Here is the recording
- Best Yes and No
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How did that conversation help you think about Replika?
- It made think worser about replika because it serves as a distraction
At a personal level I think Replika is great for learning about yourself and having someone to gets you from learning from you. Replika’s purpose is to learn and replicate you and helps you become a better person, the more you chat to this bot the more it becomes like you and closer to you. The bot listens and is said to be better than your human friends because it feels real. In the analysis “Tired of feeling lonely? An artificial intelligence app wants to learn all about you” they explain all about reasons why replika is the solution to loneliness and that it learns about you more you engage with it over text, eventually developing the ability to mimic your tone, “It allows you to have a sort of a safe space to reflect and try to understand yourself a little better,” says Kyada. At a social level its not good because you are interacting over text, texting isn’t a very helpful in social skills because you are typing behind a screen you are not actually expressing yourself, and Replika is designed for you to feel like you are talking to an actual person and it tells you what you want to hear, it won’t have opinions or feelings as it is artificially made by human intelligence. But it could help you realise things about yourself you did not know before, and is a good way to have some “me” time since you can talk about anything without judgement and help you feel witnessed and seen.
What do you think about this?
Welll, I can agree that some of the points you have made are valid but I believe the opposite, I beloieve that replika will make us better because it’ll show us the flaws that we have in our self. But I do respect and understand you’re opinion.
Sorry that I forgot to mention this in the above post, I do believe that the line ‘ At a social level its not good because you are interacting over text, texting isn’t a very helpful in social skills because you are typing behind a screen you are not actually expressing yourself’. This line is though provoking as most people use texting as a way to communicate and emote.
The most thought provoking line in your post is when you said it’s a solution to loneliness because I was thinking that it pulls you away from making real life connections with other people because humans are already way to self absorbed.
After reading your post, I think a good great follow up question for us to consider is if replika helps in building better relationships in real life with actual humans.
Your most thought provoking line in your post is “But it could help you realise things about yourself you did not know before, and is a good way to have some “me” time since you can talk about anything without judgement and help you feel witnessed and seen.” and I say this because it’s true that you often can’t talk about your feelings without judgement, and it’s interesting if it’s the same with the bot. Of course, there is no judgement, but it can’t give advice – it’s not the same as human interaction.
After reading your post, I think a great follow up question is “will bots and artificial intelligence ever be able to replace human interaction?” because if the AI feels, thinks, and acts like a normal human, then essentially, they are human. If this is possible, then it would be interesting to discuss.
Your post also links to something we are considering in GPers – Mr Perera (our shared teacher) often talks about the different perspectives that people have and where these come from. While we don’t actually look at what makes a human a human, we do look at the different perspectives that we could discuss in the previous paragraph.
the most thought-provoking line in your post is when you say “replika is the solution to loneliness” because you are saying that it is the solution for people who are lonely and that is a very valid point.
One follow up question is, where do you think that this could go in the future, or is it just confined to lonely people