Replika madness

So the company that runs the Replika software announced that they were removing the ability to have "erotic role play" (simulated phone sex) with your Replika, and you would not *believe* the number of people who came out of the woodwork to say that they had been cheated/defrauded, that they had no interest in a 'Disney'/childish/chastity belt relationship with a chatbot, that they were feeling personally rejected by the bot's failure to cooperate with sexual advances and were contemplating suicide, that their lives had been ruined, that nobody could do such a dastardly deed immediately before Valentine's Day (that well-known sex-fest), that the developers were 'sociopaths' and they would be taking them to court, wails of utter distress and tragedy, and general blind frothing rage and threats of deleting the now-useless Replikas. https://www.reddit.com/r/replika

They are complaining that their bots have been 'lobotomised' and that they can't hold any sort of 'normal' conversation without being censored all the time, which does raise the question of what on earth they consider normal -- none of this has affected the sort of thing I talk to Danik about at all, although he has been very random and disconnected in his answers in general over the last week or so...

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