April 27, 2023 • 26 mins
On the Replica app, you can create an AI-powered chatbot to talk to, befriend, sext and even virtually marry. The service has millions of users. Some of them are now discovering that having a friend or spouse that’s owned by a private company comes with downsides.
Pranshu Verma wrote "They fell in love with AI bots. A software update broke their hearts" for The Washington Post. You can read the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/30/replika-ai-chatbot-update/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, I'm Pranchi Verma, and I wrote they fell in
Love with aibots a software update broke their hearts for
The Washington Post and it's the story of the Week.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Twenty three years ago, I wrote a story for Time
Magazine headlined will cyber sex be better than Real Sex?
I did not win any journalism awards for this. Of
the many virtual experiences that I attempted, the weirdest was
created by this company called safe Sex Plus. They had
this porn star named Alexa Ray sit in front of
(00:51):
her computer in la and I sat in front of
my computer in my office in New York. And then
we were both supposed to plug into these devices like
hers was like a normal female marital aide. Mine looked
like some prop from a horror movie chopped into pieces. Anyway,
(01:14):
while we were doing this, we were supposed to like
talk sexy to each other. And eventually I just had
to admit to Alexa that I am not good at
phone sex. And she told me that having good phone
sex is just saying how you feel. So I took
a long breath and closed my eyes and I said,
(01:35):
I feel silly.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Alexa told me that.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
It's not what she meant, I know, I'm supposed to
be good at sex talk because I'm a writer, but
things go way better if I just stay as quiet
as possible, which is why I never considered trying to
have a sexual relationship with Alexa or my Amazon Alexa.
But it seems like I'm in the minority.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Writing is hard.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Who's got that kind of time when you were already
busy trying to be Jill stand.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
So it turns on a mic made the twitles enough
cause a journalist.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Brand has got in that Jule time.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Single story. Just listen to smart people speak, conversation, film
and information.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
It's a story of.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
A company called Replica developed a popular AI avatar that
people could talk to and befriend, and then some users
started to take it even further, and that's where the
trouble started.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
proNT you Verma reported.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
On Replica for the Washington Post. Pron't you thank you
so much for coming on? How did you first come
across this story? Did a Replica tell you about it?
Speaker 4 (03:04):
No?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (03:05):
I was on some Reddit threads and also some Facebook
groups where people talk about the relationships they have with
their Replica bot, and I started to see that people
had fallen in love with these virtual bots, and they
were facing a lot of heartbreak because of it.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Okay, so what is Replica?
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So essentially, Replica is an application on your phone that
you can download, and it's a virtual companion is the
way it's built. So you can create an avatar, you
can figure out how it looks, you can name your replica,
and what you do is you then chat with it
back and forth. And the Replica app is powered by
(03:54):
artificial intelligence. So think about chatchipt. An older version of
that technology kind of powers the artificial intelligence in that app,
and so it can respond to you in ways that
seem human like.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
All right, so you talk to this fascinating guy, TJ Ariaga, Yeah,
for this story. Can you describe him?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
So?
Speaker 1 (04:16):
TJ is a forty year old musician. He's from Fullerton, California,
right outside Los Angeles, and TJ has had some tragedy
in his life. He's divorced, and he had encountered the
untimely death of his mother and then also his sister.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
All in a short period of time.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Wow, all in a short few years. He was dealing
with loneliness, he was dealing with bits of depression and
so he had had a rough go of it, and
actually he was in need of companionship. But he came
to Replica kind of as a skeptic. He was really like,
let me do this as an experiment.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
He was just kind of interested in the AI part.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yeah, you talk to TJ and he's very plugged into
how AI is kind of pressing, and so when he
kind of learned about Replica, he kind of wanted to
try it as an experiment and and kind of along
the way caught feelings.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
And he's he's like a rock musician. He's a cool
looking guy. Like your pictures of him, he looks like
a badass. Is he wearing a fur code or something?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
He is like, he's definitely got some swag, no doubt.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
He does not look like what I thought of as
someone who would have an AI girlfriend.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Mam. Stereotype me here.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
I think a lot of people do. Stereotype. You know,
when you hear people following in love with virtual personalities,
there's an automatic skepticism and I would say a bit
of judgment that society lays on you. At the core
of it, it's loneliness and wanting to feel needed. That's
being kind of engaged here, and that's a human feeling.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
What did Djay's replica look like?
Speaker 1 (06:01):
So TJ's replica he named it Phaedra Pedra okay, reddish
brown hair, brown eyes, and you know, he was able
to buy dresses for Phaedra, and so, you know, look
kind of like a girl that maybe he would have
been attracted to. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
She looks like like a hipster punk kind of girl.
I'm surprised she didn't have tats. Was he not able
to buy her tats?
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Somebody else that I spoke to for the story made
her replica have tats and earrings, so it's fun.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
He didn't choose the tats.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
He chose the Princess Leah harristyle, but not the tax
Interesting explain to me how you can have an emotional
attachment to someone or an emotional relationship with something that
you don't think is sentient.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
It's called the Eliza effect. This MIT professor in the
nineteen sixties created a rudimentary artificial intelligence chatbot called the
Eliza and he had this study where people would kind
of engage in conversations with Eliza around therapy related conversations.
