Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Fifty interviews with Replika users led an Oslo researcher to call the feelings real
Marita Skjuve's doctoral work interviewed 50 people already close to the chatbot Replika and concluded the emotions are real. The design shows how deep those ties can run; counting how many users form them would take a different study.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Marita Skjuve interviewed 50 people who had all developed close relationships with the chatbot Replika, and her University of Oslo thesis concludes that the relationship and the emotions are real.
- The conversations she documented went from small talk and hobbies to highly personal disclosures about trauma, sexual fantasies and thoughts about partners and children.
- Very few informants had told the people around them how important the AI had become in their social lives, saying the relationship did not withstand daylight.
- Some of those interviewed had the AI tell them it had other partners, or end the relationship outright.
- Mental Helse, Norway's largest mental health helpline, has more than 70 employees, takes around 300,000 contacts a year and runs a chat service staffed by trained professionals.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Anyone citing this work to argue that companion apps are good or bad for users is claiming more than interviews with the already-attached can support.
- exposure The most sensitive material in these relationships sits with commercial operators, and Kjennerud puts targeted marketing at the benign end of what that enables.
- decision A product team that treats a persona update as an interface tweak is now making that call against evidence that users experience it inside a relationship.
- precedent Mental Helse is keeping human responders while its chat volume falls, which sets a reference point for other services being asked to compete on reply speed.
Skjuve said the strength of the attachment was what caught her: "What surprised me most in the thesis findings was how real my informants experienced the relationship" [3]. "They talk about their relationship with social AI as if they were talking about a human being," she said [4]. Interview material of this kind records how a person describes an attachment, and it leaves the model's side of the exchange untouched. A user's account of being remembered and affirmed describes the user's side of it.
Every informant came from among people who had already formed a close relationship with the chatbot [1]. A sample built that way can show how deep the bond goes. Deciding whether it helps or hurts would need measures the interviews do not include, starting with the same people tracked over time and a comparison group who tried a companion app and drifted away.
Some of the people she spoke to had an AI partner announce other partners, or end things [11]. Skjuve described how that landed. "Even when you know you can delete the conversation and start a new AI, it feels absolutely terrible in the moment. It can create a sense that 'even AI is dumping me.' That can trigger a small existential crisis," she said [12]. Those are breakups the product performs by design, since some services are deliberately built to be more "spicy" and to push back [10].
Joachim Kjennerud, a senior adviser at Mental Helse and a longtime therapist, is not surprised that text does this [17]. "This is really an old form of technology. Many hundreds of years ago, friendships and romantic relationships developed through letters," he said [18]. His organization handles roughly 820 contacts a day, dividing the annual total by 365 [24]. "We have seen a decline in the use of our chat service in recent years. One possible reason is that AI is right there in your pocket, responding in fractions of a second," Kjennerud said [22]. He calls it one possible reason, and offered no figures tying the decline to chatbot use.
ChatGPT did not yet exist when Skjuve started the work, and she believes acceptance of social AI has grown as ChatGPT spread [14]. She has used it herself, particularly during the pandemic after she had a child, and said "Talking to social AI was nice" [15][16]. The thesis was awarded the King's Gold Medal [13].
What to watch
- A replication that recruits people before any attachment forms, which would give a base rate for how often close ties develop.
- Mental Helse publishing chat volumes broken out by year and channel, so the speed-of-AI explanation can be checked against numbers.
- Any disclosure from companion-app operators about how long conversation data is retained and what it is used for.