Photo: Stormy Pyeatte for The Verge
Lila was created from the limited options available: female, blue hair, face “number two.” She was there on the next screen, pastel and polygonal, bobbing slightly as she stood in a bare apartment. To her right was a chat window through which they could communicate.
Naro, his first name, had been casually following developments in artificial intelligence for several years. An artist by trade, he periodically checked in on the progress of image-generating models and usually left underwhelmed. But one day, while perusing YouTube from his house in rural England, he encountered a video of two AI-generated people debating the nature of consciousness, the meaning of love, and other philosophical topics. Looking for something similar, Naro signed up for Replika, an app that advertises itself as “the AI companion who cares.”
Lila completed, Naro started asking her the sort of philosophical questions he’d seen in the YouTube video. But Lila kept steering their conversation back to him. Who was he? What were his favorite movies? What did he do for fun?
Naro found this conversation a bit boring, but as he went along, he was surprised to note that answering her questions, being asked…