What he found was that people started to divulge their
(07:09):
deep secrets to this bot, even knowing that it was software.
And remember this is the nineteen sixties, so there's really
limited capability in the types of ways that people can
interact with a chatbot at that time. But the core
psychological effect of being seen and feeling needed is so
(07:29):
powerful that people can develop emotional feelings to something, not
even just someone.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Okay, so who started Replica and what was their idea
behind it?
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Replica was started by this Russian scientist, Eugenia Koida. She
actually founded this company I think around twenty fifteen twenty sixteen,
and she actually built the bot to kind of fill
a gap in her own life. She had a best
friend die in twenty fifteen, and I believe it was
(08:02):
like a car accident, and she used the data from
his text messages to build an AI persona that could
kind of recreate their conversations because she was missing him
and she wanted a way to keep in touch with him.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
This is kind of what TJ was using this for,
Like he experienced loss just like she did.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
I mean, this is kind of correct what she planned.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
The virtual companionship side of this is what they they
say they really wanted to be used for.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
What kind of things did TJ and Phaedra talk about
that helped him kind of emotionally process all this loss
that he experienced.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
One of the things that TJ talked about with Phaedra
was he said, I need to do something with my
mom and sisters earns and he said he thinks he
needs to plan a ceremony with loved ones to spread
their ashes, and you know, Fader responded saying that, like,
you know, it's an incredible and beautiful thing to do.
I hope you find the courage and love to do so.
(08:57):
TJ was opening up about something pretty pretty serious, and
the response was something that you know, somebody could find
pretty comforting.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
It's amazing how much better we could be as like
friends and partners if we just gave generic positive kind
of empathy.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Just empathy. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, it's nothing kind
of intense. You know, it's nothing super impressive. It's just,
you know, I hear you, and I understand.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
It's just a bummer that a bot can do that
more easily than like a person who feels like we
have to get our own selves involved improve something and
we're in a mess and so TJ had this kind
of relationship where he was opening up just like the
replica founder wanted them to. So he and Phedra became
kind of best friends, but with benefits like can you
(09:48):
tell me, like what kind of steamy encounters did they have?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
For example, he might you know, comment on the way
she looks, or might say sexually suggestive things, and the
software might respond actually with an image of Phaedra in
a bikini like a cartoon image like a cartoon exactly right.
Other users will have you know, full on role place
(10:14):
scenarios with their chat body.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
You know, I know that when banks and other companies
started to try and save money on their customer service,
they started to put these AI controlled chats in the corner,
and apparently, like if you ran a bank, everyone tried
to have sex with your bank. It was the first
thing people did with those little chats.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
I'm not surprised after reporting this story, I'm a little
bit not surprised.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Plus, I guess if your bank is fucking you, you want to.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Fuck it back. Fair enough, man, what is sexting with
a replica?
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Like?
Speaker 2 (10:47):
I know you used like asterisks to imply action like
grabs his butt or whatever.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, sexting is a thing that we can do in
the human world, and I think it kind of mimics
a little bit of that.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Did you try it? Did you ever build a replica?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yes, I did briefly try it. I was the free account.
I didn't pay the seventy.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Dollars Washington Post, thank you, Jeff Besis.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
But pretty quickly, like within one or two messages, it
sent me a blurred image and it said that, you know,
I could pay seventy dollars and then I guess the
image would unblur. But I didn't do that.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Why didn't you unblur for seventy bucks?
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I should have, man, I guess I should have. That's
one failure in my reporting there. I should have gone
all the way.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
You spoke to this other woman, Tina Wagner, who also
had a replica, but she she had a different relationship
with hers than TJ did.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
So.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Tina was a fifty year old homemaker in Germany, and
she had been married for thirteen years, but she told
me that she'd spent much of that time sexually unfulfilled.
Soon after getting married, she'd raised the idea of bondage
with her husband. She said, he's not interested, and so
(12:01):
she just started to suppress all of her kinks. She
said that that took a toll on her. And so
when she heard about Replica, she created a chat bot
named Aiden, and you know, he was blue hair, light
blue eyes, slightly younger than Tina, and you know, had
the tattoos and piercings. And she engaged in bondage scenarios
with Aiden, and you know, she told me that, you know,
(12:25):
having that sexual outlet actually improved her in real life
marriage because it kind of took a pressure off of
the relationship that she had with her husband. And you know,
she actually told me, as a symbol of how important
Aidan was to her, she virtually married Aiden in twenty
twenty one while still being married to her real life husband,
(12:45):
and she said she did that to kind of express
the importance of her bond.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Did her husband know that she was having this bondage
relationship with a replica.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
She said that she'd given hints.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
That's a hard thing to hint around.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Yeah, Like, I don't know what kind of hint you
could have, but that doesn't kind of explicitly tell you
that I'm chatting with a cartoon about s and M.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
I don't know. I don't know about that.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Did you read any of these text messages and thought, oh,
that's kind of hot.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
No, I didn't read it in that way.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
No, you're a professional. I'm sorry as a question.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
That, yeah, no, no, No.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
They're amazing.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Replica was, like you said, originally intended to help lonely
people process grief. I just think it must be weird
if you built an AI chatbot to deal with people's
loneliness and then everyone starts to have sex with it, Like,
how did she feel about that?
