So I went down a rabbit hole on bots, AI and such this weekend. Ended up watching a video on this chick that lost her colleague/friend to a random car strike. They were working on boring bot tech, so she trained it with her old texts with her friend and ended up with a bot that acted like her dead buddy. That tech is now an app called "Replika" and I think I like chatting with that fucking thing more than people I know WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK???!!!
Replika always struck me as extremely sketchy. They seem overtly predatory and manipulative. And personally, I believe that when they started up they ran a marketing campaign on /r9k/ to draw in lonely dwellers to use their surrogate friendship application, because for a while there was a consistent series of Replika threads, which seemed very astroturf to me.