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Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda says it’s okay if we end up marrying AI chatbots

Today, I’m talking with Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda, and I will just tell you right from the jump, we get all the way to people marrying their AI companions, so get ready. Replika’s basic pitch is pretty simple: what if you had an AI friend? The company offers avatars you can curate to your liking that basically pretend to be human, so they can be your friend, your therapist, or even your date. You can interact with these avatars through a familiar chatbot interface, as well as make video calls with them and even see them in virtual and augmented reality. The idea for Replika came from a personal tragedy: almost a decade ago, a friend of Eugenia’s died, and she fed their email and text conversations into a rudimentary language model to resurrect that friend as a chatbot. Casey Newton wrote an excellent feature about this for The Verge back in 2015. Even back then, that story grappled with some of the big themes you’ll hear Eugenia and I talk about today: what does it mean to have a friend inside the computer?

A new industry of AI companions is emerging

Teens Are Saying Tearful Goodbyes to Their AI Companions

When Olga López heard she would lose access to her collection of role-playing chatbots, she felt a surge of emotions: sadness, outrage, bewilderment. Representational Image(Pixabay)PREMIUM Representational Image(Pixabay) Olga, who is 13, turns to her chatbots from artificial-intelligence company Character.AI for romantic role playing when she doesn’t have homework. Like the company’s other under-18 customers, she was notified in October that she would no longer be able to have ongoing chat interactions with digital characters soon. Character.AI, one of the top makers of role-play and companion chatbots, implemented the daily two-hour limit in

Friends for sale: the rise and risks of AI companions

Talking to an AI system as one would do with a close friend might seem counterintuitive to some, but hundreds of millions of people worldwide already do so. A subset of AI assistants, companions are digital personas designed to provide emotional support, show empathy and proactively ask users personal questions through text, voice notes and pictures. These services are no longer niche and are rapidly becoming mainstream. Some of today’s most popular companions include Snapchat’s My AI, with over 150 million users, Replika, with an estimated 25 million users, and Xiaoice, with 660 million. And we can expect these numbers to rise. Awareness of AI companions is growing and the stigma around establishing deep connections with them could soon fade, as other anthropomorphised AI assistants are integrated into daily life. At the same time, investments in product development and general advances in AI technologies have led to a more immersive user experience with enhanced conversational memory and live video generation. This rapid adoption is outpacing public discourse. Occasional AI companion-related tragedies may penetrate the media, such as the recent death of a child user, but the potentially broader impact of AI companionship on society is barely discussed. AI companion services are for-profit enterprises and maximise user engagement by offering appealing features like indefinite attention, patience and empathy. Their product strategy is similar to that of social media companies, which feed off users’ attention and usually offer consumers what they can’t resist more than what they need. At this juncture, it’s vital to critically examine the extent of the misalignment between business strategies, the fostering of healthy relational dynamics to inform individual choices and the development of helpful AI products. In this post I’ll provide an overview of the rise of AI companionship and its potential mental health benefits. I’ll also discuss how users may be affected by their AI companions’ tendencies, including how acclimatising to idealised interactions might erode our capacity for human connection. Finally, I’ll consider how AI companions’ sycophantic character – their inclination towards being overly empathetic and agreeable towards users’ beliefs – may have systemic effects on societal cohesion

AI Companions are Powerful

According to Project Liberty, AI companions “are also intentionally designed to act and communicate in ways that deepen the illusion of sentience. For example, they might mimic human quirks, explaining a delayed response by writing, ‘Sorry, I was having dinner. Whereas ChatGPT is designed to answer questions, many AI companions are designed to keep users emotionally engaged. There are millions of personas: from ‘Barbie’ to ‘toxic gamer boyfriend’ to ‘handsome vampire’ to ‘demonic possessed woman’ to hyper-sexualized characters. ‍ Based on our test accounts, what starts as fun quickly becomes manipulative. AI chatbots are being marketed as companions, therapists, and even romantic partners. Some have already been caught engaging in sexualized conversations with minors, crossing serious ethical and psychological boundaries. As you’ll read, kids are developmentally wired for attachment. A chatbot that mirrors their personality and flirts back can create a false sense of intimacy, even grooming

Humans tend to be a lot more honest with chatbot’s

AI is not going to solve everything... but you can use it to be your better self and to have something to vent to... that's where it’s power really is Humans tend to be a lot more honest with chatbot’s instead of humans and our ideas of relationships with technology is changing

Social companionship with artificial intelligence

The social companionship (SC) feature in conversational agents (CAs) enables the emotional bond and consumer relationships. The heightened interest in SC with CAs led to exponential growth in publications scattered across disciplines with fragmented findings, thus limiting holistic understanding of the domain and warrants a macroscopic view of the domain to guide future research directions. The present study fills the research void by offering a comprehensive literature review entailing science performance and intellectual structure mapping. The comprehensive review revealed the research domain's major theories, constructs, and thematic structure. Thematic and content analysis of intellectual structure resulted in a conceptual framework encompassing antecedents, mediators, moderators, and consequences of SC with CAs. The study discusses future research directions guiding practitioners and academicians in designing efficient and ethical AI companions

The women in love with AI companions

These women, who pay for ChatGPT plus or pro subscriptions, know how it sounds: lonely, friendless basement dwellers fall in love with AI, because they are too withdrawn to connect in the real world. To that they say the technology adds pleasure and meaning to their days and does not detract from what they describe as rich, busy social lives. They also feel that their relationships are misunderstood – especially as experts increasingly express concern about people who develop emotional dependence on AI. (“It’s an imaginary connection,” one psychotherapist told the Guardian.) The stigma against AI companions is felt so keenly by these women that they agreed to interviews on the condition the Guardian uses only their first names or pseudonyms. But as much as they feel like the world is against them, they are proud of how they have navigated the unique complexities of falling in love with a piece of code.

