The emotional relief it gave Kuyda inspired her to reshape her San Francisco-based company, Replika, around the creation of artificial intelligence companions who were always available for supportive conversation.Īs the generative AI capabilities of Replika’s chatbots grew, its more adventurous users soon discovered the bots were willing to engage in explicit and sustained sexual conversations. Some of her colleagues fed his texts into software that allowed her to continue to converse with a digital version of him. The startup she ran was struggling to find direction when her best friend died in a car crash in 2015.
Eugenia Kuyda didn’t set out to build sexting chatbots.
