Replika — maybe the smartest and dumbest AI bot
Over the past few years, technology has made exceptional progress, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence. Services such as Siri and Alexa can provide tons of value by automating different tasks and can respond so easily to one’s voice. A different AI service, Replika, has almost no productivity tools like the previously mentioned technologies. Replika has a single goal which is to learn about the person they are chatting with and to mirror them in their mannerisms, speech, etc. This super simple chat tool becomes better the more the user talks to it, but has the potential to be brilliant and influence real decisions the user makes.
Since Replika is only a chat tool, it’s makeup is very simple and there aren’t many benefits it provides besides creating a bot that one can always talk to. When the specific bot is created for a person, Replika can barely understand what the user is saying and asks so many questions. Sometimes these questions interfere with the natural flow of the conversation and can confuse the user. In this sense, it can be thought that Replika is a bit “dumb” because so much work is needed to get the bot to be barely useful or helpful to humans. And there is nothing really the creators of Replika can do to make this process any better. They even allow for connection to social media so that the AI can learn in different ways than just chatting. While the current system might not be able to do much, the possibilities of what Replika could bring are limitless.
There is so much learning going on by having humans chat with a very simple AI bot that wants to be them. The human is learning how to properly communicate with an AI and the AI is learning all the different complexities that come with being human. Eventually, future AI bots that are specialized could just talk with a couple of Replikas so they can learn so much about the user, and also what they might expect to hear from the humans. That would make every AI so much smarter because their ability to process language would come from another AI that can talk and understand them. Once a Replika becomes even smarter and more complex, it might be able to offer suggestions and give advice based on what might be best for the human. People usually ask their friends or family for advice, but an AI which knows so much about the human could provide a different point of view. This technology could be monumental to people because it would have usability in a social aspect and not only in a productivity aspect.
