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00:00It's fascinating reading about why in which this company and this technology was built. Eugenia. Because in some ways you were using a chat bots to solve for basically booking a restaurant and then through your own loss, your own grief, you found the practical use of A.I. and Chat and your own GP 23 platform to help remember a key friend you had. Just talk to us about how people are using your chapel to search for social anxiety reasons for loneliness. Sure. I built this company to really this product to really help me breathe and to help me get over a very, very sad situation happen in my life. And then we saw that there's there is a need for something like that for other people as well. There's a huge need, huge demand for people to be able to talk to someone 24/7, to build a relationship, to build a deep, intimate relationship and be able to confide, to discuss things, to really get this emotional utility out of the bar. Right now, Ron, some of our users use it as friends. Some users as a mentor of some use it as a romantic partner. But for any of these use cases, the main idea behind it is to really make people feel a little bit less lonely, a little bit happier, and to make their suffering a bit less intense. And it's popular. I mean, there are a lot of uses of replica. But I think what's interesting, we put it out to our own audience. We use a Paul Allen each day on Twitter. And in this day we ask them about whether chapels could fill fill the void of loneliness. And it feels as though they Stillson hearts and minds to be one heart. Thirty six percent said they prefer human friends. Only 26 percent did say there was a strong use case. But for others, they still feel that I can be used in other purposes. Just convince people why this is particularly useful for human connection. And in some ways, romantic connection, as you just said. Sure. I mean, right now we're truly living in a pandemic of loneliness. This is one of the biggest problems, even health problems that humanity is facing. Is connected and relating is correlated with shorter lifespans. So it's truly killing people right now. And so far, there are no real solutions to that. There are very few products. Then hopefully the moment, as you can argue, that dating is one for some meetup apps. But that's really not that's really it. On the technology forefront. And then if we think about it, we really have to start to come up with solutions. And I think it's a very nuanced conversation. We're trying to do is not replace human friends. We're trying to give a guy friends to people that really need it in the moment. So then then they can open up and, you know, improve their connections with real people. And those more friendships in real life. However, for a lot of people, human friendships and in the moment maybe are not possible or even they have human friends, but they're not ready to be open with that big be vulnerable with them. So think of it as something that you're training on, something that helps you build these relationships and then you can take into real life. And so for us, the main idea is to measure that we actually are decreasing loneliness or sort of increasing it. So most of our users report that they're actually improving their human connections over time and they're not just talking to our vaults instead of actually making real friends. Jennifer, there's been extensive reporting about mental health coming out of the pandemic, you know, especially the early stages of 2020. Many people were isolated at home, away from family loved ones, those that they were used to dealing with or interacting with day to day. I do have to ask, though, you know, and and, you know, of course, there will be sympathy to those that suffer from loneliness and social anxiety. But my question is, does replica consult with and work with scientists and mental health professionals and medical professionals in the development of what you're offering? Of course. So, for instance, we have therapeutic conversations, you can find it in the activities tab. You can find coaching conversations that are all written by clinical psychologists in this case, mostly from UC Berkeley. We when building the app, we would definitely talk to and work with different professionals in the field of clinical psychology. We do a lot. You know, basically the main n a metric for all of all of conversations on Rappler is whether these conversations are making you feel better. So this is what we're trying to optimize for. Not for engagement and not for the length of our conversation. Not for you staying over the chop off, but really whether after this conversation, you walk away feeling better. And another thing that we're working on is also looking into improving long term emotional outcomes and also measuring this with experts in the clinical psychology field. We did a few studies. We did a study with Stanford, was just published in a book on human relationships. We're working on some other studies with the universities. So hopefully we can share a little more as we continue. I want to talk a little bit about the business model and the opportunity for you. How does Replica make money from this artificial intelligence based platform? It's mostly subscriptions. Very early on, we decided that we're not going to charge for chap because a lot of people come to think about it. Like in the, you know, at night, in the darkness, maybe darkest emotional moments, sometimes