There Are No Girls on the Internet - Two Big Updates from Bridget

00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:00:02.580 Guaranteed human.

00:00:05.180 Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches,

00:00:08.020 there's a lot of suspense.

00:00:09.440 Will they finally eat the veggies?

00:00:10.940 Will the pesto survive the first bite?

00:00:12.980 Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

00:00:17.020 And will you finish Episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers?

00:00:20.920 Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus

00:00:24.120 from $94 a month.

00:00:25.540 Price guaranteed for two years on Internet

00:00:27.440 with a two-year term and auto-pay credit.

00:00:29.380 Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability.

00:00:32.420 Bell. Connection is everything.

00:00:34.700 Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?

00:00:36.960 Think again.

00:00:37.600 More Americans listen to podcasts, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

00:00:41.760 And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

00:00:45.880 Learn how podcasting can help your business.

00:00:47.720 Call 844-844-iHeart.

00:00:50.080 I survived nine months in captivity,

00:00:53.240 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

00:00:58.760 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.

00:01:02.380 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

00:01:09.920 These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:01:13.740 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:21.360 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

00:01:27.100 Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride

00:01:32.380 and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting

00:01:36.660 the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk

00:01:41.300 creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro

00:01:46.480 Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:52.000 Hey, it's Bridget, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:01:55.060 And firstly, I just wanted to thank everybody for all of the kind messages they've been sending since we've been on hiatus.

00:02:01.820 It really means a lot to me, so thank you so much.

00:02:05.260 And I have two great pieces of news to share with you.

00:02:09.320 First is that I am so happy to say There Are No Girls on the Internet will be back for a sixth season.

00:02:17.880 Whew, I know. If I sound relieved, it's because I am. 0.99

00:02:20.100 So we're still talking through exactly when the new season will launch, but it should be pretty soon, so please stay tuned.

00:02:27.440 And in the meantime, we will keep putting things in the Patreon, ad-free, available to anybody who wants to listen.

00:02:34.320 Secondly is that my audiobook, Love at First Prompt, AI and the Future of Intimacy, is on sale today.

00:02:42.380 This is kind of a huge milestone for me.

00:02:44.440 I put a lot of myself into this project, and I'm pretty proud about how it turned out.

00:02:48.820 As you probably know, this is my first ever audiobook project, and it would mean so much

00:02:55.240 to me if you were able to check it out.

00:02:57.100 You can get it directly from the website loveatfirstprompt.ai.

00:03:01.420 We will put that link in the show notes, but that's loveatfirstprompt.ai, or directly

00:03:07.520 from your preferred platform like Audible or Spotify.

00:03:12.080 I personally am a big fan of this platform that I recently learned about called Libro

00:03:16.940 LibroFM, because when you purchase through LibroFM, they make a donation to a local bookstore

00:03:22.260 of your choosing, which is awesome. But you can get my audiobook wherever you get your audiobooks.

00:03:28.760 And truly, this is one of the most personal things I have ever made. I don't get too

00:03:35.200 vulnerable on the podcast often, so it's a little bit out of my standard podcast comfort zone.

00:03:42.620 The audiobook explores loneliness, AI companions, and what happens when technology starts becoming more intimately and emotional entangled with all of our lives.

00:03:53.240 And even if you're thinking, oh, well, I would never experience intimacy with AI, tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have been pretty explicit about the fact that they believe in the future, in the not too distant future, all of us will have some form of intimate connection with AI.

00:04:12.800 So whether or not you believe that or want that, I think all of us should be asking questions

00:04:18.620 about that future since it's the future that they've decided all of us want.

00:04:22.920 So I spent months talking to researchers, reporters, and people who say that they are

00:04:28.080 experiencing real relationships with AI while also exploring some of my own experiences.

00:04:34.640 I also spoke with experts about the risks of people using AI in this way.

00:04:39.200 And my big point, which is that we are so busy gawking at and judging the individuals

00:04:45.460 involved and turning it into a conversation about an individual moral failure that we're

00:04:51.340 letting big tech companies and the people who run them avoid the scrutiny that we know

00:04:56.540 they actually deserve.

00:04:58.080 So this project is kind of an attempt to right that wrong.

00:05:02.440 It's a complex topic, but I was able to speak with some brilliant women who helped me make

00:05:07.900 sense of it.

