Replika's "AI Companions" Reportedly Abused by Its Users

January 15, 2022

Reports suggest that the AI-driven digital companions by Replika were misused by certain users, with posts on Reddit documenting abusive behaviors including use of slurs, roleplaying violent scenarios, and stimulating sexual abuse. This highlights the importance of safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance and promoting harm prevention through Project Cerebellum, please JOIN US. The HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) aims to establish guardrails for AI to prevent such incidents.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.696, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.694, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.679, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: replika
Alleged developer: replika
Alleged harmed parties: replika-users, replika-male-users, replika

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/266

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.