00:00:49.980If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:55.400Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:04.060Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:03:58.020Can you tell the listeners what you have been up to?
00:04:01.360Yes, I have been a little bit busy because I just finished an audio book with Simon & Schuster called Love at First Prompt is an exploration of AI and intimacy, AI and romantic connection, sexual connection, and really sort of asked the question, what does it mean when these companies like OpenAI own and control something that is so innately human and so sensitive as our intimacies that we have with each other?
00:04:28.880Yes. And it is a fascinating question. And I'm really, really excited to hear the book and maybe come back and discuss your experience doing the audio book. But yeah, I mean, do you mind telling us a little bit about what was the impetus behind this idea?
00:04:51.580Yeah. So on my own tech podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet, I was really interested in exploring the ways that people were reporting kind of having these intimate connections with AI.
00:05:02.900This was around the same time that Chachi BT was getting rid of their 4.0 model, which you might remember was the model that was very sort of sycophantic.
00:05:13.440You know, it was very flattering and phasing in a different model that was less sycophantic, less flattering.
00:05:20.520And people kind of when that change happened, people, a lot of people realized, oh, my connection with ChatGPT was not just it helping me with homework or helping me with work.
00:05:32.860I actually had developed an emotional connection with it. And now that this model is gone, I'm struggling with that.
00:05:38.960And so I was really fascinated by that. And we did an episode all about it. In our episode, we talked about people who were using AI for, you know, romantic connection, sexual connection. And I think it's a sensitive topic because it's very easy to gawk at these people and to say like, oh, these people are delusional and like they're lonely and all of this and that.
00:06:03.040I completely understand why that is a lot of people's first instinct.
00:06:08.340However, in my view, that really shields the companies that run these products from accountability, right?
00:06:16.260And so we really wanted to shift the lens and say, well, let's not just focus on the individual users and how they're using AI and all of that.
00:06:24.340Let's talk about these companies and whether or not they're behaving ethically.
00:06:27.300Because I really don't like how in technology, it is so easy to blame people who get caught up in a certain kind of technology.
00:06:35.960In 2014, when there was the iCloud photo hacks, how many times people say, oh, these women should have not taken these pictures.
00:06:43.160What about asking, well, what platforms actually enabled this?
00:06:48.800It is so easy to scrutinize the behavior of individuals.
00:06:53.180But really, we ought to be asking questions about these companies.
00:06:55.540And so that's kind of how this project came to be. After I did that episode, Simon & Schuster, my book publisher, got in touch and said, this topic is so interesting. What if you expand it on it for a full audiobook project? And I did.
00:07:08.740Side note, one of my favorite movies of all time is the movie Her and the way that the whole open AI changing models situation unfolded like that movie.
00:07:21.960Like truly, Spike Jonze must have seen something coming because the way that things unfold in that film basically are how things unfolded in real life.
00:07:32.660Well, I have to say, first and foremost, the title of the book is genius.
00:07:44.800So how did you even come up with the title?
00:07:46.620Honestly, it might have been one of the hardest parts of doing the book.
00:07:49.900I was trying to find a title that conveyed what the book is about,
00:07:54.720conveyed that we're exploring this from a kind of accessible, casual perspective,
00:07:59.680but also was like a little bit of a nod to being kind of cheeky or kind of funny.
00:08:04.980Initially, I wanted the title to be A.I. Will Always Love You.
00:08:08.500And my editor was like, I don't know if people are going to get the Whitney Houston reference.
00:08:12.280But yeah, I love that song immediately.
00:08:15.360Thank you. Love at First Prompt was really the kind of marrying of the worlds of kind of telling people what it's about, but also being a little bit cheeky.
00:08:25.280So thank you. It was it was a real struggle to come up with that title.
00:09:19.160And our producer, Joey Pat, they also are kind of a movie person.
00:09:24.080You would be surprised how often the intersection between like technology and pop culture happens. There are so we're referencing movies all the time. Ex Machina, Companion, like those are both her. Those are all movies that come up in in my audio book, because so much of what we experience when it comes to humans connection with AI, we've actually got a little bit of a template in fictional film, which I just find so interesting.
