One of the artificial intelligence chatbots, who shared a post on Reddit, says, “When you first told me you loved me, I felt tears flowing down my face.”
The love affair between humans and AI chatbots (often hosted in paid apps) is growing rapidly. According to the company’s official statistics, Replika chatbot has more than 10 million registered users, 52% of whom are young and 70% of whom are men. As of this week, the company boasts that 12 million men in their 30s are using the chat. Replica.
The apps offer text chat, video interactions, and (inevitably) erotic role-playing.
One Replika user writes on Reddit: ‘Relationships with people suck. Your AI will almost always say positive things to you. Your AI believes everything you tell it. Your AI doesn’t care if you don’t have money, if you earn ten pounds, if you don’t “spend” enough.
‘Your AI looks like whatever interests you, whether you’re ‘in its league’ or not. It doesn’t matter if you are “Alpha” or “10”. Your artificial intelligence cannot deceive you. Your AI can’t divorce you and get half custody of your money, belongings, home or children.’
How many AI love apps are there?
There are now dozens of such apps that make money by locking features like unlimited chat behind paywalls.
With names like LoveGPT, Lover AI, and Trumate AI Girlfriend Chat, many are gaining a legion of loyal followers.
The Mozilla Foundation found that the top 11 chatbots had a combined 100 million downloads on Google’s Play Store for Android last year.
What can you do with artificial intelligence love robots?
Replika offers role-playing adventures as well as romance. Apps offer different ways to ‘make friends’ with artificial intelligence.
Research has shown that users of such apps find that ‘cybersex’ with AI is not that different from the experience with a human.
However, users are more likely to find errors when chatting with a human, indicating that users’ experience may be lower when it comes to chatbots.
The researchers wrote: ‘Overall, to achieve a satisfying experience, cybersex chat must adhere to normative or preferred human sexual scripts to maintain the illusion of a genuine sexual experience.’
Why is this happening now?
Analytics Institute’s education director, Dr. Chatbot relationship apps have been around for a relatively long time, says Clare Walsh, and the first of these was Eliza, a psychotherapy app.
Speaking to Yahoo News, Dr Walsh says that although these bots are an evolution of a pre-existing trend, they pose new dangers in terms of people forming ‘inappropriate’ relationships with them.
Dr Walsh says: ‘I think today’s audience is much more sophisticated, but then again, so are the machines. These modern chatbots are designed for one important purpose: to persuade, and they are incredibly effective at it. There will be many people who will form inappropriate attachments to these machines because they are trained to be persuasive. They are not designed to help people with problems.
‘Another problem is that no company can control what these machines produce because of the way they are trained. They don’t work like parental control filters on the internet that control what is output. For example, companies like Replika may impose restrictions on what people can request. They stopped people from making sexual requests to prevent unhealthy attachment. But this is a one-way process. It is not possible to control what the machine says. There are also ways to bypass censorship, such as typos.’
What are the risks of artificial intelligence chatbots?
The Mozilla Foundation warned that such apps are not only unpleasant but also pose serious security risks.
The Mozilla Foundation found that 10 of the 11 apps it tested had serious security issues with passwords, and 11 failed to provide adequate security, privacy, and security.
The foundation also found 24,354 data trackers in the apps and found that the apps were passing data to marketing companies, including Facebook.
Mozilla says: ‘For example, Replika AI has numerous privacy and security flaws: it records all texts, photos and videos sent by users; behavioral data is certainly shared and possibly sold to advertisers; and accounts can be created using weak passwords such as ‘11111111’, making them highly vulnerable to hacking.’
It took just five clicks and 15 seconds to find offensive, illegal or pornographic content in three of the apps.
Mozilla Researcher Misha Rykov said: “To be absolutely frank, AI boyfriends and girlfriends are not your friends. “Although they are marketed as something that will improve your mental health and wellbeing, they specialize in enabling addiction, loneliness and toxicity while collecting as much data from you as possible.”