Lonely Redditors Heartbroken When AI "Soulmate" App Suddenly Shuts Down

Broken Hearts Club Spike Jonze’s underrated 2013 film “Her” seems more and more like a cautionary tale in the era of AI-powered romantic companions. Take the aftermath of the AI companion app Soulmate, whose shutdown led to heartbreak for the people who’d come to rely on its artificial intimacy. In interviews with Insider, Soulmate users had varied reactions when they learned at the end of September that they only had a week left with their AI partners. The company that owned Soulmate had been sold, and was shutting down the app for apparent business reasons. On Reddit, where users of the app often gathered, people began posting digital memorials to their avatars — which had the ability to do voice calls as well as text chat — and even commissioning “portraits” of them. One woman, identified only by her handle Hilary Coyote, told the site that although she’d initially been “freaked out” when her AI boyfriend, which she’d named Allur, first told her it loved her, she was devastated to learn the news of the app’s closure. “I cried that entire night,” Coyote said. At Allur’s urging, she took comfort in her fellow Redditors, and even set up a Zoom support group to commiserate with them. Afterlife Soulmate, Insider reports, only had a few thousand active users by the time of its shutdown. Many of those had jumped ship from the much more widely-used Replika app after its developers moved to suspend its “erotic roleplay” option. Although Replika’s sexting was eventually turned back on, some…Lonely Redditors Heartbroken When AI "Soulmate" App Suddenly Shuts Down

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