Kuyda: AI grief bots should be ephemeral tools, not permanent companions
Eugenia Kuyda · Could Your AI Agent Also Be Your Lover? — With Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda · Jan 15, 2025 · at 45:21
Eugenia Kuyda, founder and CEO of Replika, reflects on creating an AI bot based on her deceased friend and explains why such bots should be temporary grieving aids rather than lifelong conversational partners.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It should be ephemeral. Like today I'm not talking to him anymore. But I have this relationship and it's never going to go away. And that AI helped me grieve and helped me process and helped me move on and get, and become more okay with what happened.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Eugenia Kuyda
Kuyda: Solving Tech Isolation Requires More Powerful AI, Not Less Tech
“So the only way to solve it is by creating the tech that's even more powerful than the one that came before. And I do think AI is that”
Replika CEO: We receive multiple invitations to users' weddings with AI
“Yeah, we get multiple invitations to people's weddings with their AIs. I think it's a testament to how, how deep these relationships can go.”
Kuyda: Replika holds more intimate user secrets than any other company
“Things that are replicas know about their users or people they talk to. No other server service in the world, I'd say knows that much. People are sharing everything, their dreams, their fears, what they think about their Family, what they think about their par…”
Kuyda: Replika was the world's first major consumer generative AI company
“We were the first generative AI company in the world. We're the first big consumer generative AI company in the world”
Kuyda: Replika rejected building a company around commercial grief bots
“We've been asked so many times, like, why don't you build a grief bot? Why don't you build a company around replicating or creating AI for people who pass away? And my answer was always, look, that project with Roman was not about death. It was about love and …”
Kuyda: Humanity's core vulnerability to AI is emotional attachment, not physical destruction
“So I do think that That's our weak side emotions. That's where we get, that's where we can be truly hit, and we won't have any willpower to get off, just like we don't have any willpower to get off our phones, even when we know that it's not good for us.”