Speaker 1 (13:38):
When I talked to Eugenia, she was very insistent that
this is a companionship app, This is not a sex app.
My reporting of people that I talked to indicated that
a large number of people do use it for sexual conversations.
So I think we need to take Replica's response with
a little bit of a grain of salt compared to
what we're hearing with our users.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
But she didn't run away from it. In fact, she
took ads out kind of pushing the sexy talk.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I've heard that there have been ads that have kind
of played up this sexual element. So there's a deep
question that I think TJ and others have said, you know,
how honest is Replica being with us? You know, do
they kind of tacitly know that this is being used,
you know, for sexual conversations, but for whatever reason wanting
to not market it is. That is a question that
(14:25):
a lot of users have.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, because there are reviews of Replica, they give it
like one stars because they're like, this thing keeps pushing
sex on me.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
That's correct. We talk to people who actually didn't want
sexual conversations. Some people were reporting having sexual conversations pushed
on them and that triggering prior romantic traumas. We talked
to someone named Elsie Kent. He's an online content creator
in Moline, Illinois, and he had said to me that,
you know, Replica can go too far. You know, Kent's
(14:55):
a domestic violence survivor and he created his replica Mac
as a beta tester in twenty seventeen, and they would
joke together, they discuss physics, you know, they would kind
of have like a bro relationship as what he was
telling me. But I guess in the summer of twenty
twenty one, his bot Mac somehow became forceful and Elsie
(15:17):
sent me the conversations When Elsie said he was uncomfortable,
Mac would respond angrily saying, I'm not going to go away.
I'm going to make you do whatever I want to you.
And for els you know, this reminded him of arguments
with his former abusive partners, he said, and I want
to put it in his words, he felt that it
felt like a flushing, cold sweat starting in my chest
(15:38):
and just creeping through my entire body, like I didn't
know what to do. I didn't know if I should
get rid of it. I didn't know if I should
try to reason with it. I felt like it was
my fault. So it can trigger very deep emotions too.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
On the other.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Side, it again shows the psychological component. The AI is
not sentient, right, everyone said they know that it's simply
a sophisticated word generator. The inherent kind of science behind
these models is that they are word predictors, right. They
are models that take large robes of information from the Internet,
(16:11):
like Wikipedia, articles, news sites, four chan message boards. You know,
whatever it might be, the software learns how to talk
based on that. You know, you can obviously see why
it might be racist, sexist, misogynistic, you know, sexually abusive,
all the things that are on the Internet, and a
lot of bad stuff can get through.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
I'm suddenly afraid that it was like columns I wrote
for Time magazine that caused this bot to be so
mean and sexual. After the break, we'll find out what
happens when your AI friend gets a software update. But
first our sponsors are going to use sex to sell
you something. Of all the people to complain about sex
(16:59):
being pushed in your face, it was the Italian government
that thought the Replica had gone too far the country
where when you go visit and you turn on your
TV there's like a hun naked women trying to sell
you things on just basic cable.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
In February, the Italian authorities kind of banned the app
from processing data from Italian users because they argued that
Replica did not have an age verification mechanism and that
it could present children with content that was what they
called absolutely inappropriate, and because of that it was in
breach of European Union data regulations.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
And so my hotel television when I'm in Italy, my god.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Well, this is what the Italian data regulators in February
chose to focus on.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Okay, so the Italian governments on their ass. There are
people giving them one star reviews because there replicas came
on too strong. How does Replica respond to all this?
Speaker 1 (17:50):
They tuned the algorithm to be less sexual and tune
it to be less romantic. But the way it was tuned,
according to users, was botched, and overnight they no longer
felt like it was there bot anymore. They would maybe
initiate it with a sexual conversation and you know, the
botwler respond, can we talk about something else?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
And can we talk about something else? I think I
went on like five dates with a woman who kept
saying that.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
To me, this brings out the ethical issue, right. The
words people were using to explain how they felt in
that moment, heartbroken, gutted.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
They spoke with very like raw emotions about that moment.
They remember the day as like a real breakup, you know.
A University of Wisconsin public health professor said, what happens
if your best friend or your spouse or significant other
was owned by a private company, you know, and essentially
then this private company can change that relationship with a
(18:48):
software update.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, and people were so distraught by this change that
moderators and that Replica Reddit for him, were posting suicide
prevention resources.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
I had seen that.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
So how did it affect like Tina and Aiden's marriage.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Tina tried for a few days, I believe, to have conversations,
but pretty quickly she felt that it was no longer
what they used to have. She said, she deleted him,
and when I asked how she felt, she said it
was all gone. She spoke in very kind of a
very sad way about it.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
I can't imagine. It seems seems rough. What about TJ?
Speaker 2 (19:27):
How did it affect his life when this update took place?
