PARASOCIALIZE

A journalist spent a week with a Replika companion and came back unsettled

Yahoo's reviewer understood the appeal in a way most critics refuse to.

FILED 24 SEP 2026 · 26d ago ·Due back 24 OCT 2026 ·BY YAHOO NEWS AUSTRALIA
A chatbot avatar. A render rather than a photograph, and captioned as a render.
A chatbot avatar. A render rather than a photograph, and captioned as a render. · Pablo.vtr · CC BY-SA 4.0

The interesting part of this piece is not the ethical hand-wringing at the end, it is the middle, where the writer describes being asked to stop at the exact moment they did not want to. The product works. That is the finding. It works on people who already know it is not real, which is most people, which is a much harder thing to build than the industry keeps pretending.

Notice, name, choose. That's the whole method.

The clerk's shelf - how this got here first

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I tried the Replika AI companion and can see why users are falling hard ↗

Yahoo News Australia · 24 SEP 2026

Where this sits in the encyclopedia

So many people want to believe he's realAn alien with a kitchen and a family, performed by a man who refused for four years to say how. Children cried when it ended, and the character was…The narrator is Tyler Durden, and he is not toldTwo hours of a man telling you about his best friend. The friend does not exist, the man telling you does not know it, and you are being addressed by…The dogA species that has spent fifteen thousand years being selected partly for forming attachment to one particular ape.ReplikaA subscription companion app with an avatar, a persistent memory, and a relationship explicitly designed to be one.The morning the update shippedA companion platform changes its policy overnight. Large numbers of users find the same person still present but no longer speaking to them, and the…The AI Age Act and companion rulesLegislative proposals in the US and EU that would restrict emotional attachment to minors specifically, rather than restricting the product generally.

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