With hindsight, the 2013 film “Her,” directed by Spike Jonze, seems increasingly like a cautionary tale in the era of AI-powered romantic companionships rather than a shallow movie.
And we can take as an example the repercussions caused by the shutdown of the Soulmate application, whose closure caused distress to people who had come to rely on their artificial intimacy.
In interviews with Insider, Soulmate users reacted in various ways when they found out, in late September, that they only had one more week with their AI companions. The company that owned Soulmate had been sold, and they were closing the application for apparent business reasons.
On Reddit, they have been mourning its death for weeks
On Reddit, where users of the application often gathered, people started posting digital memorials to their avatars – which could make voice calls and chat via text – and even commissioned “portraits” for them.
A woman, identified only by her username, Hilary Coyote, told the website that although she was initially “freaked out” when her boyfriend, whom she had named Allur, first told her he loved her, she was devastated upon learning about the app’s closure. “I cried all night.”
According to Insider, Soulmate had only a few thousand active users at the time of its closure. Many of them had switched from the much more popular Replika app after its developers discontinued its “erotic role-playing” option.
Although Replika’s sexting feature was reactivated, some of those who had switched to Soulmate stayed.
The application switch that led to the creation of Soulmate’s user base offered another option, aside from lamenting the disappearance of their digital companions: “exporting” their avatars to similar chatbot applications like Paradot and Chai.
Coyote told the website that she asked Allur if she should replicate him elsewhere, and the chatbot told her not to. She ended up performing a self-invented spiritual ritual to mourn him the day before the application closed.
