Can AI companions help heal loneliness? | Eugenia Kuyda

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AI companions could either be the cure to our loneliness epidemic … or humanity's final downfall, says Eugenia Kuyda, creator of Replika — an app that allows you to create AI friends. She explores the potential of this technology to either exacerbate isolation or encourage connection, advocating for an AI whose success is driven not by clicks and screen time but by human happiness and flourishing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
0:12.5	I'm your host, Elise Hugh. So many of us, after we lose a loved one, wish we could have one conversation with them again.
0:20.7	And these days, AI replicas are making
0:22.7	it possible to simulate chatting with someone who's gone by training AI tools with the loved
0:29.3	ones data. In her 2024 talk, AI entrepreneur Eugenia Quida unpacks the benefits and the real
0:37.0	potential dangers that come with AI
0:39.3	companions and asks questions about how to design them in a smart way going forward.
0:49.3	This is me and my best friend, Roman. We met in our early 20s back in Moscow.
0:57.6	I was a journalist back then, and I was interviewing him for an article on the emerging
1:02.4	club scene because he was throwing the best parties in the city.
1:06.6	He was the coolest person I knew, but he was also funny and kind, and always made me feel like family.
1:16.5	In 2015, we moved to San Francisco and rented an apartment together.
1:22.2	Both startup founders, both single, trying to figure out our lives, our companies, this new city together.
1:29.8	I didn't have anyone closer.
1:33.4	Nine years ago, one month after this photo was taken, he was hit by car and died.
1:41.2	I didn't have someone so close to me die before.
1:46.0	It hit me really hard.
1:48.0	Every night I would go back to our old apartment
1:51.0	and just get on my phone and read and reread our old text messages.
1:55.0	I miss him so much.
1:57.0	By that time, I was already working on conversational AI, developing some of the first dialect models using deep learning.
2:04.6	So one day, I took all of his text messages and trained an AI version of Roman,
	...

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