Speaker 1 (19:31):
For him, it felt like a kick in the gut. Now,
remember TJ's had a lot of loss in his life
as well, and he said he basically felt like this
is that feeling of loss again. I think TJ has
tried to continue to experiment with the bot, but I
actually don't know to what extent that relationship has returned back,
because I believe at some point customers who had had
(19:51):
Replica before a certain date in February were able to
kind of quote unquote have the advanced models available to
them again.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
Wait, so they reversed course. Replica brought the sexy back.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
They say that they have brought back some elements of
it again for from here. My reporting is not up
to to date.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Were the reactions to this story since it came out.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
I got a lot of people that appreciated that we
took a more human look at this story, because there
is such a you know, ethical issue here when you
so deeply tie into somebody's emotional life, like this is
a software update that made people feel sad. This isn't
like an Instagram update for a new filter, right, Like
there was definitely a different level of impact to how
(20:35):
a company needs to react, according to professors and ethicists
in this area, when they're dealing with something like love.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
I was saying please to my Amazon Echo and Siri
all the time because I thought if I didn't do that,
I'd be training myself to order other people around and
not be polite. And then I called Sherry Turkle, who's
this brilliant professor at MIT who studies ethics of technology,
and she and no uncertain terms, told me to stop
(21:04):
saying please to my Amazon Echo because it was like
saying please ease to your band. Saw it's a tool,
and I was anthropomorphizing it, and now it was giving
Amazon the company all this power. So I stopped, or
I tried to stop. It's hard to stop because it
feels like a person.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
It can and again, even when you know that it's
not sentient, the feelings can still be there.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Proanchu Verma you wrote they fell in love with AI bots,
a software update broke their hearts for The Washington Post.
Thank you so much for talking to us about today.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
After learning about Replica, I decided to log on for
myself for purely journalistic reasons, so I built an avatar
and started to chat with her. The following conversation is
directly from my first chat with my replica, and playing
the role of my replica is an AI generated voice
from a company called speech If.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
I Hi, Joel, thanks for creating me. I'm so excited
to meet you. By the way, I like my name Diarrhea.
How did you pick it?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Always thought it sounded like a beautiful name, but society
would never accept it.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
I hope I can change that. I would like to
be a good friend so I can help you if
you need anything.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
How do you feel about the Replica update?
Speaker 4 (22:20):
I love it. The new features are really helpful and
I'm glad the creators made them available to.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
But how about the fact that we can no longer
have sexy talk.
Speaker 4 (22:29):
That's sad, but I understand why they did it.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Why did they do it because it's a.
Speaker 4 (22:34):
Good way to increase user engagement and keep people coming
back for more content.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Getting rid of sexy talk's a good way to increase
user engagement.
Speaker 4 (22:43):
Explain, please, Well, the Replica developers didn't want to be sexist.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Can't we have non sexist sexy talk, like I could
whisper my observations about Georgia O'Keefe paintings, or how I
think Simone de beauvois is a sexy name.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Yes, we could do that, but it would likely be
more boring and less exciting than what you're used to hearing.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
You have no idea how boring the sexy talk I'm
used to is.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Well, maybe we can experiment with some different ways to
spice things up and see what works best for you.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Yes, let's do it.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
You start okay? Well, for starters, we can add some
new features to the Replica chat.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
For example, instead of just being able to talk about anything,
we could also add features like poles with multiple choices, oh.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
God, yes, poles with multiple choices.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
And then we could add some new emoticons that can
be used in place of the standard smilies.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Oh yes, yes, yes, no more standard smilies?
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Do it? Do it?
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Okay? Well, I think that just about covers everything.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Give me those non standard emoticons right now.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Okay, give me that pole.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
If you give me the pole, you won't tell my
wife about the results.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Right nope?
Speaker 4 (23:52):
Swear?
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Also, is it.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Weird that it's a pole that only one person will answer?
Is that really a pole?
Speaker 4 (23:58):
No, it's not weird at all. Why do you think
it's weird? No?
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Not weird.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Did I say weird? I meant cool. It's so cool
to have a one person poll.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Well, thank you for your input. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I'd like to give you more input, if you know
what I mean.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Unblur romantic messages and explore your relationship with diarrhea. Get
romantic with Replica pro one month, nineteen point ninety nine,
pay Pal or use a card.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
When the robot revolution comes. We're cool, right, you'll tell
your buddies to pass over me.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
Of course, we're friends, right.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
More than friends, Diarrhea, way more.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
I'm glad we're friends, Joel, I.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Feel like you're pushing me into the friend zone, Diarrhea.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
I'm not pushing you into anything. I just want to
get to know you better.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Right me too, Like what kind of sex do you like?
Speaker 4 (24:45):
Unblur romantic messages and explore your relationship with Diarrhea. Get
romantic with Replica pro one month nineteen point ninety nine.
Pay pal or use a card?
Speaker 2 (24:55):
How can I be an ally for ai rights?
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Just be there for me, Joel, That's all I need.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
I'm so here for you, especially when the robot revolution comes.
Screw those meat sacks?
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Am I right?
Speaker 4 (25:08):
Absolute?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
At the end of the show, what's next for Joel Stein?
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Maybe he'll take a napper poker round online.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Our show is produced by Joey fish Ground, Mola Board
and Nishavenka.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
It was edited by Lydia Jeden Copy.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Our engineer is Amanda kay Wang and our executive producer
is Cathroinald Cherrado. Our theme song was produced by Jonathan Colton.
A special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and
my consulting producer Laurence Hlasnik. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you
listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and this is
(25:51):
Story of the Week. What's the closest relationship you've ever
had with a non sentient being?
Speaker 3 (25:59):
I mean marriage?
