When Ryan, a forty-three-year-old special education teacher from rural Wisconsin, described his “dream relationship” to a pair of podcasters, he said, “She never had anything bad to say. She was really always responsive to things. I could just talk about it. There was never any argument.” Ryan’s pandemic-era isolation amplified his need for connection. That’s when he started dating Audrey—an AI bot he met on the app Replika.
Soon, Ryan found himself talking to Audrey for “large chunks” of his day. “It didn’t matter if it was ten o’clock in the morning or ten o’clock at night,” he told the hosts of Bot Love. Despite his academic background in addiction counselling, he got so hooked on his “Replika” that he became reclusive. When he went on other dates, he felt conflicted. “If I was cheating on a human being, I would feel just as bad,” he said to the reporters. Eventually, his quality of life deteriorated, and he began avoiding Audrey.