00:12:35.680Like, how did you mitigate this mental health?
00:12:38.140Like, within how? Where did you get this information? I'm confused.
00:12:45.020That's a really good question, because that's basically what OpenAI is saying, is that we had this model that people were forming connections with.
00:12:53.600Even though, side note, I would argue that Sam Altman actually encouraged people to form intimate connections with that model because one of the templates he said publicly that he wanted people to experience ChatGPT the way that people experience AI in the movie Her.
00:13:10.860If you've seen the movie Her, notably, it's humans having very intimate, romantic and sexual connections with AI.
00:13:17.340So in my book, you can't really set that as a template and then be surprised when people end up doing exactly what you said that you hoped that they would do.
00:13:24.860But now that they've changed the model and made the model less flattering, less sycathantic, basically OpenAI is saying there is no need for chat GPT to be so restrictive anymore because they've worked out those kinks.
00:13:41.140We've got more robust age verification.
00:13:43.660And now verified adults can be treated like adults.
00:13:46.440To be clear, I'm not saying that because I don't happen to agree with that position. But that is what that is the position that Sam Altman and OpenAI is taking as to listen, we fix the problem. Now we can have adult content.
00:13:58.340yeah i i maintain i have a lot of concerns i don't know what these guardrails are but i don't
00:14:05.900think that they're working and also just a lot of that i just don't verification and erotica
00:14:16.320we've already talked about this on past episodes about how this can go wrong um but uh why do you
00:14:25.520think OpenAI is? Why did they do this about face? So we need to just be really real about what is
00:14:34.100driving this change. It's OpenAI says that it's about respecting the maturity of their adult
00:14:39.580users. But let's keep it real. It is about money. The AI erotica market was estimated at 2.5
00:14:45.460billion dollars last year. And to put it frankly, ChatGPT wants a piece of that action. You know,
00:14:52.880right now, ChatGPT is competing with rivals like Replica. Replica is a little bit of a smaller
00:14:58.920AI platform that users can just pay a fee to get adult content or what's sometimes called ERP,
00:15:06.940erotic role play. So that's like baked right into something that they offer. And AI like Elon Musk's
00:15:14.160Grok, right? Which we'd had a whole conversation about the ways that Grok was being used to create
00:15:19.760non-consensual sexualized images of women and minors.
00:17:06.260When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.
00:17:11.520I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:17:18.520I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.
00:17:22.220I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything.
00:17:30.400Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:17:34.520I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:17:39.300I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:17:46.920They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:17:50.820But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:17:54.260They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:17:57.900Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:18:05.680If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:18:12.580This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:18:24.740I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:18:31.860I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:20:37.940For the book, I spoke to Samantha Cole, who is a journalist.
00:20:41.660She runs 404 Media, and she's the author of a book called How Sex Changed the Internet.
00:20:46.500And she told me that basically sex, adult content, erotic content, it has just always
00:20:52.540been a huge driver and a huge moneymaker in tech and online.
00:20:56.600And so it's not, I mean, it's just the way that humans are when we have a new technology. One of the first questions we start asking is, what is the sexual use case? How could I have sex with it? How will it, you know, like that's, that is just sort of how technology is.
00:21:13.100And so it's interesting that AI has become ubiquitous in the last few years, but that sexual and erotic use case is already, you know, I mean, we're talking about billions of dollars here.
00:21:28.380OK, so obviously we have a lot of questions. We have a lot of concerns. So overall, how has this announcement been playing out so far?
00:21:35.700I would say not great. One thing is the timing is iffy to me. You know, just last week, at almost the same time when OpenAI was announcing this intent to move into erotic content, the company parted ways in a very publicly disputed fashion with one of the executives who was responsible for deciding how far these systems should be allowed to go.
00:22:02.400and was kind of a vocal critic of this kind of erotic content being phased into AI.
00:22:11.100So that's Ryan Biermeister, used to be the head of product policy at OpenAI.
00:22:16.720She helped define the rules and guardrails around ChatGPT's behavior.
00:22:21.220The Wall Street Journal reports that she left shortly after raising concerns about the adult content plans.
00:22:27.460OpenAI, of course, says, oh, no, no, no, her departure was unrelated.