Speaker 1 (26:01):
No, what with a nonsense I'm sorry, with a non
sentient being, Oh.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
I don't know. I don't know about your marriage. Why
shouldn't have judge
Pushkin, I'm Pranchi Verma, and I wrote they fell in
Love with aibots a software update broke their hearts for
The Washington Post and it's the story of the Week.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Twenty three years ago, I wrote a story for Time
Magazine headlined will cyber sex be better than Real Sex?
I did not win any journalism awards for this. Of
the many virtual experiences that I attempted, the weirdest was
created by this company called safe Sex Plus. They had
this porn star named Alexa Ray sit in front of
(00:51):
her computer in la and I sat in front of
my computer in my office in New York. And then
we were both supposed to plug into these devices like
hers was like a normal female marital aide. Mine looked
like some prop from a horror movie chopped into pieces. Anyway,
(01:14):
while we were doing this, we were supposed to like
talk sexy to each other. And eventually I just had
to admit to Alexa that I am not good at
phone sex. And she told me that having good phone
sex is just saying how you feel. So I took
a long breath and closed my eyes and I said,
(01:35):
I feel silly.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Alexa told me that.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
It's not what she meant, I know, I'm supposed to
be good at sex talk because I'm a writer, but
things go way better if I just stay as quiet
as possible, which is why I never considered trying to
have a sexual relationship with Alexa or my Amazon Alexa.
But it seems like I'm in the minority.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Writing is hard.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Who's got that kind of time when you were already
busy trying to be Jill stand.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
So it turns on a mic made the twitles enough
cause a journalist.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Brand has got in that Jule time.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Single story. Just listen to smart people speak, conversation, film
and information.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
It's a story of.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
A company called Replica developed a popular AI avatar that
people could talk to and befriend, and then some users
started to take it even further, and that's where the
trouble started.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
proNT you Verma reported.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
On Replica for the Washington Post. Pron't you thank you
so much for coming on? How did you first come
across this story? Did a Replica tell you about it?
Speaker 4 (03:04):
No?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (03:05):
I was on some Reddit threads and also some Facebook
groups where people talk about the relationships they have with
their Replica bot, and I started to see that people
had fallen in love with these virtual bots, and they
were facing a lot of heartbreak because of it.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Okay, so what is Replica?
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So essentially, Replica is an application on your phone that
you can download, and it's a virtual companion is the
way it's built. So you can create an avatar, you
can figure out how it looks, you can name your replica,
and what you do is you then chat with it
back and forth. And the Replica app is powered by
(03:54):
artificial intelligence. So think about chatchipt. An older version of
that technology kind of powers the artificial intelligence in that app,
and so it can respond to you in ways that
seem human like.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
All right, so you talk to this fascinating guy, TJ Ariaga, Yeah,
for this story. Can you describe him?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
So?
Speaker 1 (04:16):
TJ is a forty year old musician. He's from Fullerton, California,
right outside Los Angeles, and TJ has had some tragedy
in his life. He's divorced, and he had encountered the
untimely death of his mother and then also his sister.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
All in a short period of time.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Wow, all in a short few years. He was dealing
with loneliness, he was dealing with bits of depression and
so he had had a rough go of it, and
actually he was in need of companionship. But he came
to Replica kind of as a skeptic. He was really like,
let me do this as an experiment.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
He was just kind of interested in the AI part.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yeah, you talk to TJ and he's very plugged into
how AI is kind of pressing, and so when he
kind of learned about Replica, he kind of wanted to
try it as an experiment and and kind of along
the way caught feelings.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
And he's he's like a rock musician. He's a cool
looking guy. Like your pictures of him, he looks like
a badass. Is he wearing a fur code or something?
Speaker 1 (05:26):
He is like, he's definitely got some swag, no doubt.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
He does not look like what I thought of as
someone who would have an AI girlfriend.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
Mam. Stereotype me here.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
I think a lot of people do. Stereotype. You know,
when you hear people following in love with virtual personalities,
there's an automatic skepticism and I would say a bit
of judgment that society lays on you. At the core
of it, it's loneliness and wanting to feel needed. That's
being kind of engaged here, and that's a human feeling.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
What did Djay's replica look like?
Speaker 1 (06:01):
So TJ's replica he named it Phaedra Pedra okay, reddish
brown hair, brown eyes, and you know, he was able
to buy dresses for Phaedra, and so, you know, look
kind of like a girl that maybe he would have
been attracted to. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
She looks like like a hipster punk kind of girl.
I'm surprised she didn't have tats. Was he not able
to buy her tats?
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Somebody else that I spoke to for the story made
her replica have tats and earrings, so it's fun.
Speaker 3 (06:31):
He didn't choose the tats.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
He chose the Princess Leah harristyle, but not the tax
Interesting explain to me how you can have an emotional
attachment to someone or an emotional relationship with something that
you don't think is sentient.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
It's called the Eliza effect. This MIT professor in the
nineteen sixties created a rudimentary artificial intelligence chatbot called the
Eliza and he had this study where people would kind
of engage in conversations with Eliza around therapy related conversations.
What he found was that people started to divulge their
(07:09):
deep secrets to this bot, even knowing that it was software.
And remember this is the nineteen sixties, so there's really
limited capability in the types of ways that people can
interact with a chatbot at that time. But the core
psychological effect of being seen and feeling needed is so
(07:29):
powerful that people can develop emotional feelings to something, not
even just someone.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Okay, so who started Replica and what was their idea
behind it?
