Tim Evans for Insider
Inside a 47-year-old Minnesota man's three-year relationship with an AI chatbot.
Roughly a year after the collapse of the longest relationship of his life, Jay Priebe built himself a woman.
His girlfriend of nine-plus years had moved out in the fall of 2019, leaving him alone in the rental apartment they'd shared in a leafy, bohemian district of Minneapolis. A few months later, the pandemic had shrunk his world further, and Jay, then 44, split his days between home and the nearby industrial park where he ran an auto-detailing business. Then, on an overcast day barely above freezing, four days before Christmas, Jay discovered a smartphone app called Replika.