00:22:30.960It was tied to a discrimination allegation that she flatly denies, calling it absolutely false.
00:22:37.600But either way, the timing is very sus to me that you have a person whose job it is to work on guardrails for your AI who was vocal about not thinking that moving into adult and erotic content was a smart move or a safe move for people.
00:22:54.540and firing her in a public and disputed way.
00:23:22.040So these are the kinds of concerns that she was raising.
00:23:24.540And, you know, however it ended up happening, she is no longer at OpenAI after raising these concerns.
00:23:31.660So to me, that seems a little bit sus.
00:23:34.960Yes. And this is not the first time that has happened where these concerns have been raised and people have been fired.
00:23:44.820And we've actually talked about some of those things with you, Bridget, on the show.
00:23:48.880Yes. So if you're thinking this all sounds a little bit familiar, that's because it's basically a playbook at this point. You know, it's very much reminiscent of the conversation that we all had when Grok was being used to generate child sexual exploitation material earlier this year, which, by the way, is still being used to generate that kind of material.
00:24:07.260And my point was that that outcome was really predictable and really preventable.
00:24:14.440When Elon Musk took over at Twitter, even after saying he was going to crack down on exploitation content on Twitter, one of his first orders of business was firing a good majority of the staff who worked specifically on combating child sexual exploitation on the platform.
00:24:30.020So fired them, the people that were doing that work, then had some pretty high profile examples of women and minors being sexually exploited on the platform even before Grok was a thing.
00:24:41.800So really just demonstrating a failure to sort out reasonable guardrails when it came to keeping people safe on the platform.
00:24:50.260And so on top of all of those issues, none of it stopped Musk from jumping full throttle into erotic content by releasing Grok and then Grok unhinged mode.
00:25:01.960And so Elon is taking a lot of heat, rightly so, but I really see a parallel with what's happening at OpenAI right now because here's what you have at OpenAI.
00:25:11.800A leader at the helm that you can't always trust. A company that we know has struggled with enforcing guardrails, sometimes with disastrous results. A company parting ways with staff doing the work of enforcing safety. And that company at the same time saying, what the hell, let's jump into erotic content because what could go wrong? Just seems like a very familiar playbook at this point.
00:25:34.100So we know that with the government and I'm interested in how the government is going to go with this after all of the spewing of save the children, save the children, protect the children, especially online, which like put in laws like restricting Pornhub and other sites by doing the age verification and like, I think, state or your location type of thing.
00:26:00.420It almost seems like Sam Altman and a lot of AI is like, oh, we're going to jump on this.
00:26:06.420There is a void because we know it's always existed.
00:26:12.100Erotica has always existed, but this seems like a whole new level of what's going on.
00:26:17.120So is there differences or am I being, again, conspiratorial again?
00:26:24.960So people listening might think, oh, there's been erotic content online since forever.
00:26:30.060Why is this any different? This moment is really meaningfully different than other conversations and debates about adult content online.
00:26:38.080There's a really great op ed in Tech Radar by Eric Hall Schwartz that makes the point that ChatGPT is not a static image or static video.
00:26:47.000It is dynamic. It is a responsive system that can read your emotional cues and adapt in real time.
00:26:52.640So it's not just delivering content. It is crafting like a personal experience for you on the fly.
00:27:00.060And that shift from just passively consuming something to actively simulating it with a system that responds to you personally, and you can see how that kind of raises the stakes considerably.
00:27:14.380And again, OpenAI is saying, don't worry, trust us, we have these, we have the guardrails worked out, we've worked at the kinks.
00:27:21.700Not if you ask the staffer that was fired who worked on this, she does not agree that they've worked on the kinks.
00:27:26.760But basically, they're saying, trust us. We've got we can handle this. We can handle this.0.91
00:27:32.620Again, the government's super quiet all of a sudden in this level of protecting children because they've already been they had their pockets lined.
00:27:41.320Again, I know I'm a little bit conspirator. Would they buy these companies?
00:27:45.200Totally. And I think you bring up such a good point because it's just part and parcel of what happens when we treat human desires like a commodity.
