Comment on This should be illegal
brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 year agoDoesn’t even take a change of service provider to get there.
Replika had what had very obviously become a virtual mate service too, until they decided “love” wasn’t part of their system anymore. Probably because it looked bad for investors, as happened for a lot of AI-based services people used for smut.
So a bunch of lonely people had their “virtual companion” suddenly lobotomized, and there’s nothing they could do about it.
SCB@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I always thought replika was a sex chatbot? Is/was it “more” than that?
brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 year ago
It’s… complicated.
At first the idea was it’d be training an actual “replica” of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for “more than friends”, and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.
Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don’t want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.
At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.