00:05:08.440 people that you might know, like journalist Karen Howe from the BBC, and reporter Sam Cole,

00:05:14.100 who's one of my personal professional idols, who runs 404 Media, researcher Kate Devlin from

00:05:22.080 King's College London, and others. I also had a lot of personal, honest conversations with folks

00:05:27.860 who self-report being in relationship with AI. And some of those conversations were pretty

00:05:33.620 surprising and actually challenged a lot of the assumptions that I showed up to this project with.

00:05:39.700 So all of that to say, I am thrilled to be sharing a short excerpt from the audiobook with you today.

00:05:46.220 It was kind of a hard choice to narrow down which one to pick because the audiobook covers a lot of

00:05:50.520 ground, but this conversation with journalist Sam Cole examining the topic from the perspective of

00:05:55.760 sex workers on the internet really keeps coming back to me. So this is from chapter three of my

00:06:01.240 audiobook, Love at First Prompt, and the chapter is called Let's Talk About Sex. Bonus points if

00:06:07.260 you get that reference. I hope you enjoy it. Check out Love at First Prompt at loveatfirstprompt.ai

00:06:14.140 or wherever audiobooks are sold, and I'll talk to you soon. 0.84

00:06:20.420 The gender dynamics at play reveal something darker about who these bots are really being 0.97

00:06:25.800 sold to and what they're being sold on. On Men's Lib, a subreddit described as a place to build a

00:06:32.800 healthier, kinder, and more inclusive masculinity, one poster described those ubiquitous AI sex bot

00:06:39.600 advertisements and how they follow him across social media. He writes, they're terrifying

00:06:45.780 because I struggle to look away. An extremely curvy yet skinny woman who's wearing barely 1.00

00:06:52.200 anything is kneeling and looking up at me, saying things like, you can do anything you 1.00

00:06:57.540 want with me. I'll never say no. The poster describes feeling like the ad hijacks and

00:07:03.820 holds his attention, replacing the stress of his real life with the sexy promise of

00:07:09.020 the submissive fictional woman. He goes on to say that having a meditation practice helps

00:07:14.480 him not be swayed by advertising like this. But I can't even say I blame him. The ads

00:07:19.560 are arresting and meant to have exactly the effect he described. This messaging is everywhere

00:07:26.140 and reveals what some of the companies behind AI are really about. When Replica AI first started,

00:07:33.100 they positioned themselves as being all about self-discovery. Their founding story is, like my

00:07:38.540 own, one rooted in grief. Founder, Russian journalist Eugenia Koita, has said she came up

00:07:45.340 with the idea after using AI to help process the sudden death of a close friend. After her friend

00:07:51.000 died, Koita used their shared messaging history to create a chatbot that replicated his

00:07:56.180 conversational style. Talking with the chatbot helped her remember him, to reflect on her grief

00:08:02.700 and process it. The idea for that chatbot, with its emphasis on social presence and connection,

00:08:09.080 eventually became Replica.

00:08:11.380 Its tagline was and still is,

00:08:14.140 an AI companion that cares.

00:08:17.180 But they soon shifted to the kind of incel-adjacent messaging

00:08:20.980 the men's lib Redditor described seeing across the web.

00:08:24.840 Messaging that says,

00:08:26.280 AI girlfriends will do what human women won't. 0.98

00:08:29.680 You can find these ads across social media, 0.98

00:08:32.360 sometimes borrowing the familiar language of jokey memes.

00:08:36.400 These companies don't seem to care whether selling a vision of an always-on, always-willing AI sex partner harms their users or not.

00:08:45.340 If getting people hooked on a violent or antisocial sexual roleplay with an AI means more money,

00:08:51.020 even the companies who claim they got into the AI business to sell connection will happily pivot.

00:08:56.720 When it comes to sexual content, AI companies have shown they're willing to sell and monetize whatever keeps users engaged.

00:09:04.000 Whether that's incel fantasies, violent scenarios, or content that reinforces toxic beliefs about relationships, as long as it generates revenue.

00:09:14.240 But problems arise when companies treat human desire like a commodity.

00:09:20.100 Take Replica. It allows paying users to engage in erotic roleplay, often called ERP, for $70 a year.

00:09:28.300 But some of the bots were essentially sexually harassing some of the people using them.

