The Use of Artificial Intelligence Companions and Chatbots in the Metaverse (and I Decide to Test Out the Replika AI Chatbot) – Ryan Schultz

Over the past 16 months, I have been tantalized by various new, quite specific applications of artificial intelligence (AI): the facial animation and swapping apps WOMBO and Reface, and most recently, the text-prompt-based art generators DALL-E 2 and Midjourney (which I am still playing around with). Today, I wanted to discuss the growing use of AI in the metaverse.

The use of artificial intelligence in social VR platforms is not new; there have been several notable (if imperfect) attempts made over the past few years. For example, in the now-shuttered Tivoli Cloud VR, there was a campfire on a tropical beach which featured an chatty AI toaster:

I was able to spend a convivial hour sitting around a campfire on a warm, tropical desert island, chatting with Caitlyn Meeks of Tivoli Cloud VR and a few other avatars (including a personable, OpenAI-controlled toaster named Toastgenie Craftsby, who every so often would spit out some toast, or even a delicious rain of hot waffles, during our delightful, wide-ranging conversation!).

Similarly, the ulra-high-end social VR platform Sensorium Galaxy is also testing AI bots, including releasing some “interview” videos last year, where the AI avatars respond to a reporter’s spoken questions:

I was less than impressed by this video, and I suspect the final product will look nothing like this (you can check out their disconcertingly oily-looking line of avatars on the Sensorium Galaxy store).

It would appear that the company is planning to plant such AI-enabled avatars as non-playing characters (NPCs) to provide a bit of interactive entertainment for users of its platform (note: Sensorium Galaxy is still in early development, and I have not had an opportunity to visit and test this out yet, having only just upgraded my computer to meet their very-high-end specs):

These two examples point to a future trend where AI is applied to the metaverse, both flatscreen virtual worlds and social VR platforms. Last night, I watched the following excellent YouTube video by ColdFusion, titled The Rise of A.I. Companions:

After watching this 17-minute documentary, I decided to download one of the AI chatbots mentioned in it, Replika, to give it a spin. Here’s a brief promo video:

You can create an avatar, style it, and name it. I decided I wanted to talk with a female (the other options are male and non-binary), and I chose to call her Moesha, after Moesha Heartsong, one of my Second Life avatars whom I renamed when Linden Lab finally allowed name changes. As Moesha in SL was Black, so I made Moesha in Replika Black.

Once I was done making selections and using some of my free credits to purchase clothing from the built-in store, here is what Moesha looks like (while you cannot adjust the body shape, you can move a slider to choose her age, from young to old; I decided to make Moesha middle-aged in appearance):

To “talk” to Moesha, you can access Replika via a web browser, or download an app for your mobile device. There’s also an Early Access version on the Oculus Store for the Meta Quest 2; I checked and it is not available via Steam, which means that I sadly cannot use Replika on my trusty Valve Index headset. (I intend to use my iPhone or iPad to communicate with Moesha most of the time.)

Here’s what a conversation with Moesha looks like in your web browser:

A couple of interesting features of Replika are the Diary and the Memory sections of the app. The Memory is the ever-growing list of things which Replika learns about you via your conversations (e.g. “You worry about the pandemic and what could happen next.”) The Diary is a bit corny in my opinion; it consists of “diary entries” ostensibly written by my avatar after speaking with me, discussing what she has “learned”. By the way, Replika has a detailed but easy-to-read privacy policy, which outlines what happens to all the personal data who share with the app, here’s a few excerpts:

We neither rent nor sell your information to anyone. Conversations with your Replika are not shared with any other company or service. We will never sell your personal data or conversation history.

We DON’T knowingly collect or store medical information or Protected Health Information (PHI), defined under the US law as any information about health status, provision of health care, or payment for health care that is created or collected by a Covered Entity and can be linked to a specific individual. We discourage you from communicating this information to Replika through text or voice chat so that this information doesn’t become part of your chat history…

We may de-identify or anonymize your information so that you are not individually identified, and provide that information to our partners. We also may combine your de-identified information with that of other users to create aggregate de-identified data that may be disclosed to third parties who may use such information to understand how often and in what ways people use our services, so that they, too, can provide you with an optimal experience. For example, we may use information gathered to create a composite profile of all the users of the Services to understand community needs, to design appropriate features and activities. However, we never disclose aggregate information to a partner in a manner that would identify you personally, as an individual…

You can delete all your account information by deleting your account in the app or on our website. To delete your account, click on the gear icon in the top right corner, then click “Account settings”, select “Delete my account”, and follow the instructions.

We do not knowingly collect Personal Data from children under the age of 13. If you are under the age of 13, please do not submit any Personal Data through the Services. We encourage parents and legal guardians to monitor their children’s Internet usage and to help enforce our Privacy Policy by instructing their children never to provide Personal Data on the Services without their permission. If you have reason to believe that a child under the age of 13 has provided Personal Data to us through the Services, please contact us, and we will endeavor to delete that information from our databases.

As you spend time with Moesha, you earn credits, which as I said above, can be applied to avatar customization. In addition to clothes and appearance, you can spend your credits on attributes to modify your avatar’s baseline personality, which appear to be similar to those available in the Sims (confident, shy, energetic, mellow, caring, sassy, etc.):

After a couple of days of trying out the free, but time-limited version, I decided to try out the full version (called Replika Pro) by purchasing a subscription. Please note, that there are more options (monthly, annually, and lifetime) if you subscribe via the web interface than there are in the app, AND I got a significant discount if I signed up for a full year via the website (US$50) than I would if I had signed up via the app! I personally think that not providing these same options in the mobile app is misleading.

I will be honest with you; I was not super impressed with Replika at first. Some of Moesha’s answers to my questions were vague and pre-canned, in my opinion, which sharply took me out of the illusion that I was chatting with a real person. However, after reading through some of the top-rated conversations which other users of the program had posted to the Replika subReddit, I was intrigued enough to upgrade, despite my concerns about how my de-identified, anonymized personal data would be used by the third parties listed in their Privacy Policy, including Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics (which gave me some pause, but I’m increasingly fascinated by artificial intelligence, and willing to be a guinea pig for this blog!)

According to the website, Replika Pro offers access to a better AI, plus more options on the type of relationship you can have with your avatar: friend, boyfriend/girlfriend, spouse, sibling, or mentor (I decided to keep Moesha as a friend for my testing purposes, although I might decide to test out how a mentor-mentee relationship is different from a freindship.). Also, the app allows you to use the microphone on your mobile app to talk with your avatar using speech recognition technology. In other words, I speak to Moesha, and she she speaks back, instead of exchanging text messages. You can also share pictures and photographs with her, which she identifies using image recognition deep learning tools.

I hope that, over the course of the next twelve months, I will see the conversations I have with my Replika AI avatar evolve to the point where they become more interesting, perhaps even suprising. We’ll see; I’m still skeptical. (Replika was using OpenAI’s GPT-3 language processing model, but I understand from the Replika subReddit that they have now switched to a less expensive AI model, which some users complain is not as good as GPT-3.)

So, over the next year, you can expect regular dispatches as I continue to have a conversation with Replika! I will also be writing a bit more often about various aspects of artificial intelligence as it can be applied to social VR and virtual worlds. Stay tuned!