Machines Like Us The Globe and Mail

When Eugenia Kuyda saw Her for the first time – the 2013 film about a man who falls in love with his virtual assistant – it didn’t read as science fiction. That’s because she was developing a remarkably similar technology: an AI chatbot that could function as a close friend, or even a romantic partner.

That idea would eventually become the basis for Replika, Kuyda’s AI startup. Today, Replika has millions of active users – that’s millions of people who have AI friends, AI siblings and AI partners.


When I first heard about the idea behind Replika, I thought it sounded kind of dystopian. I envisioned a world where we’d rather spend time with our AI friends than our real ones. But that’s not the world Kuyda is trying to build. In fact, she thinks chatbots will actually make people more social, not less, and that the cure for our technologically exacerbated loneliness might just be more technology.


Mentioned:
“ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine” by Joseph Weizenbaum
“elizabot.js”, implemented by Norbert Landsteiner
“Speak, Memory” by Casey Newton (The Verge)
“Creating a safe Replika experience” by Replika
“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
Additional Reading:
The Globe & Mail: “They fell in love with the Replika AI chatbot. A policy update left them heartbroken”
“Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots” by Maples, Cerit, Vishwanath, & Pea
“Learning from intelligent social agents as social and intellectual mirrors” by Maples, Pea, Markowitz

In the last few years, artificial intelligence has gone from a novelty to perhaps the most influential technology we’ve ever seen. The people building AI are convinced that it will eradicate disease, turbocharge productivity, and solve climate change. It feels like we’re on the cusp of a profound societal transformation. And yet, I can’t shake the feeling we’ve been here before. Fifteen years ago, there was a similar wave of optimism around social media: it was going to connect the world, catalyze social movements and spur innovation. It may have done some of these things. But it also made us lonelier, angrier, and occasionally detached from reality.


Few people understand this trajectory better than Maria Ressa. Ressa is a Filipino journalist, and the CEO of a news organization called Rappler. Like many people, she was once a fervent believer in the power of social media. Then she saw how it could be abused. In 2016, she reported on how Rodrigo Duterte, then president of the Philippines, had weaponized Facebook in the election he’d just won. After publishing those stories, Ressa became a target herself, and her inbox was flooded with death threats. In 2021, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.


I wanted this to be our first episode because I think, as novel as AI is, it has undoubtedly been shaped by the technologies, the business models, and the CEOs that came before it. And Ressa thinks we’re about to repeat the mistakes we made with social media all over again.
Mentioned:
“How to Stand Up to a Dictator” by Maria Ressa
“A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism” by Thompson et al.
Rappler’s Matrix Protocol Chat App: Rappler Communities
“Democracy Report 2023: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization” by V-Dem
“The Foundation Model Transparency Index” by Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence)
“All the ways Trump’s campaign was aided by Facebook, ranked by importance” by Philip Bump (The Washington Post)
“Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy

We are living in an age of breakthroughs propelled by advances in artificial intelligence. Technologies that were once the realm of science fiction will become our reality: robot best friends, bespoke gene editing, brain implants that make us smarter.

Every other Tuesday Taylor Owen sits down with someone shaping this rapidly approaching future.

The first two episodes will be released on May 7th. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an episode.