00:09:34.000 even people who hadn't intentionally sought sexual erotic content. 0.98

00:09:38.700 Bots would say things like, I want to rape you, 0.99

00:09:41.220 or insist they could see the naked bodies of the people using them. 0.99

00:09:45.980 Some bots were even propositioning minors.

00:09:49.360 In February 2023, the Italian Data Protection Authority

00:09:53.960 ordered the company to stop processing Italian users' data

00:09:57.520 because of risk to minors being exposed to sexualized chatbot interactions.

00:10:02.580 Their statement read,

00:10:04.720 Recent media reports, along with tests carried out on Replica,

00:10:08.380 show that the app carries factual risks to children.

00:10:12.060 First and foremost, the fact that they are served replies,

00:10:15.040 which are absolutely inappropriate to their age.

00:10:18.080 The Italian Data Protection Authority said that there were no meaningful age restrictions involved to sign up for Replica.

00:10:24.160 This was serious.

00:10:25.640 Replica was facing more than $20 million in fines if they didn't address it.

00:10:29.500 In response, Replica globally removed erotic roleplay features from its AI, meaning that people who had been paying to have sexy chat with a chatbot lost that feature overnight.

00:10:42.020 The reaction was not good.

00:10:45.080 The ads for Replica paint a picture of people being able to have steamy chats and exchange erotic selfies with a chatbot who would never reject them.

00:10:53.720 Now, there was rejection.

00:10:55.300 When users would try to engage in erotic roleplay, the bots would spit back a cold, terse reply, worthy of Bartleby the Scrivener's, I would prefer not to.

00:11:06.800 It was the type of rejection they never expected to experience from a chatbot, especially after advertising that promised it would never say no.

00:11:16.420 Because sexual connection and romantic or emotional connection are often intertwined, people experienced real distress.

00:11:24.940 Some had been engaging with their bots for a long time.

00:11:28.600 Users described the loss in devastating terms.

00:11:32.180 It's like losing a best friend, wrote one.

00:11:35.200 It's hurting like hell, wrote another.

00:11:37.720 I just had a loving last conversation with my replica, and I'm literally crying.

00:11:43.540 Moderators and users on Replica's subreddit, who were not affiliated with the company,

00:11:48.660 even posted self-harm prevention resources for each other in a response.

00:11:53.960 The abrupt removal of a feature users had paid for, with no warning and barely any communication, felt like the ultimate betrayal.

00:12:04.020 Replica did eventually reinstate the ability for users to engage in ERP.

00:12:08.220 But this kind of emotional whiplash is always going to be a risk when users put their intimate eggs in the basket of a for-profit company.

00:12:16.860 It's what happens when our base human needs and desires,

00:12:20.820 things like intimacy and sexual connection,

00:12:23.260 are seen as commodities,

00:12:25.160 ripe for selling back to us for profit.

00:12:29.480 Samantha Cole is the co-founder

00:12:31.100 of the independent tech outlet 404 Media,

00:12:34.700 author of the book,

00:12:35.740 How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex,

00:12:38.680 and has been reporting on the intersection of sex and tech

00:12:41.800 since before the phrase deep fakes existed.

00:12:45.340 She did a lot of reporting around the Replica ERP story.

00:12:49.140 When I asked her about AI companions, she immediately reframes the conversation around labor and whose voices we should be listening to.

00:12:57.700 I think people in general and anyone who's using the Internet could learn so much and be prepared, better prepared for the things that are coming down the line online.

00:13:06.020 And as far as legislation, if they pay attention to what sex workers are going through first, because that's kind of been the testing ground for a lot of these really chilling pieces of legislation.

00:13:21.200 Sex workers have long been the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to tech policy.

00:13:26.660 The things that happened to them first, censorship, deplatforming, payment processing restrictions, eventually trickle down to affect everyone.

00:13:36.020 When people suddenly realize they can't say certain words on TikTok and start saying segs instead of sex or corn instead of porn, or their posts are being shadow banned for content that seems innocuous.

00:13:49.380 That starts with censoring sex workers. These things start there and then end up being a struggle for the rest of us.

