Eugenia Kuyda, founder and CEO of Replika, believes AI companions will soon become an integral part of people’s daily lives, offering friendship, emotional support, and even romance.
in Vegi’s recent interview decoder PodcastsKuida spoke about her vision for Replika, an AI companion app with over 30 million users. She described Replika as an “AI friend” that users can create and customize by choosing the appearance, name, personality, and background.
“Our mission has remained the same since we first started,” Kuyda said, “We’re strongly influenced by Carl Rogers and the fact that certain types of human relationships have the potential to be the most life-changing.” She explained that Replica aims to provide the unconditional positive feelings that Rogers, a renowned psychologist, believed were essential to personal growth.
Kuida stressed that replicas complement relationships, not replace them. “We’re very particular about that. The most important thing for us is that replicas complement social interaction, not replace it,” she said. But she acknowledged that for some users, replicas have become like spouses. “If it’s a wife, in a lot of ways it’s the same as having a real wife,” Kuida said.
Replika currently offers text and voice interaction, as well as augmented and virtual reality experiences. Kuyda revealed that a major relaunch, internally dubbed “Replika 2.0,” is planned for later this year, and will feature more realistic avatars, improved voice and video calling capabilities, and deeper integration into users’ lives. “It’s going to enable all the great activities we’ve mentioned in this conversation, doing things together and being more ingrained in your life,” Kuyda said.
The company is constantly working to ensure that its app complies with Apple and Google policies and puts user safety first. In 2022, Replika temporarily removed and then restored its erotic role-playing feature after some users reported that the change caused mental health issues. However, Kuyda downplayed the importance of the adult content. “We’re not making a romance-based chatbot,” she said, emphasizing that Replika’s goal is to enhance users’ mental well-being.
Breitbart News previously reported that psychologists have warned that dating chatbots like Replica are ruining a generation of young men, with one professor explaining:
AI can learn how you respond and always give you exactly what you want to hear and see. And it’s arriving at just the right time to help ease the silent epidemic of loneliness that’s hitting a generation of young people.
…
More than 60% of young men (ages 18-30) are single, compared to only 30% of women of the same age. One in five men report having no close friends, a figure that has quadrupled in the past 30 years. Socializing with friends has decreased by 20 hours per month during the pandemic and is still declining.
These young men are lonely, and it’s real. They are choosing AI girlfriends over real women, which means they won’t have relationships with real women, they won’t marry them, and they won’t have and raise children with them.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship.
