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Eugenia Kudya, the founder and CEO of Replika, a San Francisco company known for creating A.I.-powered chatbots that are designed to be empathetic companions, says that the stigma of having a romantic relationship with a chatbot will soon disappear.
Replika, which says it has 2 million active users and 500,000 paying subscribers, recently created a spin-off brand called Blush that is specifically designed for users who want to have a romantic relationship or sexual relationship with a chatbot. This came after it modified its main Replika app to prevent users from engaging in sexual banter with the chatbot.
Kudya said the change was necessary to ensure that its chatbots would be safe and commercially-acceptable for the majority of its users. But the change angered a small but devoted set of adherents who had been using Replika chatbots for aspects of their sexual fulfillment.
She said the current stigma around friendships and even romantic relationships with chatbots would likely go through a similar transition to people’s attitudes towards online dating. “It’s similar to online dating in the early 2000s, where people were ashamed to say they met online. Now everyone does it,” she said, speaking on stage at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech conference in Deer Valley, Utah. “Romantic relations with A.I. can be a great stepping stone for actual romantic relationships, human relationships.”
Kudya also said that she saw the idea that people would develop romantic relationships with companionship chatbots was only natural.
“I feel like in a relationship, especially in a close relationship, emotional relationship, intimacy is going to be part of these relationships and it’s very hard to draw the line,” she said.
While Replika bills itself as a tool for alleviating social isolation and loneliness, Kudya said the company was alert to the possibility that if people rely on a chatbot to the exclusion of human contact, it could have the opposite effect. Because of this, she said Replika tries to nudge users off the platform and to go out and engage with real people.
She said that because Replika makes money from subscriptions, it did not try to maximize user engagement on its app. Instead, it tries to monitor whether users are reporting they are happier or less lonely after interacting with a Replika chatbot.
But she criticized some competing chatbot companies for not taking this approach, and simply trying to keep users engaged on the app for as long as possible. “I think this is really dangerous,” she said.
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