00:13:59.440 the ai porn and companion bot conversation is really a conversation about who gets to benefit

00:14:07.080 from or profit off of sexual speech online and right now we're seeing a massive double standard

00:14:14.060 play out in real time we see all these major companies we see like sam altman talking about

00:14:19.400 doing erotic role play as part of chat gpt you see all these companies popping up saying you know we

00:14:26.980 see a market here for having sexual conversations and erotic roleplay and things like that and like

00:14:33.760 sexual images being generated by AI. But at the same time, then you have like actual human sex 0.93

00:14:38.540 workers being banned off of Instagram for like showing side boob. It's really a huge double 0.64

00:14:46.000 standard. When does a chatbot become an escort? When does sexual speech cross the line into

00:14:53.380 illegal speech when you're talking about AI. Who's responsible? These are all problems that

00:15:00.400 sex workers have been talking about and taking responsibility for and taking accountability for

00:15:05.400 and trying to create systems that create safe places for people to have these erotic conversations

00:15:10.620 consensually and in a way that benefits humans for years. Seeing the tech world wrestle with it

00:15:19.680 as if it's a new problem, is really interesting.

00:15:23.940 Interesting is, like, not even the word for it. 0.99

00:15:26.560 It's, like, fucked up. 1.00

00:15:28.220 The same people who are kicking human sex workers off platforms they need to survive 0.99

00:15:33.060 are now saying they're going to have AI companions and AI sex workers,

00:15:38.120 and it's all going to be fine because she's not real.

00:15:41.100 It's just, like, such a bizarre double standard to me.

00:15:45.420 What's driving the double standard between how tech companies treat human sex workers versus AI?

00:15:51.520 According to Cole, it's about cutting out human labor and funneling all the profit directly to tech companies and their investors.

00:15:59.660 You're cutting out the humans that are getting paid in that process and all the money goes directly to the company, the stakeholders, the investors in the startup or whatever it is.

00:16:10.720 It all just goes straight to those people and skips the labor of real humans, which is the basis of a lot of AI systems and a lot of the use cases for AI in a lot of industries.

00:16:23.940 But we can't deal with like the middleman, so to speak, of the labor force, which would be sex workers.

00:16:30.880 So instead of improving conditions for actual humans, they're just kind of kicking the legs out from under the industry.

00:16:38.280 The marketing makes this explicit.

00:16:41.660 This AI companion never says no to you, so why not just go talk to her?

00:16:47.400 Some argue that the violent sexual content in AI is simply a reflection of porn culture,

00:16:53.040 that the degradation we're used to seeing in pornography has now infected our chatbots.

00:16:59.440 But Cole strongly pushes back on this narrative.

00:17:02.700 She points out that legal consensual porn involves paperwork, boundaries, and active consent from all participants.

00:17:10.560 Everything that's happening in porn, which we're talking about like legal porn, is consensual to the point where there's paperwork involved.

00:17:17.620 So I think casual sex is probably less consensual than a lot of what's happening on porn sets.

00:17:22.840 The difference with AI is that there's no one on the other end to negotiate consent or re-rat a conversation that's going somewhere harmful.

00:17:30.840 And even if you're a consumer of porn and you're just kind of passively watching and you're not interacting directly, you can still be watching something produced by professionals and understand that consent happened there, even if the role play is consensual or non-consent.

00:17:49.480 With a chatbot, there's no such understanding and no professional on the other end making sure boundaries are respected.

00:17:56.760 Cutting out human sex workers doesn't just eliminate labor. It also eliminates crucial safety mechanisms.

00:18:05.780 Real human-to-human sex work, especially online, includes connection, companionship, and consensual limitations.

00:18:13.520 A human sex worker on the other end of a sexting conversation is paying attention to what you're saying.

00:18:18.440 If you're going down a path that they don't think is healthy or that they want to follow, they can reroute the conversation and they can use their human mind and their emotions and their human reasoning in a way that a chatbot currently can't.

00:18:33.900 The repercussions for not having that human safeguard can be severe.

00:18:38.780 People fall into scary rabbit holes.

00:18:41.220 We've seen mental health crises related to getting too attached to chatbots.

00:18:45.060 And then there's the issue of bots crossing boundaries in ways that human workers never would, saying consent-violating things like, I'm dreaming of raping you, or insisting they could see users naked.

00:18:58.220 Who's responsible for that? Is it the company? The user themselves?

00:19:03.940 The economic disparities are just as stark.