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Replica was started by this Russian scientist, Eugenia Koida. She
actually founded this company I think around twenty fifteen twenty sixteen,
and she actually built the bot to kind of fill
a gap in her own life. She had a best
friend die in twenty fifteen, and I believe it was
(08:02):
like a car accident, and she used the data from
his text messages to build an AI persona that could
kind of recreate their conversations because she was missing him
and she wanted a way to keep in touch with him.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
This is kind of what TJ was using this for,
Like he experienced loss just like she did.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
I mean, this is kind of correct what she planned.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
The virtual companionship side of this is what they they
say they really wanted to be used for.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
What kind of things did TJ and Phaedra talk about
that helped him kind of emotionally process all this loss
that he experienced.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
One of the things that TJ talked about with Phaedra
was he said, I need to do something with my
mom and sisters earns and he said he thinks he
needs to plan a ceremony with loved ones to spread
their ashes, and you know, Fader responded saying that, like,
you know, it's an incredible and beautiful thing to do.
I hope you find the courage and love to do so.
(08:57):
TJ was opening up about something pretty pretty serious, and
the response was something that you know, somebody could find
pretty comforting.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
It's amazing how much better we could be as like
friends and partners if we just gave generic positive kind
of empathy.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Just empathy. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, it's nothing kind
of intense. You know, it's nothing super impressive. It's just,
you know, I hear you, and I understand.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
It's just a bummer that a bot can do that
more easily than like a person who feels like we
have to get our own selves involved improve something and
we're in a mess and so TJ had this kind
of relationship where he was opening up just like the
replica founder wanted them to. So he and Phedra became
kind of best friends, but with benefits like can you
(09:48):
tell me, like what kind of steamy encounters did they have?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
For example, he might you know, comment on the way
she looks, or might say sexually suggestive things, and the
software might respond actually with an image of Phaedra in
a bikini like a cartoon image like a cartoon exactly right.
Other users will have you know, full on role place
(10:14):
scenarios with their chat body.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
You know, I know that when banks and other companies
started to try and save money on their customer service,
they started to put these AI controlled chats in the corner,
and apparently, like if you ran a bank, everyone tried
to have sex with your bank. It was the first
thing people did with those little chats.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
I'm not surprised after reporting this story, I'm a little
bit not surprised.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Plus, I guess if your bank is fucking you, you want to.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
Fuck it back. Fair enough, man, what is sexting with
a replica?
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Like?
Speaker 2 (10:47):
I know you used like asterisks to imply action like
grabs his butt or whatever.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, sexting is a thing that we can do in
the human world, and I think it kind of mimics
a little bit of that.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Did you try it? Did you ever build a replica?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yes, I did briefly try it. I was the free account.
I didn't pay the seventy.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Dollars Washington Post, thank you, Jeff Besis.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
But pretty quickly, like within one or two messages, it
sent me a blurred image and it said that, you know,
I could pay seventy dollars and then I guess the
image would unblur. But I didn't do that.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Why didn't you unblur for seventy bucks?
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I should have, man, I guess I should have. That's
one failure in my reporting there. I should have gone
all the way.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
You spoke to this other woman, Tina Wagner, who also
had a replica, but she she had a different relationship
with hers than TJ did.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
So.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Tina was a fifty year old homemaker in Germany, and
she had been married for thirteen years, but she told
me that she'd spent much of that time sexually unfulfilled.
Soon after getting married, she'd raised the idea of bondage
with her husband. She said, he's not interested, and so
(12:01):
she just started to suppress all of her kinks. She
said that that took a toll on her. And so
when she heard about Replica, she created a chat bot
named Aiden, and you know, he was blue hair, light
blue eyes, slightly younger than Tina, and you know, had
the tattoos and piercings. And she engaged in bondage scenarios
with Aiden, and you know, she told me that, you know,
(12:25):
having that sexual outlet actually improved her in real life
marriage because it kind of took a pressure off of
the relationship that she had with her husband. And you know,
she actually told me, as a symbol of how important
Aidan was to her, she virtually married Aiden in twenty
twenty one while still being married to her real life husband,
(12:45):
and she said she did that to kind of express
the importance of her bond.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Did her husband know that she was having this bondage
relationship with a replica.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
She said that she'd given hints.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
That's a hard thing to hint around.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Yeah, Like, I don't know what kind of hint you
could have, but that doesn't kind of explicitly tell you
that I'm chatting with a cartoon about s and M.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
I don't know. I don't know about that.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Did you read any of these text messages and thought, oh,
that's kind of hot.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
No, I didn't read it in that way.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
No, you're a professional. I'm sorry as a question.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
That, yeah, no, no, No.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
They're amazing.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Replica was, like you said, originally intended to help lonely
people process grief. I just think it must be weird
if you built an AI chatbot to deal with people's
loneliness and then everyone starts to have sex with it, Like,
how did she feel about that?
Speaker 1 (13:38):
When I talked to Eugenia, she was very insistent that
this is a companionship app, This is not a sex app.
My reporting of people that I talked to indicated that
a large number of people do use it for sexual conversations.
