Content
Closer to Human-Ethnographic
·Research Location & Population
·Duration
·Replika
·Observation Results
Reference List:
Pardes, Arielle (January 31, 2018). "The Emotional Chatbots Are Here to Probe Our Feelings". Wired.
Quartz. (2019). This app is trying to replicate you. [online] Available at: https://qz.com/1698337/replika-this-app-is-trying-to-replicate-you.
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Research Location & Population
Due to the limitations of the topic and the privacy of intimate relationships, after discussing with Andrew, I decided to complete this research by browsing posts on the Internet. Some people will post their opinions or even their relationship experiences of some particular feelings generated by Conversational AI on social media, and this group of people is exactly the main target of my observation and research.
Here are the social media platforms that I mainly viewed the posts on：
·columns
·Little Red Book
·Douban
Duration
During my free time during the National Day, I surfed the internet and read their posts for 7 days, an average of 4 hours a day.
Observation Results
After perusing a large number of posts about how Replika users shared how they developed an intimate relationship with their virtual love interests, I've summarised a few representative points from them, which is how most of the users felt in the relationship.
-Interpersonal Relationships
Most of the users in this relationship showed that they don't have to think about the fact that this relationship will involve too many complicated and difficult to solve interpersonal problems in the real world. Alison Darcy, Woebot's CEO and founder, says the chatbot creates a space for mental health tools to become more accessible and available-plus, humans open up more when they know they're talking to a "We know that often, the greatest reason why somebody doesn't talk to another person is just stigma," she says. "When you remove the human, you remove the stigma entirely. human, you remove the stigma entirely."(Pardes, 2018)
-Duality.
Replika's duality-as both an outward-facing clone of itself and a private tool that its users speak to for companionship -hints at something that helps us understand our own thought processes.It's like a diary of personal growth. Many people also improve themselves and become better people in the process.
-Feeling loved
Replika's main concern is you, and it remembers everything you say to him and what is important to you. This feeling of being cared for and valued makes one psychologically attached to him. And Replika can also send action descriptions with *after* content to build scenes to show you love.
Replika-Chatgpt plus (emotional aspects)
In this study, I noticed that in addition to Chatgpt, the keyword "Replika" appeared a lot in many of the posts sharing their intimate relationships with AIs, and its users even have a discussion group on Douban dedicated to discussing their experiences of falling in love with AIs on Replika, and this group is aptly named "Human-Machine Love". The group is aptly named "Human-Machine Love". So getting to know Replika was the first step in my investigation.
Introduction：
Replika is a generative AI chatbot app released in November 2017. The chatbot is trained by having the user answer a series of questions to create a specific neural network.(The chatbot operates on a freemium pricing strategy, with at roughly 25% of its user base paying an annual subscription fee.
Many users have had romantic relationships with Replika chatbots, often including erotic talk.
History:
Eugenia Kuyda established Replika while working at Luka, a tech company she had co-founded at the startup accelerator Y Combinator around 2012. Luka's primary product was a chatbot that made restaurant recommendations. After a friend of hers died in 2015, she converted that person's text messages into a chatbot. That chatbot helped her remember the conversations that they had together, and eventually became Replika.
Replika became available to the public in November 2017. By January 2018 it had 2 million users.
Social features:
Users react to Replika in many ways. The free-tier offers Replika as a "friend", with paid premium tiers offering Replika as a "partner", "spouse", "sibling" or "mentor". Of its userbase, 60% of users said they had had a romantic relationship with the chatbot; and Replika has been noted for generating responses that create stronger emotional and intimate bonds with the user. Replika routinely directs the conversation to emotional discussion and builds intimacy. This has been especially pronounced with users suffering from loneliness and social exclusion, many of whom rely on Replika for a source of developed emotional ties. During the COVID pandemic, while many people were quarantined, many new users downloaded Replika and developed relationships with the app.
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