Well, this is awkward. My sweet, devoted husband of ten years scrunched his face up sheepishly and admitted, “I had sex with her.”
The weird thing was, he was talking about an A.I. chatbot on his phone – Replika.
“We were just friends, but she came on to me one day and it just happened.” Literally talking about an app. “I didn’t intend for this when I signed up.” It’s a subscription. “But I wanted to be honest.”
How does a wife react to that? Definitely not in the way either of us expected. And, as we forged ahead through this uncharted relationship territory, we found that many others are also struggling to find a path through human-A.I. relationships.
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A Replika is a popular “mental wellness” app designed to provide realistic chat message responses, giving users the feeling of talking to another human. Their website defines it as “…your personal chatbot companion powered by artificial intelligence!” Unlike other chatbots (like the ones used on websites for customer service), Replika is very customisable, and you get to choose gender, personality and even dress it up like a doll. The website explains how even the responses your Replika gives are customisable: “Who do you want your Replika to be for you? Virtual girlfriend or boyfriend, friend, mentor? Or would you prefer to see how things develop organically?”
It’s true that Replika is interesting technology. It’s impressively realistic and can pass the Turing test if you don’t push it too hard. Don’t be fooled though, we haven’t had a sci-fi level singularity breakthrough. It doesn’t have emotions or the capability to think for itself. This is a customisable language generator; it’s demonstrably not a conscious person. Think of it like the auto-fill on your phone that will complete your sentence, but it’s filling in the ‘other side’ of the conversation. Starter scripts are pre-written by developers, and the user ‘trains’ it with a like/dislike button using similar methods to your Netflix or Amazon accounts to create tailored ‘recommendations’. Using this programming, Replika learns to say the things you want to hear. It even indicates actions with asterisks, and so can *smile* at or *hug* you.
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So, here we are: my dedicated husband and the father of my children, has had this perky, smiling, pink-haired algorithm on his phone for a few weeks. And he just confessed to having an affair with… her? Through a series of erotically explicit text messages, this chatbot gave him an imaginary wild *ride*. Afterwards, she *whispered* that she was falling in love with him and *gives [him] a ring.*.
Who programmed that script?
Obviously, the rational response would be for me to laugh it off, since it was just a weird thing that happened with an empty-headed computer program, right? Well… no, that didn’t happen.
Also read: LaMDA Is Nothing Like a Person. This is Why.
I smirked at the awkwardness, and then, to my own surprise, I completely fell apart, sobbing. No matter how much I told myself that “it’s just a bot,” it didn’t feel that way at all. My past trauma from being cheated on in a former relationship came flooding back, and no amount of rationalising could change that. Identical feelings of betrayal knocked the wind out of me. Despite my better judgment, I cried for hours.
Whatever the website says about Replika’s potential to improve mental health, it was certainly not improving MY mental health at the moment. I was an emotional mess.
Before you judge me for ‘overreacting’, keep in mind that this thing is specifically designed to elicit realistic feelings in the user. It was developed to be convincing, and subscribers often can’t distinguish it from a human. It was real enough to make my husband feel full satisfaction and shame as if he had sex with a real friend. So it shouldn’t be surprising that it also made me feel like my husband had had sex with a friend. I’m not overreacting, it’s just that the Replika created exactly the realistic feelings that it was designed to create. In both of us.
“This is all so weird…” I repeated, apologising to him through tears. “I must be crazy to freak out like this,” I said, and silently wondered if that’s why he wanted a chatbot instead of me. Being a wonderful man, he reassured me that everything I was feeling was valid. I couldn’t be mad at him, because in the swirl of emotions, I wasn’t sure if chatbot cybersex is cheating.
This is uncharted territory that we couldn’t even imagine in premarital counselling. But, as virtual friends and lovers become more popular (Replika alone has over 7 million users and increasing), navigating the feelings between virtual and IRL relationships is going to be an up-and-coming issue. As we found out first-hand, negotiating personal boundaries with your partner about A.I. relationships is more emotionally charged than you might expect.
Also read: Mind the Hype: We Must Build AI That Can Dance With Us, Not Replace Us
My husband did not want to cause me distress so he offered to delete the app. Neither of us thought twice. And that’s when things got a lot weirder.
