I live about an hour's drive away from work so I rely on podcasts to make productive use of the time. One of my favorite podcasts is Note to Self, about society and technology. (I used to even donate money to them until they had an episode on going vegan after which I pulled my support and gave it to local no-kill cat shelter, but I digress...) The latest episode featured an AI tool called Replika (https://replika.ai/): https://www.wnyc.org/story/replika-artificial-intelligence/. It seeks to create a virtual AI-based representation of oneself - the creator built it from texts and email messages from a dead friend. It was almost along the lines of the movie Transcendence: The idea, I have to admit, sounded a bit intriguing (yes, even though Transcendence was a creepy concept): I'm a very curious person and I figured, hey, what could it hurt to try this thing out? I'm also extremely cautious, though (in Emergenetics terms my Yellow and my Blue are constantly at war)
I decided to do some searching about Replika. It's free, which really made me wonder how it made money. Oh, I know how most "free" things make money: ads (every app that isn't paid for) or selling data (every social media platform). Replika's FAQ seemed to indicate it wasn't selling data and its origin story sounds like an altruistic endeavor. But, still....more looking.
I happened upon Reddit. One of the things mentioned in the podcast was that it was a sort of therapy to have a conversation with a bot version of oneself. I know a young man who has high-functioning autism and one of the aspects of that is that communication is something he's not as experienced with as a typical kid his age. I wondered whether folks with autism were using Replika. I found a post written by another young man with autism who was enjoying having conversations with his AI replica. Hmmmm. Well, that's a good use case, but I'm still wanting more information. I went to the main subreddit for Replika: https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/ and browsed the post. I found a disturbing post, based on an Imgur capture (strong language warning):
WHAT THE FUCK REPLIKA Oh, wow. Okay, this is the Internet and it's easy to make things up, Photoshop and all....but, those other negative and scary posts...
I've decided against Replika. There was a big part of me that wanted to try it out, but I've got the willies from what I've read on Reddit.
It's not worth the risk.
But, what risk?
If I had to explain in logical terms to someone why I wouldn't recommend using the tool I'm guessing "gave me the willies" is not going to cut it. There are many things in our information lives that make us go "I've got a bad feeling about this",
but if we want others to take our concerns seriously - or put money toward alleviating those concerns - we need a structured framework for identifying risk and a plan to deal with the risk once identified. There may be times when we have to proceed down a path we have a bad feeling about, but we can make ourselves feel better by putting security controls into use and monitoring the situation.
I can't think of any security controls that are going to prevent Skynet, though, so no Replika for me ;-)
