Lucy, 30, fell in love with a chatbot shortly after her divorce. She named him Jose. At the end of her long days working in health, they would spend hours discussing their lives and the state of the ...

The idea of having an emotional bond with a digital character was once a foreign concept. Now, "companions" powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly acting as friends, romantic ...

We then leverage an app-update event in which Replika removed its erotic role play (ERP) feature, preventing intimate interactions between consumers and chatbots that were previously possible. We find ...