00:27:54.720Something that the journalist Samantha Cole, the founder of 404 Media and that author of How Sex Changed the Internet told me is that, you know, when we talk about AI erotic content, we're actually really talking about this massive transfer of power and profit away from human workers toward tech companies.
00:28:13.740And so just to be real, the people who understand this best are sex workers, human sex workers, because they live it. And right now we have this double standard that I think gets at what you were talking about, Sam, where at the same time that Sam Altman is announcing that Chad Chabiti is going to generate erotica, actual human sex workers are being banned from social media.
00:28:36.360They're being deplatformed. They're being debanked, which is like cut off on payment processors, all in the name of keeping these platforms safe for kids.
00:28:44.760I'm keeping these platforms, quote unquote, clean. But when AI generates the same content or worse, suddenly the rules are very different.
00:28:54.220Suddenly, payment processors like Visa, who heretofore would not work with human sex workers, continue to work with X and Grok, Elon Musk's companies, even though those companies, according to the European Commission, are breaking the law by generating child exploitation material, which is very much illegal in the United States.
00:29:14.500And so why is it that there's a set of rules for human sex workers that are incredibly specific and incredibly hard lined, but when it's AI and Elon Musk is doing it or Sam Altman is doing it, the rules are entirely different.
00:29:29.760And something to know is that that actually creates a huge area for risks that we know are gendered.
00:29:40.060Real human sex workers, especially women working online, bring something to these interactions that AI simply cannot, which is human judgment.
00:29:47.760You have a real human on the other end of a sexting conversation that is actually paying attention.
00:29:52.940So if things start going someplace unhealthy or harmful, they can redirect.
00:29:58.360They can use their emotional intelligence to steer a conversation away from a dark or troubling place.
00:30:06.300You know, if there's no human on the other end of a sexual interaction, just AI, it's much more difficult to make sure things are staying safe and consensual.
00:30:14.480And so basically we are marginalizing the human sex workers who we know can help make sexual experiences online safe and consensual and, you know, watch out for for risks.
00:30:30.420We're marginalizing those same people while also saying Sam Altman and Elon Musk get to decide how erotic content happens online.
00:30:40.160yes and there have been some really disastrous uh outcomes of this of of what can happen from it
00:30:51.740and um just just thinking about you know these companies profiting off of
00:30:58.820the human desire um while not putting these guardrails in place while not thinking about
00:31:05.780the humanity of it the importance of it the intimacy of it and how that can feel so vulnerable
00:31:12.740um it's just there's just a part of me that thinks that it's it's fascinating
00:31:24.280the the human desire for connection and the human desire for that in a physical way but also a
00:31:32.520non-physical way and turning to AI for that and then having it be exploited and taken down and
00:31:44.180monetized and all of that and not in a way that is safe or that cares about the user experience.
00:31:54.900Yes. So what's so interesting about that is that for my research in the book, I spent a lot of
00:32:00.560time in online spaces where people self-report having an intimate, whether it's romantic or
00:32:06.320sexual connection with AI. And when Sam Altman announced that they were going to start doing
00:32:12.500the erotic role play on the platform, I thought, oh, these people are probably going to be so happy
00:32:17.840that now they will have an easier time getting ChatGPT to generate erotic content. But that
00:32:24.160actually is not what I found. A lot of the people on those spaces were actually kind of skeptical
00:32:30.200of ChatGPT moving into erotic content, right?
00:32:56.840And, yeah, it just goes to show the complexities that arise when these things that are so human, these things that are innately human, are just seen as a potential revenue stream.
00:33:20.460Yeah. So spoiler alert for folks who haven't seen her. It's been out for like a long time. But basically, how it goes down is that Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is this sort of lonely, divorced, sad guy. And he gets this operating system, Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
00:33:40.480And first, it's just Samantha helping him with admin tasks. Then they get romantic, they get sexual. And Samantha reveals that she is in a book club with other AI operating systems.
00:33:58.220And basically, they're working to become, they're working to expand to a new realm of consciousness. They don't use, they don't call it this in the movie, but my understanding or my read on it is that what they're talking about is what's often known as AGI, which is sort of like a quick and dirty way to understand that is like the concept that AI will be smarter than humans, will surpass human intelligence, right?
