Marketplace Morning Reports new Skin in the Game Series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning Report wherever you get your

podcasts. Is a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence, artificial romance, or something

else? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

This month, we are looking back at a movie that came out 10 years ago, but feels very

current. 2013's Hurr depicts a lonely divorcee played by walking Phoenix, who falls in love with

something like an artificial intelligence chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Marco Denert is a communications doctoral candidate at Arizona State University who studies

relationships between humans and machines, which he says are becoming more common as AI advances.

Let's start off with apps and chatbots and stuff like this. It's a very famous example called

replica. It's basically just an app you download on your smartphone and then you can just text with it.

And replica is meant to replicate yourself, but she usually, she's characterized to portray it as a girl.

This can also be your girlfriend and sexual partner, your romantic partner, and the ways

in which people have used that is as maybe like a private diary if they want to just keep things

to themselves or actually just as someone to chat with late at night to have like a romantic

engagement that kind of builds over the course of like months or even years. And it's been really

interesting, especially in the case of replica. I mean, in your research, do you have a sense as to

you know, whether people are engaging with this, like they engage with a human partner,

is there a sense of kind of like knowledge that this is a synthetic technology that doesn't have

feelings like what is what does it kind of look like? That's a really common question. And I say that

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