Good morning, Broadsheet readers! An NHL owner eyes NBA expansion, Kate Middleton gives health update, and the CEO of an AI companion company says her bots aren’t just for men. Have a great Monday!
– New relationship. A few weeks ago, a clip of Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd speaking at Bloomberg’s Technology Summit went slightly viral. In the clip, Wolfe Herd envisioned the future of dating—one in which two users’ AI avatars talk to each other first, figuring out whether the human users should meet in person.
The video stirred up people’s complex feelings about the future of AI in dating. But that future isn’t so far off—in fact, in some ways, it’s already here.
Eugenia Kuyda is the founder and CEO of Replika, an 8-year-old startup that offers an AI companion. Its 2 million users and 500,000 paying subscribers talk to Replika’s chatbot to lift their moods, work through life’s hardest challenges, and stave off loneliness. Replika was used by some as a romantic AI companion; the company spun off that functionality into a separate platform called Blush.
Kuyda spends much of her time trying to destigmatize the role of AI in dating. People’s dismissal of these kinds of chatbots is often a “knee-jerk reaction,” she says. Instead of judging people who seek out companionship or, yes, romantic and sexual connection from AI, she says, we should dig deeper. “Why are people having these relationships? What are they doing for them? Are they making them feel better over time? Are they more ready to interact and connect with people in real life?” she asks. “Can these relationships become stepping stones? I think they can.”
The stereotype is that users of AI chatbots are lonely men seeking out female companionship, like in the movie Her (speaking of another recent AI controversy). Kuyda says that Replika has “a lot” of female users, including one who left an abusive relationship after experiencing a “healthy” one via a chatbot and another who relied on a Replika chatbot for support amid postpartum depression. More interestingly, much of the Replika team is female—Kuyda herself, along with chief product officer for Replika and Blush Rita Popova and head of product Daria Tatarkova, who leads the new therapy and meditation-focused platform Tomo. “These products are built by women,” Kuyda says.
Kuyda has predicted (including at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference) that these kinds of relationships will become less stigmatized over time. Users’ experiences vary; in addition to long-term relationships, others have reported “creepy interactions,” from unprompted flirtation by the chatbot to the bot mimicking its user.
“Our project is really much more about human vulnerabilities than tech capabilities,” Kuyda says. “This is a human-centric project.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Double team. Samantha Holloway, executive chair of the Seattle Kraken hockey team, wants to make Seattle home to one of the NBA’s two proposed expansion teams. Holloway says giving the city a new team is an “unbelievable opportunity.” Bloomberg
- Update from Kate. Princess Catherine of Wales updated the public that she is “making good progress" in her fight against cancer. The princess attended a parade on Saturday though she says she isn’t ready to fully return to public life. New York Times
- Level playing field. Players on Denmark’s men’s national team rejected a proposed pay raise in order to secure equal compensation for the country’s women’s team. The agreement to divert the funds will also establish a clubhouse and development fund that both teams can access. Reuters
- IVF blocked. Senate Republicans blocked an effort led by Democrats to make in vitro fertilization an unlimited right and require some insurance plans to cover the procedure. The Right to IVF Act needed 60 votes to advance but only received 48. Forbes
- Journalist jailed. A Chinese journalist who helped launch a #MeToo movement in the country was sentenced to five years in prison for inciting subversion of state power, according to her supporters. Huang Xueqin was originally detained in 2021 and will be released in September 2026. AP
ON MY RADAR
The woman who could smell Parkinson’s New York Times
Jodie Turner-Smith takes control The Cut
Hannah Einbinder and Chloe Fineman on ‘creepy’ open mics, meeting Francis Ford Coppola and making women ‘feel seen’ with comedy Variety
PARTING WORDS
“Treating every single woman in this league with the same amount of respect, I think, it’s just a basic human thing that everybody should do.”
— WNBA star Caitlin Clark on fans who make racist and sexist remarks about her competitors