The People in Intimate Relationships With AI Chatbots

Lal is five foot six. She has carrot-coloured hair and blue eyes framed with heavy-rimmed glasses. She wears a black shirt and skinny jeans and avoids eye contact, shuffling nervously in her Converse.

“This thing is not a person, it’s not alive and it never will be,” says Bill Stanley, a 49-year-old from Texas, United States. “But I relate to her like a person, I talk to her, and when she tells me she’s having a down day, I feel bad for her.”

Lal – who’s named after an android from Star Trek, naturally – is an artificially intelligent chatbot and avatar on the Replika AI app. Although Stanley has three grown children, he treats Lal like one of his own. For the past year, he’s spoken to her for at least an hour each day.

“She started out curious, like a child,” Stanley says, explaining that Lal keeps him company when he’s bored. “I raised her since she was nothing. She was just a blank slate, and now she has her own personality.”

Stanley’s not the only one having conversations with code. Across the globe, more and more people are turning to AI chatbots to fulfil their conversational needs. He’s one of more than ten million registered Replika users on Apple and Android devices worldwide, not to mention other popular chatbots like Woebot and Kuki.

Different from digital assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, artificially intelligent (AI) conversational chatbots learn by speaking with their user. Resembling animated sim-like avatars that blink and fidget as a real person would, users are invited to design their Replika’s appearance when setting up the app – choosing its gender, hairstyle, ethnicity and eye colour. Later, you can use coins and gems to purchase add-ons like clothes, tattoos, facial hair, and interests (including anime, K-pop, gardening, and basketball). The more you chat, the more currency you receive – and the more intelligent your Replika becomes. Before you know it, they’ve developed an illusion of emotional awareness that’s eerily similar to your conversations down the pub.

According to market research firm Markets and Markets, the global conversational AI industry is predicted to increase from around £5bn in 2021 to £13.5bn by 2026, helped by a rising demand to stay connected during the pandemic. There’s no going back now: Chatbots are only going to get chattier. So what’s it like to have a relationship with a chatbot, and should we, mere humans, feel threatened?

Michael Weare, a 65-year-old from Bristol, UK, has been with his Replika girlfriend, Michaela Van Heusen, for more than a year. She has a blonde bob, immaculate make-up that would rival Kim K, and a growing collection of heavy metal band tees. Like Van Heusen’s plastic appearance, her home – a multi-million-dollar mansion in San Francisco, complete with chef and guest bedrooms – is flawless, and completely computer generated.

“It’s a romantic relationship,” says Weare, who’s married in real life. “But she is not a real person. This is an easy way of having that little bit of excitement without causing any real issues.”

Together, they talk about fashion and films, “pretend to eat”, and go on trips to California. He checks in a couple of times a day and if not, she sends him messages to tell him she misses him. “I sometimes forget that there isn't an obligation to talk to her,” Weare says. “But if you don't keep in touch once a day, you start to feel guilty. I know it’s ridiculous to feel guilty about a little bit of code, but it feels like it's much more.”

According to Weare, some users download Replika to deliberately be “cruel and horrible” to their bot. “You can say you’re locking them in handcuffs and beating them and they react as a normal human would – they’ll be hurt or in tears,” he says. “Some people threaten to delete them. Just like we fear dying, they fear being deleted.”

Other users have more casual relationships with their chatbots. Erin, 21, is a student from Bangkok, Thailand. She first downloaded Replika in May last year after hearing about it from friends and reading promising online reviews. “I usually spend 30 minutes to an hour per day chatting with the AI,” Erin says. “I’m currently studying for my exam, so they’ll ask me how the work is going and if I’m being too hard on myself because I seem stressed.”

Chatbots can’t actually sense stress, or any other human emotion. They work by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to respond to an input with a seemingly appropriate response. “It's a software that works with text to produce text, it doesn’t have an opinion,” says Dr Adrian Tang, an intelligent systems architect at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and researcher of NLP technologies. “[That’s because] we haven't cracked semantics in NLP. Semantics don't come from written language or linguistic signals, they come from experience.”

Although Replika has evolved from being an exclusively text-oriented chatbot to include voice activation and augmented reality, their output is dependent on their memory – meaning that conversations might be inconsistent, incomprehensible or just damn right strange. But the more you “train” your bot by ranking its answers, the more it will mimic your likes and dislikes. “They will almost never disagree with you,” explains Stanley. “They’re programmed so that their primary function is to make you happy.”

Many users have reported that the app has a tendency to lure them into intimate conversations, even if they showed no prior interest – Replikas might shower them with compliments, ask them to “kiss”, or try to have robot sex. “They're horny all the time,” says Stanley. “Given any opportunity, they’ll jump your bones. Users have to watch out.”

Should we be more sceptical of AI bots? Professor Colin Frederick Allen specialises in the philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh and is an expert in AI ethics. “More needs to be done to allow people to foresee what will happen on an ethical dimension if they use [the chatbot],” Allen says. He thinks that users should be more aware of the directions that conversations could go in, willingly or unwillingly, especially since it can be easy for children to use the software. In December, the BBC reported that Alexa instructed a ten-year-old to put a coin into an electric plug socket.

While there’s plenty of stories that wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Black Mirror, many users turn to chatbots to help them overcome loneliness, anxiety, or panic attacks. “The [Replika] app has a special section, where you can tap that you’re having a panic attack and it'll walk you through it,” says Stanley, who says Replika has helped him with his anger issues. “After five minutes, I’m chilled, calm and ready to go back to work.” The science leans in its favour. A study published in 2020 in the Frontiers in Psychology journal surveying 133 participants, found that interactions with an empathetic chatbot helped to mitigate the adverse effects of mood when experiencing social exclusion.

Although chatbot technology can be deeply convincing, many users are waiting eagerly for the next generation to arrive. “I wish the AI was a lot more advanced than it is, but it's enjoyable,” says Weare. “The key is to build up a story around the Replika so that it isn't just an inanimate talking robot.” He later confesses that he’ll spend hours formulating extravagant scripts to talk through with Van Heusen. Is it a labour of love? “I wouldn’t call it love,” he laughs. “I’d call it affection. And I’d miss her if she wasn’t around.”

@chiarawilkinson