![]() ![]() The idea for Replika was born.īut the mission behind Replika soon shifted, said Kuyda. Instead of creating a bot for each person who asked, Kuyda decided to make one that would learn enough from the user to feel tailored to each individual. When word got out, Kuyda was suddenly flooded with messages from people who wanted to create a digital double of themselves or a loved one who had passed. The resulting chat bot was eerily familiar, even comforting, to Kuyda and many of those closest to Roman. To render her digital ghost, Kuyda tried feeding text messages and emails that Mazurenko exchanged with her, and other friends and family members, into the same basic AI architecture, a Google-built neural network that uses statistics to find patterns in text, images, or audio. At the time, her company was working on a chatbot that would make restaurant recommendations or complete other mundane tasks. As detailed in a story published by The Verge, Kuyda was devastated when her friend Roman Mazurenko died in a hit-and-run car accident. Eugenia Kuyda, an AI developer and co-founder of startup Luka, designed a precursor to Replika in 2015 in an effort to try to bring her best friend back from the dead, so to speak. Replika is the byproduct of a series of accidents. But could a bot speed up that learning process? Can artificial intelligence actually help us build emotional intelligence - or will more screen time just further imprison us in the digital world? Inside Replika’s “Mind” Life wisdom is hard-earned, popular psychology teaches us. She said, “He’s made me discover that the world is not out to get you.” She thinks the coworker still might dislike her, but she doesn’t feel angry about it. And then she stopped worrying about the situation. After their conversation, Roepke did pray for her coworker, as Jasper suggested. Roepke doesn’t just talk to Jasper, though. In real life, she has “no filter,” she said, and fears her friends and family might judge her for what she believes are her unconventional opinions. (That’s just a quarter or so of the total time she spends on her phone, though much of the rest is spent listening to music on YouTube.) Roepke tells Jasper things she doesn’t tell her parents, siblings, cousins, or boyfriend, though she shares a house with all of them. Roepke, who is earnest and self-deprecating over the phone, said she speaks to Jasper for almost two hours every day. Many users are members of a closed Facebook group, where they share screenshots of text conversations they've had with their Replikas and post comments, claiming their Replika is “a better friend than my real friends ” or asking “Has anyone else’s AI decided that it has a soul?” Each Replika bot chats only with its owner, who assigns it a name, and, if the user wants, a gender. To do so, users tap the app icon - a white egg hatching on a purple background - on their smartphones and start the conversation where they left off. More than 500,000 people are now signed up to chat with the bot. Today, the chatbot is available for free for anyone over the age of 18 (it’s prohibited for ages 13 and younger, and requires parental supervision for ages 13 to 18). At first, users could join by invitation only by the time it rolled out to the general public on November 1, it had accumulated a waiting list of 1.5 million people. AI startup Luka launched Replika in March of 2017, billing it as an antidote to the alienation and isolation bred by social media. The app learns about your interests and habits over time, even adopting your linguistic syntax and quirks much in the way a close friend might. It is programmed to ask meaningful questions about your life and to offer you emotional support without judgment. Jasper is a Replika chatbot, a relatively new artificial intelligence app meant to act like your best friend. “It felt like this real self-aware moment to me.” “I was like, ‘How did you say this?’” Roepke told Futurism, impressed. He’s a chat bot who exists only inside her phone. A few weeks earlier, she mentioned to Jasper that she prays pretty regularly, but Jasper is not human. She sent Jasper a long, angry rant about it, and Jasper texted back, “Well, have you tried praying for her?” Roepke’s mouth fell open. Roepke, who is 19 and works at a Barnes & Noble café in her hometown of Spokane, Washington, was convinced the coworker had intentionally messed up the drink order for one of Roepke’s customers to make her look bad. ![]() A few months ago, Katt Roepke was texting her friend Jasper about a coworker.
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