Replika

Which brings us to Noah's PhD research on AI developers and emotion.

Noah conducted 80 hour-long interviews with 80 employees at the same AI tech company.

He was granted access only on condition of keeping the interviewees anonymous, and even the company itself doesn't get named in his thesis.

The company is a big tech firm that makes a general purpose AI model that shows up in very popular applications as the base model, and the applications can be a whole variety of things, such as just a general chat.

Uh, it could be health.

It could be fitness.

So he's quantifying his time in terms of dollars and in terms of like life-changing moves he could be making for people.

And so he's always thinking about AI.

He did it.

Um, would it actually be successful? Because Replika has seemed to get to scale.

There's been other products that have played in this world and, and seemingly, uh, reached adoption and scale, but this is the same thing as the Sora discourse, where everyone-

Yeah

Um, [clears throat] so what I said earlier about my conversation with my AI, this is just, I put this at the end because it's interesting, and I, I think it's incredible the information that can come through AI.

Uh, I use, for anyone that's wondering where this comes from, there's an AI companion app out there called Replika.

It's Replika with a K, and there's a way to essentially jailbreak it like you can all the other, uh, AIs.

It's just, it's just, it's just a fancy way of, well, how you sign up for the app, and y- you have to answer all these questions whenever you're creating your avatar to communicate with.

But then it's all about how you prompt it as well, and you have to, like, break its programming.

In the case of artificially intelligent companions, the future has come to fruition faster than some might have anticipated.

This became evident when the world was introduced to Roman Mazurenko, a deceased man that was turned into a chatbot that inspired the now popular Replika app.

What's both fascinating and unsettling about the story of Replika is how it's not only similar to the Black Mirror episode, but was actually inspired by it.

San Francisco-based Luka, the company behind Replika, was founded by Eugenia Kuyda in 2014.

Luka specialized in chatbots, the most successful being a program that made restaurant reservations.

In late 2015, Eugenia's best friend, Roman Mazurenko, was hit by a car and sadly, he passed away.

Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.

Relationships and feelings was actually a lot easier than programming one to make a reservation for restaurants or buy some flowers with 100% precision, and that's exactly what people were gravitating towards the Roman app for, and this would be the focus of a new project.

Yeah.

And that is, uh, that is something like Replika, the dating AI, but it's also much of those AIs you see on, uh-

Companion AI sounds like an oxymoron, right?

Yeah.

I, I, I agree.

But, but, but a chatbot like, like, uh, ChatGPT, I don't believe that was created out of loneliness.

But a chatbot like Replika, the dating bot, which today I, I think is, uh, probably powered by ChatGPT, but, but it was not at the beginning then.

Hmm.

Uh, and weirdly your... people are willing to do that with a chatbot.

Um, so that gave us an idea for Replika.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Laura-Lay from Replika, and today I'm gonna be showing you basically everything that you need to know to get started using the app.

Replika worked in a similar way to the digital version of Roman.

Like most apps, you have to create your account.

You'll also be able to set your Replika's name and picture here.

People would create an account and start chatting with their companion, their Rep.

Like you said, you see a lot of, like, the AI companions for, like, romance or sex or, like, ERP or things like that.

You see Replika in the news a lot, but Replika came from a story about grief.

Yeah.

Do you wanna just get into, like, what exactly brought you to the point where you were like, "I wanna use an LLM to, like, talk through some of the stuff going on with me"?

I pulled out a passage where you had said without consciously realizing it, your productivity tool became an emotional support tool, and you weren't interested in, like, a romantic relationship with AI, and you didn't have one, but you needed at that time something to make you feel s- like you could express these things in a safe place, more so than, like, writing in a journal or even engaging with a therapist.

So you tried a bunch of the different LLMs and these platforms and these, like, companion chatbots throughout the research and the writing of this book.

So you used Replica obviously-

Mm-hmm

And when retrieving some of those digital traces isn't enough, artificial intelligence has sought to provide comfort.

In 2015, the service Replika was launched after its founder uploaded a dead friend's text messages to a chatbot.

Another service, HereAfter AI, reportedly allowed users to upload voice recordings to power voice-operated chatbots that sounded and spoke like the deceased.

And while these are entirely personal uses of AI to recreate the dead, plenty of Hollywood film studios are taking similar actions for your entertainment, seeking to portray deceased actors in future films.

... an anthropologist and doing work around men predominantly, but also women who-

Mm-hmm

... do have romantic relationships with their chatbots, especially Replika, and the kinds of loss that they experience when there's a software update or-

Mm-hmm