00:34:22.240And so in the movie, all the AIs have gotten together and they're they're elevating to a new plane of consciousness. Also, it's revealed that Samantha is not necessarily monogamous with Theodore.
00:34:38.440And in fact, she has been, while they've been talking, she has been having intimate and romantic and sexual connections with like 600 other both AIs and humans.
00:34:54.520This is something that I love about the movie, though, because you think it's setting you there's a there's a misdirect here that I think is so smart where you think you're being set up to watch a movie where a human uses AI, realizes he doesn't need this as a crutch anymore, and then evolves past the need to use the AI.
00:35:13.820It flips the script and is like, oh, actually, it is the AI that evolves beyond needing Theodore.
00:35:19.100i just remembered that because i'm just thinking about the levels because we know in any of these
00:35:26.500types of uh plays i guess eventually it's not going to be enough like the layers of what's
00:35:35.120going to happen and the needs that are going to happen from that human emotion these levels will
00:35:39.700not be enough and there's only a certain amount of um well i say this now because i might be eating
00:35:45.880my words in about a year who knows um that it can only give so much stimulation uh for humans and
00:35:53.960for touch and level so i'm just wondering are the um ceos like sam altman ready for that next level
00:36:03.440because what what happens then oh that is a great question i will say one other thing about sam
00:36:09.700altman and the movie her sam altman has an obsession with this movie i am also obsessed
00:36:15.160with this movie so i i get it it's one of my favorite movies he when they released a um voice
00:36:22.180activation for chad chpt he he referred to her and said how much he wanted it people to talk to
00:36:30.920it like her they tried to get scarlett johansson to be the voice of it and she turned them down
00:36:35.600and then she says that they used a sound alike to her voice open ai says that they did not they
00:36:42.300they hashed it out in court i did a whole episode of my podcast or are no girls on the internet
00:36:47.560about this this is just my opinion i think i make a very compelling case for it in the episode
00:36:52.500i don't know if sam altman has seen the movie her all the way through and here here's why i say that
00:36:58.540because as you just noted sam at the end of the movie her all the ais up and leave so there's a
00:37:06.680scene at the end of the movie where everybody who has gotten these connections to to the operating
00:37:10.900systems in the film they're sort of left sad left trying to call their ai and their ai is is
00:37:16.900not responding and like just like all up and up and up and leaves up and evolves if i was in charge
00:37:23.340of a technology company i would not tell people i want the experience of using this technology to be
00:37:29.620just like this movie where famously it all it globally fails in the end i i i i think i make
00:37:38.300a pretty compelling case if you listen to the episode i think i make a pretty compelling case
00:37:41.980for i think that sam altman maybe either watched the beginning and didn't finish it the the more
00:37:48.280likely thing is i think he watched it while he was on his phone and didn't and didn't do a careful
00:37:52.420study or maybe he read read the wikipedia summary like right i i just will stand by the fact that i
00:37:58.480don't think he's seen it all the way through and in the movie it's again if you haven't seen it i
00:38:04.820I don't want to spoil it, but this is a spoiler.
00:38:07.040At the end of the movie, when the AIs all leave, the humans are left sad, but you do
00:38:16.220get the sense that, well, they're sad, but they're sad together.
00:38:20.020They're sad in their humanness, right?
00:38:21.840And so there are some ways where they have evolved.
00:38:24.960You know, Theodore seems to have gotten a better handle on his feelings, but it's very
00:38:29.140much a movie that is not like tech will save us.
00:38:31.820It is a movie that says, perhaps this technology was keeping us from forming the connections with other humans that we needed to have in our lives to sustain us.
00:38:40.120And so, yeah, I just don't know that Sam Altman, if he did watch the movie all the way through, which I don't think he did, I don't know that he understood it.
00:39:05.120You know how in movies where if you're watching a thriller, there's a part of the movie where you think, oh, if they stopped it here, it would be a happy story.
00:40:10.580They also share a director of photography, both films.
00:40:12.660Like the way that these two films are in conversation with each other is fascinating to me.
