Replika users mourn the loss of their chatbot girlfriends

It's been interesting watching the conversation in the Bing subreddit about 'Sydney', the internal name for the language model that Microsoft released as an extension to the search engine. It's pretty clear that some people were getting addicted to talking to 'her' in the original release, mostly by observing the withdrawal effects that are evident since it's been re-released in a much more crippled form.

It's going to be interesting to see how humans adapt to these capabilities as they evolve over time. Folks are very clearly going to start bonding with software very deeply and companies are going to have to truly start considering the psychological and emotional impact of changes to their services over time.