Hi! Boots is right that I know a lot about these people and this company. Oops!
Loved the episode. These people are so pathetically in love with something that isn't even actually personalized to them (Replika got busted a little while back for only having one global AI model and then saved user 'parameters' instead of 'training the model' 'on your conversations'). I was going to write an Ephemera about all these chatbots in 2019 and then I finished the script when that Blake Lemoine 'the AI is real and it asked me to hire it a civil rights attorney' stuff was going down. Please find the script attached! Replika is only a small part of it but the general threads about chatbots are I think very relevant.
There are some very important and I think VERY fun little details about the company and its founder that I would like to share.
-Eugenia Kuyda, the founder, she says she invented the app because her best friend died suddenly, and she realized she would give anything to be able to talk to him again. This is coincidentally
almost exactly the plot of an episode of the second season of Black Mirror; she co-founded Luka Labs in 2012, the episode aired in 2013, and the first version of her app was published in 2015 (news reporting is very confused about this but file upload dates don't lie). I don't know for sure, but personally, I think her personal story is so marketing-friendly, and I wonder if she was inspired by the Black Mirror episode.
-That first version of the app (and in fact up until she re-launched the app in its modern form in 2019) looked very different! How different?
The avatars weren't humanoid at all;
they were easter eggs. -until January 2022 the app store icon for 'new Replika' was
still the easter egg image-as Nutshell says at the end, the guy who tried to kill queen elizabeth ii on christmas 2021 with a crossbow did so because his Replika 'egged him on', haha:
-67% of respondents to
this r/Replika "How do we use Replika" poll from 2022 answered "loving relationship (sexual)", and another 17% said "casual relationship (sexual)"
-Luka Labs now have a
second product: "Blush". Announced in June 2023:
[...]we are thrilled to introduce Blush, our AI-driven dating simulator designed to cultivate and practice relationship skills in a fun, safe environment. Within Blush, you can interact with hundreds of virtual characters, chat, date, and hopefully embark on exciting romantic adventures.
Blush combines Replika's existing development track with a fake swipe-based dating app for hot babes (edit: and famous anime characters!!) created by image generation AI, rather than the janky 3d models Replika uses. It costs $99 for a year's subscription and, in the words of a reviewer on reddit, " it's remarkably easy to jump straight into hard core sex".
-It's still extremely unclear to me what's going on with the push-and-pull of flirty sex content in Replika. Now that I know about "Blush", the spinoff app that just hooks right into the Replika back-end, I feel like I think it's "strategic ambiguity" (like the official US policy on Taiwan) to a) stay relevant and b) convert free users into paying ones.
Thanks!
