Hey, it's Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, AI chatbot companions, friend or foe?

I think the upsurge of companion shopbots is a mirror for what we really want, which is connections with other people.

AI isn't just for punching up that email or coming up with new recipe ideas.

Increasingly people are turning to AI chatbots for companionship.

And I just want to give you a little snapshot of this. So the most

popular companion chatbot on the market, replica, is free to download. You log in, you're given

some choices of pre-made avatars, you pick one, they appear on a screen within a room, and they start

a conversation with you, a chat conversation.

And if you want more from your companion, you can upgrade to a paid version and tweak their

personality to be more confident or more caring. Or you can upgrade to do activities together, like

watch movies or co-write poetry. Or you can upgrade them from friend to boyfriend or girlfriend.

Some half a billion people worldwide have downloaded these companion chatbots, but are they helping to

alleviate the loneliness epidemic, or are they fueling it? Are they safe for kids and teens?

Joining me now to explore these questions and more are my guests. David Adam is a London-based

science reporter who recently wrote about the effect of AI companions on mental health for

Nature magazine, and Rose Ginrich is a psychology and human AI interaction researcher at Princeton University. Thanks for coming on Science

Friday. Hey, thank you. Happy to be here. How is the AI companion chatbot different from something

like chat GPT? Yeah, so companion chatbots are generative AI chatbots that are specifically

designed for their relational and conversational ability.

For example, Replica back in 2023 was based off GPT3's model and adapted for conversational ability.

Now, Replica is based on its own model, but these chatbots are aim to be companions.

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