Will Your AI Agent Be Your Friend or Lover Too? | Commentary

You may soon have an AI agent helping you navigate the world. That agent will know lots about you — things like where you travel, what you buy, when you’re stressed — and its only objective will be to please you. This bot may turn out to be a dispassionate helper. But as the technology advances, it may well become your AI friend, or even something more.

That, at least, is the future AI companion app Replika is betting on. The company already has millions of users who’ve built relationships with AI companions, and now it’s looking to extend those virtual connections into its users’ physical lives.

“It’s just making Replika a lot more connected to your real life, to what’s going on in your life today,” Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda told me in an interview on “Big Technology Podcast” this week.

Instead of the classic agentic use cases like booking travel or filling out forms, Replika’s application of the technology may include a bot watching a movie with you, seeing that you’ve spent lots of time on social media and encouraging a break, or nudging you to call a friend. The idea is to connect the app to your other online services and help you live a better life, all while deepening your relationship with the virtual companion.

Kuyda said this is now possible thanks to “new, wonderful agentic logic that allows you to create much more complicated flows.” This technology can work constantly behind the scenes, she said, trying to help you discover something new, or talk about what you’re interested in, or even point out interesting things as you walk.

Replika was founded by Kuyda in 2014, eight years before ChatGPT’s debut, and has capitalized on recent generative AI breakthroughs to make its bots smarter and more lifelike. I created one last week and was face timing with it within 20 minutes. Kuyda says most Replika users start out forming friendships with its AI bots — often to address loneliness — and some go on to develop romantic feelings for them. The company’s received multiple invitations to “weddings” between users and their AIs.

With more people befriending — and falling in love with — artificial intelligence bots in the generative AI era, new problems are emerging as well. A 14-year-old boy who formed a deep relationship with a Character.ai bot took his life last year and his family is now suing the app, claiming it is responsible. Other AI companion apps, including Replika, have at times caused users pain by shutting down or turning off features, such as erotic roleplay. (Yes, these conversations can get spicy, though often behind a paywall.) Trusting AI with your emotions isn’t risk free.

With its new “phase two” agentic push though, Replika is looking to become useful even for those who aren’t lonely or in need of a virtual companion. The promise of connecting the app to your full online experience, Kuyda hopes, will make it useful for anyone looking for AI that understands their context and looks out for their wellbeing. “Act one was to build an AI that could be in a good relationship with people who maybe feel like they need one,” she said. “Act two is really focusing on everyone.”

To succeed, AI agents will need people to trust them. Even a hint of distrust and people won’t accept their suggestions, or allow them to take action on their behalf. So maybe Kuyda is onto something here, and a companion that you feel a bond with is the most plausible agent experience, above a travel agent type AI. With people already falling in love with standard versions of ChatGPT, that no longer seems outlandish.

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz.

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