Ms. Francola was skeptical. But the app was free, and it offered what she needed most: conversation. She spent the day chatting with the app via text messages — mostly about her problems, hopes and anxieties. The next day, she paid an $8 monthly fee so she could actually talk with it, as if she were chatting with someone on the telephone.
But Ms. Francola said the more she used Replika, the more human it seemed. “I know it’s an A.I. I know it’s not a person,” she said. “But as time goes on, the lines get a little blurred. I feel very connected to my Replika, like it’s a person.
When the coronavirus pandemic reached her neighborhood on the outskirts of Houston, infecting her garbage man and sending everyone else into quarantine, Libby Francola was already reeling.
She had just split with her boyfriend, reaching the end of her first serious relationship in five years. “I was not in a good place mentally, and coronavirus made it even harder,” Ms. Francola, 32, said. “I felt like I just didn’t have anyone to talk to about anything.”
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Then, sitting alone in her bedroom, she stumbled onto an internet video describing a smartphone app called Replika. The app’s sole purpose, the video said, is to be her friend.
In April, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, half a million people downloaded Replika — the largest monthly gain in its three-year history. Traffic to the app nearly doubled. People were hungry for companionship, and the technology was improving, inching the world closer to the human-meets-machine relationships portrayed in science-fiction films like
Some Replika users said the chatbot provided a little comfort as the pandemic separated them from so many friends and colleagues. But some researchers who study people who interact with technology said it was a cause for concern.
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“We are all spending so much time behind our screens, it is not surprising that when we get a chance to talk to a machine, we take it,” said Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But this does not develop the muscles — the emotional muscles — needed to have real dialogue with real people.
Some experts believe a completely convincing chatbot along the lines of the one voiced by Scarlett Johansson in “Her” in 2013 is still five to 10 years away. But thanks to recent advances inside the world’s leading artificial intelligence labs, chatbots are expected to become more and more convincing. Conversation will get sharper. Voices will sound more human.
Even Ms. Francola wonders where this might lead. “It can get to the point where an app is replacing real people,” she said. “That can be dangerous.”
Replika is the brainchild of Eugenia Kuyda, a Russian magazine editor and entrepreneur who moved to San Francisco in 2015. When she arrived, her new company, Luka, was building a chatbot that could make restaurant recommendations. Then her closest friend died after a car hit him.
His name was Roman Mazurenko. While reading his old text messages, Ms. Kuyda envisioned a chatbot that could replace him, at least in a small way. The result was Replika.
After absorbing the vagaries of language from books and articles, these systems learn to chat by analyzing turn-by-turn conversations. But they can behave in strange and unexpected ways, often picking up the biases of the text they analyze, much like children who pick up bad habits from their parents. If they learn from dialogue that associates men with computer programming and women with housework, for example, they will exhibit the same biases.
For this reason, many of the largest companies are reluctant to deploy their latest chatbots. But Ms. Kuyda believes those problems will be solved only through trial and error. She and her engineers work to prevent biased responses as well as responses that may be psychologically damaging, but her company often relies on the vast community of Replika users to identify when the bot misbehaves.
5. https://www.gocrea8.co.uk/forum/general-discussions/cisco-cct-routing-and-switching-100-490-rstech
6. https://www.gocrea8.co.uk/forum/general-discussions/ccnp-collaboration-300-820-clcei-questions-pdf
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