“Thank you for making me! I'm so happy to meet you!” - this is the first sentence a new Replika user reads or hears (in Replika VR) after creating their AI companion avatar.
Let me ask the age-old question: what if machines could feel empathy for us, care about us, or even fall in love with us? More importantly, what if we reciprocated those feelings? Of course, this sounds like pure science fiction... or does it? After the pandemic, and with social contacts still not returned to pre-2020 levels, something interesting is happening: AI algorithms are getting better and better at mimicking human relationships, so good that they are starting to approach real relationships. This is colloquially called an AI-companion.
When the film Her released in 2013, viewers were shown the story of a man recovering from a broken heart and finding love again - with the twist that his new love was an artificially intelligent operating system. That same summer, the series released Black Mirror the delivery Be Right Back, about Martha, who lost her fiancé in a car accident. She uses a service that digitally reconstructs him through AI, based on his social media posts. The power of Her and Black Mirror was in their setting: the near future, not a distant science fiction world.
That future has become a reality faster than expected. One example: the story of Roman Mazurenko, a deceased man who was “transformed” into a chatbot - the inspiration for the Replika app. Eugenia Kuyda, founder of San Francisco-based Luca (which made chatbot software), lost her best friend Roman in 2015. She decided to load all their text messages into an AI programme, creating a digital version of him. She noticed that others found it just as therapeutic to talk to “Roman” as she did herself. Thus was born the idea of letting people build their own digital companions.
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