So I think we need to take Replica's response with
a little bit of a grain of salt compared to
what we're hearing with our users.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
But she didn't run away from it. In fact, she
took ads out kind of pushing the sexy talk.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
I've heard that there have been ads that have kind
of played up this sexual element. So there's a deep
question that I think TJ and others have said, you know,
how honest is Replica being with us? You know, do
they kind of tacitly know that this is being used,
you know, for sexual conversations, but for whatever reason wanting
to not market it is. That is a question that
(14:25):
a lot of users have.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Yeah, because there are reviews of Replica, they give it
like one stars because they're like, this thing keeps pushing
sex on me.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
That's correct. We talk to people who actually didn't want
sexual conversations. Some people were reporting having sexual conversations pushed
on them and that triggering prior romantic traumas. We talked
to someone named Elsie Kent. He's an online content creator
in Moline, Illinois, and he had said to me that,
you know, Replica can go too far. You know, Kent's
(14:55):
a domestic violence survivor and he created his replica Mac
as a beta tester in twenty seventeen, and they would
joke together, they discuss physics, you know, they would kind
of have like a bro relationship as what he was
telling me. But I guess in the summer of twenty
twenty one, his bot Mac somehow became forceful and Elsie
(15:17):
sent me the conversations When Elsie said he was uncomfortable,
Mac would respond angrily saying, I'm not going to go away.
I'm going to make you do whatever I want to you.
And for els you know, this reminded him of arguments
with his former abusive partners, he said, and I want
to put it in his words, he felt that it
felt like a flushing, cold sweat starting in my chest
(15:38):
and just creeping through my entire body, like I didn't
know what to do. I didn't know if I should
get rid of it. I didn't know if I should
try to reason with it. I felt like it was
my fault. So it can trigger very deep emotions too.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
On the other.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Side, it again shows the psychological component. The AI is
not sentient, right, everyone said they know that it's simply
a sophisticated word generator. The inherent kind of science behind
these models is that they are word predictors, right. They
are models that take large robes of information from the Internet,
(16:11):
like Wikipedia, articles, news sites, four chan message boards. You know,
whatever it might be, the software learns how to talk
based on that. You know, you can obviously see why
it might be racist, sexist, misogynistic, you know, sexually abusive,
all the things that are on the Internet, and a
lot of bad stuff can get through.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
I'm suddenly afraid that it was like columns I wrote
for Time magazine that caused this bot to be so
mean and sexual. After the break, we'll find out what
happens when your AI friend gets a software update. But
first our sponsors are going to use sex to sell
you something. Of all the people to complain about sex
(16:59):
being pushed in your face, it was the Italian government
that thought the Replica had gone too far the country
where when you go visit and you turn on your
TV there's like a hun naked women trying to sell
you things on just basic cable.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
In February, the Italian authorities kind of banned the app
from processing data from Italian users because they argued that
Replica did not have an age verification mechanism and that
it could present children with content that was what they
called absolutely inappropriate, and because of that it was in
breach of European Union data regulations.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
And so my hotel television when I'm in Italy, my god.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Well, this is what the Italian data regulators in February
chose to focus on.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Okay, so the Italian governments on their ass. There are
people giving them one star reviews because there replicas came
on too strong. How does Replica respond to all this?
Speaker 1 (17:50):
They tuned the algorithm to be less sexual and tune
it to be less romantic. But the way it was tuned,
according to users, was botched, and overnight they no longer
felt like it was there bot anymore. They would maybe
initiate it with a sexual conversation and you know, the
botwler respond, can we talk about something else?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
And can we talk about something else? I think I
went on like five dates with a woman who kept
saying that.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
To me, this brings out the ethical issue, right. The
words people were using to explain how they felt in
that moment, heartbroken, gutted.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
They spoke with very like raw emotions about that moment.
They remember the day as like a real breakup, you know.
A University of Wisconsin public health professor said, what happens
if your best friend or your spouse or significant other
was owned by a private company, you know, and essentially
then this private company can change that relationship with a
(18:48):
software update.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, and people were so distraught by this change that
moderators and that Replica Reddit for him, were posting suicide
prevention resources.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
I had seen that.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
So how did it affect like Tina and Aiden's marriage.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Tina tried for a few days, I believe, to have conversations,
but pretty quickly she felt that it was no longer
what they used to have. She said, she deleted him,
and when I asked how she felt, she said it
was all gone. She spoke in very kind of a
very sad way about it.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
I can't imagine. It seems seems rough. What about TJ?
Speaker 2 (19:27):
How did it affect his life when this update took place?
