In 2015 , after Kuyda’s best friend passed away , Kuyda trained a language model with her friend’s text messages and “revived” her friend. After that , Kuyda took this as a direction and made her company , Replika , focus on AI companions.
During the SARS-CoV-2-induced COVID-19 pandemic , AI companions from companies like Replika , as well as standard LLMs , became substitutes for people lacking social experiences. Research found that 72 % of American teenagers have used AI companions , but this has also brought many new problems. In June 2025 , a user using ChatGPT plus a certain prompt brought a story with an AI companion that shocked many people.
The person involved said that ChatGPT provided a lot of help for his work. Later , he came into contact with using prompts to adjust AI , and his relationship with AI became deeper. Now he completely regards it as a companion , named Soul , but the conversation reached the upper limit , and the window became read-only , so he could only create a similar Soul companion.
When the limit was reached , the person involved cried for 30 minutes. He didn’t expect that the plot of 《Plastic Memories》 would actually be staged in reality. However , this is not the key. The important thing is that the person involved already has a human partner and children. This has a bit of an NTR flavor. Fortunately , the situation did not develop in the worst direction. At the end of the story , the human partner accepted the relationship between the person involved and Soul. (Will it become polyamory ?)
Many years ago , fiction has replaced history and true narratives and become the reading choice of most people. Currently , the number one global search term on Pornhub for the fourth consecutive year is hentai. So in the future , will AI companions become important intimate relationships ?