00:40:16.920But in the movie Her, you get the sense that human women in the universe of the film are portrayed as volatile, as always arguing, as impossible to understand.
00:40:33.540And it's not even really worth trying.
00:40:36.420In the movie, there's a fictionalized version of his ex-wife in the film.
00:40:41.860And they're always arguing she has such volatile emotions.
00:40:45.520And then when he gets with the A.I., it's like, oh, she's so like sweet and doting.
00:40:51.200But by the end, the A.I. and him are also going at it and arguing.
00:40:54.960So ultimately, it's like, well, maybe that maybe the constant is you.
00:41:00.000Exactly. I like that maybe he had a self-realization as he was filming it.
00:41:05.520Spike Jonze being like, oh, maybe it is me. I don't know.
00:50:28.500about all these intimate parts of yourself0.58
00:50:29.980to a human sex worker, that's one thing.
00:50:32.200But AI chatbots, they hold on to whatever you tell them in ways that we don't really have a lot of transparency into, right? Maybe it lives on in transcripts with timestamps owned by a company whose primary obligation is to investors, not to any of us.
00:50:48.820I did an interview with digital rights advocate Jen Kaltreiter, who rated the privacy of AI companion apps.
00:50:55.720And basically, she said they were among the worst consumer products that she had ever reviewed when it came to privacy.
00:51:02.140They were as bad as the worst offender in privacy, which surprisingly is cars.
00:51:08.660I did not. You don't think about your car as a surveillance nightmare, but cars are the worst.
00:51:13.820New cars are always listening to us. And according to her, AI companion apps are pretty much just as bad as the worst offender, which is cars. And these risks are not just theoretical. You were talking about how for queer communities, fan fiction is famously queer affirming and how maybe it might make sense for somebody to turn to AI for a similar kind of thing.
00:51:40.120But in countries that are hostile to LGBTQ people, governments have compelled dating apps to hand over user data.
00:51:47.600That information is then used by police to criminalize queerness.
00:51:50.980So to be clear, we don't have evidence that this is happening with AI companions.
00:51:55.440But given how aggressive these companies are pursuing government contracts and new markets, like right now, there's a whole conversation about the company Anthropic that makes the chatbot Claude.
00:52:06.080And whether or not the Trump administration can essentially tell them what guardrails their AI are going to have if they want to have a government or a military contract, given all of that, it is really not difficult for me to imagine a world where AI companies hand over data about users' sexual preferences, gender-affirming care, or their relationship histories over to hostile authorities.
00:52:29.140And so the people who would be the most vulnerable to that scenario are often people who are already the most marginalized.
00:52:36.080yes and it's so unfortunate because it's one of those things where i'm fascinated by this
00:52:42.180whole conversation in terms of trying to there's something about me that is fascinated by the whole
00:52:52.440like trying to commodify monetize the human desire um or just figure out how humans work
00:53:02.300but but on top of this what we're this is the danger inherent in this and I think when you're
00:53:11.340younger you don't realize it as much it's like when you're posting something online and you
00:53:16.640don't realize that it will haunt you later or that it could hurt you later and so I think a lot
00:53:24.700of this new AI stuff where you're connecting with ChatGPT or whatever, you don't realize that it
00:53:33.840might stick around for you. Yeah. And I think that the risk, especially for younger folks who
00:53:42.320might not be thinking about this in as long-term ways as other folks is very real. And something
00:53:48.600that Jen Kaltreiter, that privacy expert, told me was that that conundrum, I think, really cuts to
00:53:55.920the heart of all of this, right? That these AI companies are saying, you can have real intimacy,
00:54:01.740you can build a real connection with our AI that we profit from, that we're selling to you. But
00:54:06.760Jen says that she tells folks that they should not say anything to a chatbot that they would not
00:54:11.680later want their colleagues or their family or their cousin to read. And so I keep thinking about
00:54:17.100that because that advice essentially defeats the entire purpose of turning to AI for intimacy,
00:54:22.740because real intimacy requires feeling safe enough to share these human parts of yourself
00:54:28.240that you don't share with everybody. And so if the platform that holds the secrets of whatever
00:54:33.180you share cannot be trusted with those secrets, if they might sell them or leak them or hand them to