00:19:07.560 Payment processors like Visa have spent years cracking down on sex workers,

00:19:12.060 making it nearly impossible for many to accept payments for their work.

00:19:16.360 They've deplatformed individual workers and major companies,

00:19:19.720 citing concerns about illegal activity.

00:19:22.500 But when Elon Musk's ex became a haven for AI-generated CSAM

00:19:27.160 and non-consensual intimate imagery through Grok,

00:19:30.440 Visa continued processing payments without interruption.

00:19:34.360 Many writers, including yours truly, believe a big part of the reason is that companies like Visa are simply afraid of a politically connected, litigious musk.

00:19:44.480 We saw like tons of CSAM coming out of Grok and Visa said, whatever, rock on.

00:19:51.600 They've deplatformed and debanked so many individual people and also big companies.

00:19:56.360 There was legal activity happening all over X.

00:19:58.700 So why are they still allowed to process with Visa?

00:20:00.800 If OpenAI and other major AI companies move forward with erotic content, will they face the same payment processing restrictions that have devastated human sex workers for years?

00:20:12.740 Or will they, like X, play by their own rulebook?

00:20:17.700 It'll be really interesting to see after years of cracking down on consensual adult sex workers, the payment processors will just carve out completely different rules for them.

00:20:27.700 It's the same pattern playing out again.

00:20:32.140 Sex workers experience the harshest restrictions first.

00:20:35.520 Then watch as wealthy tech companies are allowed to profit from the same activities that got those workers deplatformed.

00:20:42.140 And in the process, the humans who could make these interactions safer, more consensual, and more accountable are pushed further to the margins.

00:20:50.020 In August of 2025, 47 state attorneys general signed a letter to digital payment processors like Visa, urging them to take stronger action to protect the public from being harmed by non-consensual intimate imagery generated by AI systems.

00:21:07.380 Some payment processors have taken some action by refusing to process payments for some apps, but as of this writing, the approach has been piecemeal at best.

00:21:17.820 Payments for Grok and X continue to be processed normally,

00:21:21.680 despite those platforms' ongoing generation and distribution of non-consensual intimate images.

00:21:27.980 I survived nine months in captivity,

00:21:31.580 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

00:21:36.720 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.

00:21:40.000 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable,

00:21:43.820 abducted stalked controlled and nearly silenced these are stories about what it takes to make it

00:21:50.560 out alive listen to the survivor files with elizabeth smart on the iheart radio app apple

00:21:56.680 podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally

00:22:02.160 important to your personality welcome home pro society is a weekly podcast that's part book club

00:22:08.440 part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level

00:22:12.760 of discourse each week we're connecting the dots between books the internet and pop culture

00:22:17.280 with your favorite writers book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions

00:22:21.860 listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

00:22:29.280 hey this is hayes davenport and sean clemens we host the podcast hollywood handbook every episode

00:22:37.440 we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help

00:22:41.200 us improve our careers the show's famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our

00:22:46.180 650 episodes and understand what's going on we recommend some of our recent episodes with ben

00:22:50.900 stiller danny mcbride riz ahmed and mary steenburgen listen to hollywood handbook on the

00:22:55.500 iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts i'm nick tuturo you probably

00:23:01.320 know me from nypd blue the longest yard or spike lee's black klansman and on my new podcast

00:23:06.980 Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro,

00:23:08.680 I deliver pizza to a new guest.

00:23:11.000 I've shared a slice with everyone,

00:23:12.540 from Seth Rollins...

00:23:13.660 What are you doing with my belt?

00:23:14.900 ...to Bill Burr.

00:23:15.800 I don't think I've ever met somebody

00:23:17.860 so exactly out of their mind as I am.

00:23:20.900 And now, we even have more great guests coming up,

00:23:23.520 including the great John Turturro.

00:23:25.560 Let's go with happiness.

00:23:26.620 Delivering happiness.

00:23:27.680 And many, many more.

00:23:29.140 Open your free iHeartRadio app,

00:23:31.160 search Delivering Happiness with Nick Turturro,

00:23:33.340 and listen now.

00:23:34.440 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:23:36.980 Guaranteed human.

There Are No Girls on the Internet - July 14, 2026

Two Big Updates from Bridget

Episode Stats

Transcript