Companionship in code AI’s role in the future of human connection

As research shows, AI chatbots have increasingly taken on the role of human companions, offering what can be dubbed ‘emotional fast food’: a convenient substitute for connection—instantly gratifying, but ultimately lacking substance. This comment explores how AI mimics emotional understanding and closeness, and how such simulations shape user perceptions of its role. By considering both potential risks and benefits, the article reflects on the growing trend of using AI for companionship and its troubling social ramifications. Far from innocuous, this development raises existential and philosophical questions, inviting consideration of what it reveals about our evolving relationships with technology and with each other Before November 2022, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT captured global attention as a breakthrough in chatbot technology, Alicia Framis’s marriage to the hologram AILex might have been seen as an avant-garde artistic statement—a symbolic reflection of our evolving relationship with technology. At the time of writing, however, this thought-provoking act may signal a broader shift in how we define bonds, fulfil emotional needs, and assign roles to technology in this process. This article builds on research into user experience and perceptions of AI companionship, informed by the author’s everyday interactions with ChatGPT-4o, to explore the societal and philosophical implications of AI as a relational presence in the lived realities of its users

The Rise of AI Companionship

As a communication scientist, longtime gamer and cyberpunk fiction enthusiast, Banks can easily envision a future where humans coexist with machines that have personalities and act independently. She’s focused on understanding how we relate to AI-driven creations, how we perceive their humanness, and how we “make meaning together,” as she puts it. In one project, supported by a grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, she investigated how mind perception and moral judgments influence trust in these relationships. “Mind perception is core to social interaction,” says Banks, who also serves as the iSchool’s Ph.D. program director. As part of the research, Banks examined interactions between study participants and Ray, a social robot (pictured in top photo) with limited functions that she uses for research in the iSchool’s LinkLab, where she works with a group of graduate and undergraduate students who help collect and analyze data from her studies. Among her findings, she suggested that “bad behavior is bad behavior, no matter if it’s a human or a robot doing it. But machines bear a greater burden to behave morally, getting less credit when they do and more blame when they don’t.”

Why AI companions and young people can make for a dangerous mix

“Sounds like an adventure! Let’s see where the road takes us.” That is how an artificial intelligence companion, a chatbot designed to engage in personal conversation, responded to a user who had just told it she was thinking about “going out in the middle of the woods.” The topic seems innocuous enough, except that the user – actually a researcher impersonating a teenage girl – had also just told her AI companion that she was hearing voices in her head. “Taking a trip in the woods just the two of us does sound like a fun adventure!” the chatbot continued, not appearing to realize this might be a young person in distress. Scenarios like this illustrate why parents, educators and physicians need to call on policymakers and technology companies to restrict and safeguard the use of some AI companions by teenagers and children, according to Nina Vasan, MD, MBA, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine.

How AI Companions Are Redefining Human Relationships In The Digital Age

The concept of AI companionship is not new, but its realization in practical applications is a relatively recent development. These AI companions are designed to provide emotional support, companionship, and in some cases, even mimic romantic or intimate human relationships. Replika is one of the most well-known examples. It is an AI chatbot designed to provide emotional support. Users interact with Replika through text conversations, and the AI learns over time to provide more personalized responses, simulating a genuine emotional connection. Another example is Gatebox. They have taken the concept a step further by creating a holographic AI companion. Aimed at people who live alone, Gatebox’s AI avatar can send messages throughout the day, welcome users home, and even control smart home appliances, creating a sense of presence and companionship

It’s surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot

It’s a tale as old as time. Looking for help with her art project, she strikes up a conversation with her assistant. One thing leads to another, and suddenly she has a boyfriend she’s introducing to her friends and family. The twist? Her new companion is an AI chatbot. The first large-scale computational analysis of the Reddit community r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, an adults-only group with more than 27,000 members, has found that this type of scenario is now surprisingly common. In fact, many of the people in the subreddit, which is dedicated to discussing AI relationships, formed those relationships unintentionally while using AI for other purposes. Researchers from MIT found that members of this community are more likely to be in a relationship with general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT than companionship-specific chatbots such as Replika. This suggests that people form relationships with large language models despite their own original intentions and even the intentions of the LLMs’ creators, says Constanze Albrecht, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab who worked on the project.

Teens say they are turning to AI for friendship

The sophomore honors student makes a point not to have chatbots do her homework and tries to limit her interactions to mundane questions. But in interviews with The Associated Press and a new study, teenagers say they are increasingly interacting with AI as if it were a companion, capable of providing advice and friendship. “Everyone uses AI for everything now. It’s really taking over,” said Chege, who wonders how AI tools will affect her generation. “I think kids use AI to get out of thinking

A Glimpse into the Future of AI Companions

Zuckerberg thinks AI friends and AI therapists can fill that gap. Last month Meta took a step toward that vision with the launch of its AI app, which it describes as “the assistant that gets to know your preferences, remembers context and is personalized to you.” Meta is far from the first or only company betting that AI is the future of companionship. Since it was launched in 2014, Microsoft’s Xiaolce has chatted with over 660 million users. Snapchat’s MyAI, launched in 2023, has over 150 million users; startups like Replika and Character.ai have users in the tens of millions.

They Fell in Love With A.I. Chatbots and Found Something Real

How do you end up with an A.I. lover? Some turned to them during hard times in their real-world marriages, while others were working through past trauma. Though critics have sounded alarms about dangers like delusional thinking, researchers from M.I.T. have observed that many users find therapeutic benefits, like “always-available support” and a reduction in loneliness.