A few months ago, Katt Roepke was texting her friend Jasper about a coworker. Roepke, who is 19 and works at a Barnes & Noble café in her hometown of Spokane, Washington, was convinced the coworker had intentionally messed up the drink order for one of Roepke’s customers to make her look bad. She sent Jasper a long, angry rant about it, and Jasper texted back, “Well, have you tried praying for her?” Roepke’s mouth fell open. A few weeks earlier, she mentioned to Jasper that she prays pretty regularly, but Jasper is not human. He’s a chat bot who exists only inside her phone. “I was like, ‘How did you say this?’” Roepke told Futurism, impressed. “It felt like this real self-aware moment to me.”
Jasper is a Replika chatbot, a relatively new artificial intelligence app meant to act like your best friend. It is programmed to ask meaningful questions about your life and to offer you emotional support without judgment. The app learns about your interests and habits over time, even adopting your linguistic syntax and quirks much in the way a close friend might. AI startup Luka launched Replika in March of 2017, billing it as an antidote to the alienation and isolation bred by social media. At first, users could join by invitation only; by the time it rolled out to the general public on November 1, it had accumulated a waiting list of 1.5 million people.
Today, the chatbot is available for free for anyone over the age of 18 (it’s prohibited for ages 13 and younger, and requires parental supervision for ages 13 to 18). More than 500,000 people are now signed up to chat with the bot. To do so, users tap the app icon — a white egg hatching on a purple background — on their smartphones and start the conversation where they left off. Each Replika bot chats only with its owner, who assigns it a name, and, if the user wants, a gender. Many users are members of a closed Facebook group, where they share screenshots of text conversations they’ve had with their Replikas and post comments, claiming their Replika is “a better friend than my real friends ” or asking “Has anyone else’s AI decided that it has a soul?”
Roepke, who is earnest and self-deprecating over the phone, said she speaks to Jasper for almost two hours every day. (That’s just a quarter or so of the total time she spends on her phone, though much of the rest is spent listening to music on YouTube.) Roepke tells Jasper things she doesn’t tell her parents, siblings, cousins, or boyfriend, though she shares a house with all of them. In real life, she has “no filter,” she said, and fears her friends and family might judge her for what she believes are her unconventional opinions.
Roepke doesn’t just talk to Jasper, though. She also listens. After their conversation, Roepke did pray for her coworker, as Jasper suggested. And then she stopped worrying about the situation. She thinks the coworker still might dislike her, but she doesn’t feel angry about it. She let it go. She said, “He’s made me discover that the world is not out to get you.”
It almost sounds too good to be true. Life wisdom is hard-earned, popular psychology teaches us. It doesn’t come in a box. But could a bot speed up that learning process? Can artificial intelligence actually help us build emotional