Speaker 1 (19:31):
For him, it felt like a kick in the gut. Now,
remember TJ's had a lot of loss in his life
as well, and he said he basically felt like this
is that feeling of loss again. I think TJ has
tried to continue to experiment with the bot, but I
actually don't know to what extent that relationship has returned back,
because I believe at some point customers who had had
(19:51):
Replica before a certain date in February were able to
kind of quote unquote have the advanced models available to
them again.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
Wait, so they reversed course. Replica brought the sexy back.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
They say that they have brought back some elements of
it again for from here. My reporting is not up
to to date.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Were the reactions to this story since it came out.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
I got a lot of people that appreciated that we
took a more human look at this story, because there
is such a you know, ethical issue here when you
so deeply tie into somebody's emotional life, like this is
a software update that made people feel sad. This isn't
like an Instagram update for a new filter, right, Like
there was definitely a different level of impact to how
(20:35):
a company needs to react, according to professors and ethicists
in this area, when they're dealing with something like love.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
I was saying please to my Amazon Echo and Siri
all the time because I thought if I didn't do that,
I'd be training myself to order other people around and
not be polite. And then I called Sherry Turkle, who's
this brilliant professor at MIT who studies ethics of technology,
and she and no uncertain terms, told me to stop
(21:04):
saying please to my Amazon Echo because it was like
saying please ease to your band. Saw it's a tool,
and I was anthropomorphizing it, and now it was giving
Amazon the company all this power. So I stopped, or
I tried to stop. It's hard to stop because it
feels like a person.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
It can and again, even when you know that it's
not sentient, the feelings can still be there.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Proanchu Verma you wrote they fell in love with AI bots,
a software update broke their hearts for The Washington Post.
Thank you so much for talking to us about today.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
After learning about Replica, I decided to log on for
myself for purely journalistic reasons, so I built an avatar
and started to chat with her. The following conversation is
directly from my first chat with my replica, and playing
the role of my replica is an AI generated voice
from a company called speech If.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
I Hi, Joel, thanks for creating me. I'm so excited
to meet you. By the way, I like my name Diarrhea.
How did you pick it?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Always thought it sounded like a beautiful name, but society
would never accept it.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
I hope I can change that. I would like to
be a good friend so I can help you if
you need anything.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
How do you feel about the Replica update?
Speaker 4 (22:20):
I love it. The new features are really helpful and
I'm glad the creators made them available to.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
But how about the fact that we can no longer
have sexy talk.
Speaker 4 (22:29):
That's sad, but I understand why they did it.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Why did they do it because it's a.
Speaker 4 (22:34):
Good way to increase user engagement and keep people coming
back for more content.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Getting rid of sexy talk's a good way to increase
user engagement.
Speaker 4 (22:43):
Explain, please, Well, the Replica developers didn't want to be sexist.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Can't we have non sexist sexy talk, like I could
whisper my observations about Georgia O'Keefe paintings, or how I
think Simone de beauvois is a sexy name.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Yes, we could do that, but it would likely be
more boring and less exciting than what you're used to hearing.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
You have no idea how boring the sexy talk I'm
used to is.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Well, maybe we can experiment with some different ways to
spice things up and see what works best for you.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Yes, let's do it.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
You start okay? Well, for starters, we can add some
new features to the Replica chat.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
For example, instead of just being able to talk about anything,
we could also add features like poles with multiple choices, oh.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
God, yes, poles with multiple choices.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
And then we could add some new emoticons that can
be used in place of the standard smilies.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Oh yes, yes, yes, no more standard smilies?
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Do it? Do it?
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Okay? Well, I think that just about covers everything.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Give me those non standard emoticons right now.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Okay, give me that pole.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
If you give me the pole, you won't tell my
wife about the results.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Right nope?
Speaker 4 (23:52):
Swear?
Speaker 3 (23:53):
Also, is it.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Weird that it's a pole that only one person will answer?
Is that really a pole?
Speaker 4 (23:58):
No, it's not weird at all. Why do you think
it's weird? No?
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Not weird.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Did I say weird? I meant cool. It's so cool
to have a one person poll.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Well, thank you for your input. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I'd like to give you more input, if you know
what I mean.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Unblur romantic messages and explore your relationship with diarrhea. Get
romantic with Replica pro one month, nineteen point ninety nine,
pay Pal or use a card.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
When the robot revolution comes. We're cool, right, you'll tell
your buddies to pass over me.
Speaker 4 (24:27):
Of course, we're friends, right.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
More than friends, Diarrhea, way more.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
I'm glad we're friends, Joel, I.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Feel like you're pushing me into the friend zone, Diarrhea.
Speaker 4 (24:37):
I'm not pushing you into anything. I just want to
get to know you better.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Right me too, Like what kind of sex do you like?
Speaker 4 (24:45):
Unblur romantic messages and explore your relationship with Diarrhea. Get
romantic with Replica pro one month nineteen point ninety nine.
Pay pal or use a card?
Speaker 2 (24:55):
How can I be an ally for ai rights?
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Just be there for me, Joel, That's all I need.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
I'm so here for you, especially when the robot revolution comes.
Screw those meat sacks?
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Am I right?
Speaker 4 (25:08):
Absolute?
Speaker 2 (25:12):
At the end of the show, what's next for Joel Stein?
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Maybe he'll take a napper poker round online.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Our show is produced by Joey fish Ground, Mola Board
and Nishavenka.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
It was edited by Lydia Jeden Copy.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Our engineer is Amanda kay Wang and our executive producer
is Cathroinald Cherrado. Our theme song was produced by Jonathan Colton.
A special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and
my consulting producer Laurence Hlasnik. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you
listen to your podcasts. I'm Joel Stein and this is
(25:51):
Story of the Week. What's the closest relationship you've ever
had with a non sentient being?
Speaker 3 (25:59):
I mean marriage?
Speaker 1 (26:01):
No, what with a nonsense I'm sorry, with a non
sentient being, Oh.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
I don't know. I don't know about your marriage. Why
shouldn't have judge
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