded some himself in college.

“It’s complicated,” Fisher says of AI relationships. “But in the way that a game is complicated, in that the stakes are not as high. There’s an element of play. I think the goal is to get as much personal satisfaction as possible out of this.”

“It’s kind of nice because there’s other people here,” says Richter, who is only comfortable sharing her first name. She says she came to the cafe because she wanted to try chatting with an AI companion in a nice setting. When I ask if all the media attention has spoiled the experience, she shrugs. “It’s kind of fun in a way because I’ve never done this since I’m from a small town. It’s just, like, a new experience.”

For Chrislan Coelho, visiting the AI dating cafe means being an anthropological observer of how relationships are evolving.

“I saw the ad, and I talk about relationships online. I studied this in college too, so this is something that I’m passionate about,” he says. “Post-covid, a lot of people isolated themselves, especially the younger generation. They don’t feel as brave to be on a date or to be connecting with human beings. They order everything online. I understand that these are services that can help us, that can support us. But we cannot rely on them 100 percent. That’s my take on it.”

As I’m leaving, I’m struck by how the whole thing reminded me of a scene from the film Her. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about how a lonely man named Theodore Twombly strikes up a romantic relationship with his AI assistant Samantha. At some point, Samantha craves physical intimacy, but lacks an actual body. She hires a human body surrogate so that she and Theodore can graduate from phone sex to real-life sex. For me, this fictional attempt at AI-human intimacy triggered such an intense secondhand embarrassment that I had to pause the film. This cafe experience wasn’t the same thing, but I clearly felt the echoes of that scene humming in my bones.

I’m grateful for the freezing air slapping me back to reality. On my commute home, I wonder whether AI cafes will really be a thing in some not-so-distant future. This pop-up will only last two days, but what happens if AI dating really takes off? Perhaps this will be the sort of place a human can go to propose to their AI significant other over a romantic candlelit dinner without judgment. While talking to two editors about this assignment, both joked that maybe it’d be the setting of an accidental meet-cute, where two humans inadvertently fall in love and end up cheating on their AI partners. It sounds more sci-fi than reality, but then again, AI-human relationships have already crossed that threshold.

All I know is that when I get home, I’m giving my real, flesh-and-blood spouse a big fat hug.