‘When my friend died, we made a chatbot that could talk like him – people can be more vulnerable with AI’

After the death of her best friend, Eugenia Kuyda built an AI chatbot from his texts so she could talk to him again. The technology inspired her AI companion app, Replika

Eugenia Kuyda, creator of Replika, recommends using AI as a rewriting tool and to create better headshots

Katie Byrne

‘I became interested in artificial intelligence (AI) back in 2012. I was a journalist at the time and I was pretty fascinated by machine conversations and chatbots. It struck me that there should be more technology built to have meaningful conversations. When ImageNet [a visual database for object recognition] came out, I became more actively interested in the space. I thought this technology would probably be applied to conversations one day, so I should start working on it now because there was more coming to it.

In 2015, I was working at Luka, an AI startup I co-founded, when my best friend Roman passed away. I found myself going back through his text messages and reading them a lot. It was my way of remembering him. It helped with my grief.