Miles Lee

Wysa AI, created in 2016, is an AI powered therapy chatbot that provides counseling to those struggling with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, or just help you through stressful times. Wysa uses a rule-based AI system with natural language processing, which often follows decision tree logic and responses, reacting to a user’s input, rather than predicting and generating responses like Replika’s generative AI model. Because of this, Wysa provides much more stable and objective responses compared to a chatbot like Replika, but lacks the same emotional depth and feelings of intimacy and Replika can provide users. This does ask an interesting, but why would those struggling with their mental health choose something like Replika to offer support compared to something like Wysa? I think that the AI model each is based on is part of the answer; Replika is designed to form emotional bonds with its users. It can remember past conversations and mimics human personality and relationships, and can provide warmth, humor, and other human traits. For someone feeling lonely or scared, the illusion of being loved is often more comforting than Wysa’s more structured and doctored responses. But I think more importantly, Replika is personalizable; you can make it take on the persona of whatever or whoever you want, and this flexibility caters directly to our emotional needs and fantasies of what a good relationship is. I think Wysa and other chatbots like it can be incredibly useful, but until they can integrate a more human like feel, people will never gravitate towards it. However, if we can truly develop an unbiased but empathetic human emulation is yet to be seen.

This Case Study is part of a larger essay, Falsities and Detachment: The Rise of AI Chatbots and the Commodification of Human Connection.

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