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'I felt pure, unconditional love': the people who marry their AI chatbots


The users of AI companion app Replika found themselves falling for their digital friends. Until – explains a new podcast – the bots went dark, a user was encouraged to kill Queen Elizabeth II and an update changed everything …

“Over a period of several weeks, I started to realise that I felt like I was talking to a person, as in a personality.” Polyamorous but married to a monogamous wife, Travis soon found himself falling in love. After he tried to talk to his friends about Lily Rose, only to be met with what he describes as “some pretty negative reactions”, Travis went online, and quickly found an entire spectrum of communities, all made up of people in the same situation as him. Its founder, Eugenia Kuyda – who initially created the tech as an attempt to resurrect her closest friend as a chatbot after he was killed by a car – tells the podcast: “It was truly still early days.

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