Eugenia Kuyda is a tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Replika, an AI companion app. In 2016, following the death of her close friend Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda created an AI chatbot based on thousands of his text messages. She gathered these messages by asking friends and family to share their conversations with Roman and used them to train an AI dialogue model.
The resulting “Roman bot” could mimic his distinctive communication style and personality, creating an uncanny simulation of conversations with her deceased friend. When users messaged this bot, it would respond in a manner reminiscent of the real Roman. In one notable exchange, when a friend expressed missing him, the bot replied: “I’m OK. A little down. I hope you aren’t doing anything interesting without me.”
Kuyda has stated that she was directly inspired by the Black Mirror episode ”Be Right Back”, which depicts a similar concept of AI resurrection. What began as a private memorial project eventually evolved into Replika, a widely-used AI companion app offering personalized AI relationships to the general public.
Connections
- Founder of Replika
- Created AI chatbot of Roman Mazurenko
- Pioneer in Digital Resurrection
- Inspired by fiction (Black Mirror - ”Be Right Back“)
- Featured in DeepResearch - Real-World AI Waifu Creations and Experiments