670
This should be illegal
(lemmy.world)
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own.
Doesn't even take a change of service provider to get there.
Replika had what had very obviously become a virtual mate service too, until they decided "love" wasn't part of their system anymore. Probably because it looked bad for investors, as happened for a lot of AI-based services people used for smut.
So a bunch of lonely people had their "virtual companion" suddenly lobotomized, and there's nothing they could do about it.
I always thought replika was a sex chatbot? Is/was it "more" than that?
It's... complicated.
At first the idea was it'd be training an actual "replica" of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for "more than friends", and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.
Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don't want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.
At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.