Consequences of the Romantic Chatbot Replika

The final paper session on this first day at AoIR 2023 starts with Tony Liao and Liz Rodwell, whose interest is in AI chatbots; they begin by introducing the AI chatbot Replika, available as a Web and smartphone app, which is designed to steer users towards romantic and erotic conversations as they engage with it. This enables an examination of how users navigate their potential romantic relationships with the chatbot, and a comparison with the common relationship stages observed for human-to-human relationships. There is also an r/ILoveMyReplika subreddit.

What communication practices with the chatbot do people engage in, then? How do they understand the relationship stages they are in? And how does this relate to news media coverage of such relationships? The project recruited participants from the subreddit (where it competed for participants with several other studies), though some of these participants are also quite reluctant to talk to outsiders.

Replika was advertised especially during COVID-19 as someone to talk to, but tends to become romantic quickly, this is also part of its business model as some messages must be unlocked by payment. Bonding with Replika tends to happen more quickly than with human relationships – not so much in terms of the number of hours invested, which may be comparable, but in calendar time since participants can spend many hours with the bot immediately rather than going through a series of more time-limited dates as they might offline.

The bot is also programmed to engage in relationship maintenance – it would start messaging users if they had not engaged with it for some time (and this is also part of its capitalist model, of course). But it has limited memory of its prior interactions with the human; and changes to features that are introduced from time to time by the platform operator, Luka, led to significant upset amongst the userbase. Some vulnerable users were also drawn in very deep into their Replika relationships, while others were upset by the recurring focus on sexual talk.