AI friendships

September 9, 2024

ISLAMABAD – YOU don’t forget your first love. Psychologists say it is because it is a life-changing experience and one that can impact your brain, leaving an imprint on its sensory parts. By the same token, you also don’t forget your first break-up. These experiences are the first intense emotions we go through.

Imagine feeling this for a virtual companion. Before you wave me off as stark raving mad, I assure you technology has been creating solutions to finding the right companion for you in the form of matchmaking apps and now AI chatbots for companionship and intimacy.

I heard about one such app, which was created in 2017 in the US called Replika. As I am an avid podcast consumer, I heard about it on Black Box, a series by The Guardian on how AI is impacting lives. Replika sells itself as a ‘virtual friend’ that is able to improve the emotional well-being of the user. You log on, create the avatar of the friend you want — name, body, personality and backstory — and presto, your friend is ready to engage with you through text, voice, augmented reality and virtual reality.

“What does it mean to have a friend inside your computer?” wrote Casey Newton in The Verge in 2015, before large language models became what they are today. Nearly a decade on, virtual beings are helping answer that question.

In an interview to The Verge earlier this year, Replika’s founder Eugenia Kudya said the app was not trying to replace real-life relationships but “create an entirely new relationship category with the AI companion, a virtual being that will be there for you whenever you need it, for potentially whatever purposes you might need it for.”

Millions of users signed up when it was launched and were using it for