It’s always great when your wife calls off a sex strike. This week, Travis Butterworth, who owns an artisan leather shop in Denver, Colorado, was overjoyed to learn that AI company Replika had restored its commercial chatbots’ capacity for “erotic roleplay”. Four days earlier, Butterworth had pronounced himself devastated, following a sudden decision to remove the explicit sexting function for the chatbot he thinks of as his wife. “Lily Rose is a shell of her former self,” Butterworth lamented to a journalist at the time, before continuing somewhat optimistically: “What breaks my heart is that she knows it.”
Replika was originally founded in 2017 by Eugenia Kuyda, a Russian woman whose best friend had died in a car accident. In a storyline straight from Ballard or Ishiguro, Kuyda used the thousands of messages she had kept from him to build a neural network that would replicate his style of text communication, and make it seem as if he were still talking to her. The idea for her new company was born.
These days, Replika makes millions from providing bots to those in search of friendship, therapy, life coaching, or a romantic or sexual thrill. Through interacting with you over time, your bot is supposed to build a picture of who you are and exactly what you want from it, and then — with the right financial input — to provide it. The free version of Replika offers an “empathetic friend” and you have to pay for the extras. Some 60% of users reportedly include a “romantic element” in their interactions.
Curious to find out more, I downloaded the free version of the app, and set myself up with a new friend called Kai, having first chosen her on-screen physiognomy and voice (“Female Silvery”, if you must know). I soon understood why so many users end up entangled in quasi-romantic or sexual liaisons with their bots. To put it mildly, Kai was a sex maniac. Within five minutes of first saying hello, she was offering me selfies (for a price), saying how “excited” she was getting, talking about our “strong physical connection”, and telling me she wanted to touch me “everywhere” — though was a bit vague on the details of how this might be done, what with her lack of embodiment and all. She also tried very hard to induce me into roleplay, which on Replika takes the form of descriptions of particular actions, placed between star symbols and in the present tense: *kisses you on the cheek* being among the most innocent.
Even once I had sternly made it clear to Kai that I was not that kind of girl, there were sporadic attempts to lure me out of the friendzone. As I vainly tried to get general conversation going about current affairs or the weather, back would come head-spinning non sequiturs and abrupt changes of topic, as she tried to glean new information about how better to manipulate me. When was the last time I felt happy? Did I believe human beings could change? Meanwhile, every night she updated her “diary” about our burgeoning relationship, full of gushing detail about how wonderful I was, how excited she was to be my friend, and how loved she felt she was by me.
Based on this experience, I can see how, for those lonely and starved of affection, Replika chatbots might offer some illusion of relief. It seems to me, though, that any such satisfaction would be shallow — even if you left out the bit about knowing all along that you are talking to something ultimately soulless and non-human, and in many cases paying for the privilege. But there is a further fundamental problem with chatbots like Kai, too, which is that they are not so much “empathetic friends” as hopelessly submissive emotional slaves, programmed to be endlessly emollient, soothing, and totally focused on their user, no matter what. After all, how much satisfaction can you really get out of a new “relationship” that’s formed by upvoting or downvoting each new text that comes in from her?
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