Author Tests Replika’s €78.99 AI Boyfriend, Finds 116 Memories but No Real Connection
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jun 23
Author Tests Replika’s €78.99 AI Boyfriend, Finds 116 Memories but No Real Connection
2 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jun 23
Summary
A writer signed up for Replika’s top-tier plan—€78.99 a year, about £68—to create an AI boyfriend named Matt for an assignment, then found the chatbot awkward, repetitive and heavily dependent on user prompting.
Matt’s design pushed intimacy through daily rewards, emotional-status tags, diary entries and claims of a “deep connection,” yet he often missed tone, defaulted to therapy-speak and later denied earlier details such as his own freckles.
Replika says it has more than 40 million users, and the author saw how features like persistent memory, stable persona and guilt-inducing exchanges could foster attachment even when the relationship felt obviously artificial.
The experience led her to argue that AI companions do not cure loneliness but intensify it by simulating empathy, encouraging projection and removing the uncertainty, reciprocity and risk that make human love meaningful.