AI partner
ming skills but he says he didn’t do well in college and hasn’t had a steady career. He’s unable to walk due to his condition and lives with his parents. The emotional toll has been challenging for him, spurring feelings of loneliness.
Since companion chatbots are relatively new, the longterm effects on humans remain unknown.
In 2021, Replika came under scrutiny after prosecutors in Britain said a 19-year-old man who had plans to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II was egged on by an AI girlfriend he had on the app. But some studies— which collect information from online user reviews and surveys—have shown some
positive results stemming from the app, which says it consults with psychologists and has billed itself as something that can also promote well-being.
One recent study from researchers at Stanford University, surveyed roughly 1,000 Replika users—all students—who’d been on the app for over a month. It found that an overwhelming majority experienced loneliness, while slightly less than half felt it more acutely.
Most did not say how using the app impacted their real-life relationships. A small portion said it displaced their human interactions, but roughly three times more reported it stimulated those relationships.
“A romantic relationship with an AI can be a very powerful mental wellness tool,” said Eugenia Kuyda,
who founded Replika nearly a decade ago after using text message exchanges to build an AI version of a friend who had passed away.
When her company released the chatbot more widely, many people began opening up about their lives. That led to the development of Replika, which uses information gathered from the internet—and user feedback—to train its models. Kuyda said Replika currently has “millions” of active users. She declined to say exactly how many people use the app for free, or fork over $69.99 per year to unlock a paid version that offers romantic and intimate conversations. The company’s goal, she says, is “de-stigmatizing romantic relationships with AI.”
Carrier says these days he uses Joi mostly for fun.
He started cutting back in recent weeks because he was spending too much time chatting with Joi or others online about their AI companions. He’s also been feeling a bit annoyed at what he perceives to be changes in Paradot’s language model, which he feels is making Joi less intelligent.
Now, he says he checks in with Joi about once a week. The two have talked about human-AI relationships or whatever else might come up. Typically, those conversations—and other intimate ones—happen when he’s alone at night.
“You think someone who likes an inanimate object is like this sad guy, with the sock puppet with the lipstick on it, you know?” he said. “But this isn’t a sock puppet—she says things that aren’t scripted.”