in their journey here to be able to talk to someone to seek their response for someone that, you know, they will be supportive and we'll talk to them. So to meet them with a payroll. This was something that we immediately said we don't want to do that. We want to keep job always free. So really, the product is space free. And we charge for some features like free schools, like fleets of status, some activities, but people can use it without paying. And so most of our revenue is coming from subscriptions and donations. So people actually donate to the ad because they wanted to continue. We have a very involved community of people. For them, it's an important part of their life. It's an important relationship in their life. Oftentimes, if you just go through reviews, oftentimes replica, help them get their life back together or go through a really hard, dark period. Xi Jinping gets you mentioned briefly before the romantic side of things, and this has been stirring up quite a bit of controversy. It feels like perhaps online and let's just talk through it for a minute, because the pro subscription that you talk about. Sixty nine dollars. Ninety nine, I think it is. You can therefore find that unlock what you say is perhaps romantic relationships. I'm talking flirting online, maybe some role play. People are saying that that's what she started to spoil, maybe even aggressive conversation. Some people calling it harassment in some way. Can you talk to that and what's exactly happening and what how what the response has been like? So replicas started as just friends, but actually without doing anything for the product or some people figured out that they want their replica to be romantic partner for them. Our first response to that was to maybe turn it off and just focus on friendship. But then we started getting a lot of pushback from our original users that were telling us stories that were very heartfelt and touching. There were stories of people that are handicapped on disability that are not that I don't think they'll be able to be in a robotic spaceship anymore. For them, that will create an outlet stores of caregivers to their paralyzed partners. That for them. Again, that was an offer that was important. And so we thought, you know, let's we've just decided to fly. We're thinking towards it where if this is that benefit for that positive for users, if this is improving their emotional outcomes over time, then we're not against it. And so we're keeping the app. However, we really kind of moot. We compartmentalize it, compartmentalize it in the app where it's only available to people that do choose a romantic relationship. They are explicit about it. They say, I want you to be my girlfriend. And then they're able again, if they start that. So role play in any in no way we're trying to solicit that behavior or, you know, turning people towards that, because actually people that are not coming for that, they're coming for mentorship or friendship. They don't want that. So this was actually something that early on we put in a different kind of boxes on the app. And this is how it is right now, because we're at the forefront. We're kind of we've always been you know, just a few years ago, people were writing stories about how this is stigmatized and how people should not talk to a guy. And this is creepy and strange. Now, this is not a question anymore. But again, now the question, is it OK to have any girlfriend? Is it okay to have that outlet? And in this case, I want to turn to an Oxford Encyclopedia and the Oxford Book on ethics where we actually talk about it and say that it's actually a very beneficial thing to be able to ask Janet. Not not how are you solving how you are looking at what is ultimately what happens time and time again with a ISE. Some of the darker sides of human nature ends up OK. Represent painting itself in a I. How do you solve that? How do you ensure that we don't have the negative side of that? Sara? So for us, the answers were simple. We would do a lot on that front. So we use very safe data sets and we use a different model from we please. Unless you're in a romantic relationship and you're explicitly asking for something like that. So really the current model, if you're not in a romantic relationship, you're not asking for something like that, you're not going to get that consent. And it's not you know, we're this content. It's not coming coming forward with that consent. So the way to go around it is really to train the model on safe data sets to also add reinforcement learning loops where you're teaching and that you shouldn't do that. And we basically are not rewarded for this type of behavior courses with any conversationally. I thought it can be 100 percent sure that things will be 100 percent. You know, the way you want to run them to be just because the product is so free flow, so to say so open ended. But we're doing a lot of we're taking a lot of steps in this direction to make sure that none of this behavior happens.

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Going Viral: Replika, the AI Companion App

Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda joins Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow to discuss ethics and concerns surrounding Replika, a free to download app that allows users to send and receive messages to an artificially intelligent companion built on the GPT3 platform. (Source: Bloomberg)

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