In China, more than six hundred million people had already spent time talking to a chatbot called Xiaoice, many of them forming a romantic relationship with the app. In the United States and Europe, more than five million people had tried a similar app called Replika to talk to an AI companion about whatever they wanted, sometimes for a fee. Russian media entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda founded Replika in 2014 after trying to create a chatbot that could “replicate” a deceased friend. She had collected all his texts and emails and then used them to train a language model, allowing her to “chat” to
...more