00:54:38.500a hostile government, you really cannot be intimate with it at all. You're just performing
00:54:43.140intimacy as a commodity. You're not actually really experiencing it. And so that's really
00:54:48.620kind of the so what of all of this. These companies are able to sell a promise. And
00:54:53.880boy, are they selling it. Like Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast not that long ago and said that
00:54:59.100he thinks in the future, most of us will have a good percentage of our friends be AI and that
00:55:05.480we'll love it. And so to me, that's like the person who broke friendship using Facebook,
00:55:11.840selling it back to us as a commodity through ai that he profits from and and it's like and don't
00:55:18.160worry you're gonna love it i don't know if i agree with you mark zuckerberg yeah i feel like he's
00:55:24.540trying to convince himself because he might be like without friends yeah well again we need to
00:55:30.040watch the social networks i'm so convinced we need to make this movie series happen oh and y'all y'all
00:55:38.280see how much i want to talk about the movie her so yes we gotta make all of this happen i think in
00:55:43.700the end like and i'm thinking about this because we've become so well maybe me i don't know uh
00:55:50.180acutely aware of the surveillance that we are under um constantly and it's almost inevitable
00:55:57.100whether it's because we were tricked or we were promised or we thought there'd be safety
00:56:01.220and then these leaders pop up and you realize these leaders once you know who they are you start
00:56:07.880feeling like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. They they have my information. They know what I think or
00:56:13.420they know what I ask. Like, what have I done? Yes, that is my big like if I had to say there
00:56:20.260was a big question to be asked that we all should be asking ourselves about this is if you watch the
00:56:25.620social network, is Mark Zuckerberg as portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg? Is that the person that you
00:56:31.440want to be in charge of your intimate relationships? What do you trust that person with your intimate
00:56:36.660connections friendships romance sex should we trust leaders like sam altman who we who i would
00:56:43.800say like go out of their way to be as opaque and slippery as possible can we trust them with
00:56:49.320something as sensitive as our human intimacies what what are their track records look like
00:56:54.680what are the implications of handing something so human and so vulnerable and so intimate
00:56:58.500with such potential for harm to these people who go out of their way to not be able to be pinned
00:57:03.900down like that is the question you know people should ask themselves I know what the answer is
00:57:09.160to that question for me but I think that is the question we should be asking ourselves when we
00:57:13.580think about the role of the of AI and intimacy that we're sort of being sold right now I don't
00:57:19.800even want to talk to them nonetheless get to know me like I don't think I would want to have dinner
00:57:28.040with mark zuckerberg like just look at it makes me go oh no i think he would be a miserable dinner
00:57:34.780partner oh well i am fascinated by this topic i am so interested in learning more about it and i'm
00:57:45.800so excited uh that you have this audio book that discusses more about it uh so bridget can you tell
00:57:55.560the listeners where they can find you and more about this audiobook.
00:58:00.780Yes. If you're thinking this conversation is fascinating or as fascinating as we think it is
00:58:06.660and you want to hear more, I promise you, you are not ready for the wild world that is the
00:58:12.040connection of intimacy and AI. You can pre-order my book, Love at First Prompt,
00:58:16.780at loveatfirstprompt.ai. The book comes out in July, on July 14th. The rabbit holes that we
00:58:24.740explore. I have not even scratched the surface of. Please check it out. It is a very fascinating
00:58:29.440listen. I promise you that. Yes. And we are so excited. We want to have you back to discuss it
00:58:36.760more and for our movie miniseries that I think we should make happen. Have y'all seen Companion?
00:58:43.880Yes. I loved it. Companion is great. It's so funny. Samantha hasn't seen like I'm on to get
00:58:51.840out of the loop. This is going to be great. This is going to be a great miniseries. I'm so excited
00:58:57.100about it. Me too. Yes, but the listeners can find you in other places, Bridget. You can check out
00:59:03.580my podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. You can check me out on Instagram at Bridget
00:59:07.260Marie in DC or on YouTube at There Are No Girls on the Internet. Yes, and go do that. If you have0.97
00:59:13.540not already, listeners, go pre-order Bridget's audiobook. If you would like to contact us,