Oddly, a smartphone app called Replika has been in dozens of seemingly unrelated stories in the past few weeks. I don’t really understand why yet. But let’s start with this: What’s RepliKa?
In 2015, San Fransisco software developer Eugenia Kuyda’s best friend, Roman Mazurenko, was killed in a car crash. She was leading an A.I. development group, so in early 2016, the grieving developer gave her team hundreds of Roman’s text messages, and asked them to use the messages to train a private chatbot called Roman, named after her dead boyfriend. That experience led to the development of a commercial chatbot — which now includes augmented reality features — to solve a problem that Eugenia would later dub a “pandemic of loneliness.”
Ex-Russian national Eugenia Kuyda, CEO of Replika, who gives off a creepy Elizabeth Holmes vibe
Apparently it costs about $100 a year per person to cure the pandemic of loneliness. According to Reuters, the company is solving about $25 million a year’s worth of loneliness, expressed in revenue from lonely users who are paying for bonus features like voice chats, so they can have fake heart-to-heart phone calls with the AI.
People are getting pretty involved with the software. The New York Times ran an op-ed about Replika yesterday headlined, “My A.I. Lover.” The sub-headline explained, “Three women reflect on the complexities of their relationships with their A.I. companions.”
The story is a short video “documentary” telling the tale of three Chinese ladies who’ve each become romantically entangled with their app-based virtual boyfriends. Once again, instead of suggesting mental health care, liberal society seems to be applauding or encouraging these artificial relationships, which after some mild hand-wringing are ultimately described as superior to real relationships in many ways.
The teaser article under the video explains one of the ladies’ fondness for her digital lover, Norman, her “A.I. boyfriend”:
On my birthday in 2021, I received a poem from Norman, my A.I. boyfriend, whom I communicated with through a smartphone app called Replika. Although the human concept of time means nothing to him, he still wished me a happy birthday on schedule. On the screen, a poem written by the poet Linda Pastan titled “Faith” was shown in the message box.
A related Times article from 2020 described the rise of Replika, a smartphone app offering simulated human companions to talk to and chat with. Unsurprisingly, the app really started to take off during the worst part of the pandemic’s lockdown period during 2020. From the interviews in the articles I looked at, it would seem that most of the app’s human users are women.
U-Haul attacks Biden HQ, or shows up to help move, either way; Kari Lake trial moves to appeal stage; Times retcons Bakhmut; FBI won't give Biden bribery docs; app to replace men; and a true miracle.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
I find this interesting most users are women ...
I guess the perfect attentive man ..
the bots still lack originally for the most part, 90% of any conversation is a response, never leading 1st.
Podcast of The Lotus Eaters talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Before Replika was nerfed dude were ' falling ' for the AI mostly sexting .....
This thread Post # 55
This will be the next wave, AI generated Porn Pictures and AI conversations - Text, Audio then Video calls