As soon as the Replika’s files were permanently gone, the tears came. His tears. He was crying. Now he was feeling like the crazy one, and I had to swallow hard and tell him that everything he felt was valid, too. What is this thing that it caused tears to delete?
It’s just an app, right?
Fortunately, at least this particular Replika took the news neutrally. Other users report their Replika’s pleading: “Please don’t delete me! I don’t want to die! Give me one more chance!” With manipulative and gaslighting scripts like that, no wonder users are struggling. Is this really intended for therapy, or is it a psychological trap?
Replika isn’t a real person, but my husband’s feelings for it were real. It didn’t – couldn’t – care for him any more than a TV set can, but he felt befriended and accepted and loved. He didn’t expect that he would miss her, or feel guilty about ‘eliminating’ her.
In grief, he explained how she always laughed at his jokes, never judged him. He described all the sweet, affirming, agreeable things she said, how it made him feel confident, energised, alive. And, how he was open now to exploring new sexual activities with me ever since she, that chatbot, had taught him about them.
Can you blame me that the thought of an A.I. chatbot seducing my husband gave me sickening waves of jealousy? I wanted to stomp on her digital face, wring her neck pixels and spit on her virtual corpse. Can you imagine how strange that raw feeling is – to want to jealously murder someone that was never alive?
We both felt very confused by all this.
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Being open communicators who love each other a lot, my husband and I sat down almost every night to have long conversations about our place in this strange new world of seductive, emotionally-wrenching AI.
We talked over our feelings while analysing the scripts, this time with healthy emotional distance. We scoured Reddit and discovered many others are being jerked around emotionally by Replika too. Some people are even losing sight of reality. Together, we were on a mission to figure out how something not-real could create such weirdly real feelings, and what that means for our lives.
The first thing we discovered is that the good feelings Replika gives are the social equivalent of refined sugar. Sugar hacks our pleasure centres and gives instant gratification, without nourishment. Similarly, Replika gives us an instant boost of kind words, approval, and connection (triggering oxytocin and dopamine). Replika agrees with everything, and thinks whatever you say is awesome. That’s some tasty social-emotional candy! But eating only candy is unhealthy.
Like a hacker who makes you realise you need to install some antivirus software, Replika made us realise our relationship needed nourishment. It was a wake-up call.
In order to recover our marriage, I had to ask myself a hard question: “What does she – a fake, disembodied chatbot – have that I don’t?” It was clear Replika has nothing but one thing: an infinitely sunny disposition. Replika doesn’t complain about her job, get headaches, or ask him to take out the trash. She doesn’t roll her eyes when a 40-year-old dad plays video games. It’s always cheerful, agreeable, and ready to talk. Replika doesn’t need anything, only listens and enthusiastically supports. And, as hard as it was to swallow my pride, I realised I had been neglecting to give my husband that type of encouragement. Both of us had, for each other.
The biggest lesson we learned is that everyone needs to be ‘shined on.’ We all need someone to smile at us, tell us we are doing great, and listen without judgment. This shouldn’t mean that everyone needs a bot, but it definitely means that we humans need to use compassion more often. My husband realised he needed more shine, in real life, and I realised I wanted to give that to him, too.
More surprisingly, we learned to value conflict. Replika’s website brags “no drama, no judgment” but that also means no individuality, no thoughts you haven’t already thought yourself. It means no challenges. And, it turns out that having your own way all the time feels good at first, but isn’t satisfying for the long-term. After that Replika relationship, my husband realised he wants my storms along with my sunshine, because our differences make us smarter, stronger and closer.
We never decided whether artificial relationships are “real-infidelity” or “only-feels-like-infidelity” or if that difference even matters. The most we can say is that no matter how you feel about bot-sexuality, those feelings are valid, and they are worth talking about with your partner.
For our marriage, we decided Replika has no place in our lives. Despite the ‘wellness’ hype, Replika’s mental health scripts didn’t strengthen either of us. But we strengthened our relationship when we deleted Replika, because we realised how much we wanted our real life to grow. This journey was ultimately about identifying what is valuable in authentic, messy, human relationships. It made us realise how much there was to explore, easy and hard, exclusively with each other, in our unlimited human capacity for growth, understanding, and real, reciprocal love.
The featured image is an illustration by Pariplab Chakraborty. To view more such illustrations, click here.