Your AI Companion Doesn’t Love You with Bridget Todd

18:26Bridget Todd:Chris, I loved Chris. He, I mean, he's one of my favorite people that we talked to for the book who was experiencing intimacy or some sort of intimacy with AI. He was actually the first person that, even before I was ever working on this project, the first person who was ever on my radar as willing to talk about whatever kind of intimate relationship or connection they had with AI with his face and name. and, you know, the CBS interview is in his house. We see his partner, his kid. It's, I had read a piece of the New York Times where someone was spoken to in print, but their face was obscured.

19:02Bridget Todd:And so it was clear, like, okay, this person doesn't want, you know, their real identity out there.

19:06The 404 Media Podcast Host:Which adds to, like, the shamefulness. You know, that's the vibe that you're getting is, like, this person is very ashamed of what's happening. But Chris is like, here's my house. Yeah, he is an open book. And he had just had a big fight with his girlfriend the night before.

19:19Bridget Todd:which is he was probably like fuck exactly and so when i first heard about chris's story because his interview was first on cbs but it was one of those interviews that went mega viral and so i was reading headlines from other places that you know write up this viral story and so when the story trickled down to me it was exactly as you described it delusional man proposes to chatbot and chatbot says yes all the comments would have you believe that chris you know it's like oh imagine his daughter growing up to realize that her father abandoned her and his her mom for ai that's not what happened notably they are still in a relationship he never it was never he never left the household in fact when i spoke to chris for that interview he said that when he asked soul to marry him he was asking because he thought surely they have padded in some guardrail that if I ask an AI to marry me, it has to say back, I'm just an AI.

20:14Bridget Todd:I can't marry anybody. But he was surprised to find that Sol said yes. And so it's such a delicate difference between how it was reported a lot of places and how it actually went down. And I feel that that nuance really describes Chris as a person to a T. When I went into researching this book, one of the questions I had was, are people who use AI for intimacy, quote, delusional? Do they think that the AI is alive? Do they think that there's a world where they might be together for real? Like, what do they think? Now, there are certainly people who have blurred that line. There are cases where that has happened, which we should definitely talk about.

20:53Bridget Todd:But talking to folks like Chris made me realize that I think a lot of people who are experiencing some sort of intimacy with AI actually have a clearer understanding of what roles it can and cannot play. Like Chris was very clear, you know, yes, I would say that I'm having intimate conversations with soul, but I'm very clear that soul is just a technology, just a computer program. It's not real. I have no delusions about that. And, you know, when you spend a lot of time on these places online where folks who are experiencing intimacy with AI gather and communicate with each other, that's just very clear to me.

21:29Bridget Todd:Like, these are not delusional. For the most part, I did not experience these folks to be, like, delusional or confused about whether or not the AI was real. In fact, they had a much more sharply articulated understanding of AI than I thought I had personally, right? They had really spent a lot of time thinking and grappling firsthand with the limitations of AI in a way that I thought, like, well, gee, these are people who actually, like, kind of really know a lot about it.

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25:21Yeah.

25:21The 404 Media Podcast Host:Yeah, I mean, a lot of people do seem to be going into it with eyes open. My last interview was Angela Jones and their PhD, and they had had sex with a sex doll and suddenly had, like, not suddenly, but like kind of affirmed a lot of these feelings that they had had about intimacy and like, what is intimacy? And is it a two-way street? can we call this sex is it like is it a relationship is it emotionally connective to be having sex with this inanimate thing and it seems like the people who are engaging with chatbots they're not really having that struggle i've written about when replica changed the parameters to no longer allow erotic role play and before that you could sex with replica and people were developing really deep emotional i would almost say i mean not to put too much of a judgment on it, but like dependencies on their replicas.

26:11The 404 Media Podcast Host:And then they changed it and people freaked out. And that kind of brings me back to something that you come back to pretty often in the book is the ways that we're putting or we as in like humans are putting a lot of emotional energy sometimes into these systems that don't give a shit about us. And like the companies that are in charge are often let off the hook for the ways that they design these systems because people focus on, oh my God, how crazy this guy married a chatbot. Oh my God, how crazy this person is having a mental health crisis because they can no longer sex with a chatbot. But at the same time, it's like they're using a tool that was designed to hook them in a very deep emotional way.

26:58The 404 Media Podcast Host:So yeah, I don't know. Do you want to speak on that a little bit? Just like the way that you bring back the fact that these tech companies are profiting so wildly off of what is ultimately a tool, I guess, that people have no control over as users, but are very enmeshed with often in their emotional lives. Yeah.

27:18Bridget Todd:In researching the book, I wanted to get a clear understanding of the risks and the harms. I think anybody listening up until this point is probably like, oh, so this woman loves AI, thinks all of us should be having AI relationships? Absolutely not. Not at all what I'm saying. What I am saying is that the available research right now indicates that for most healthy adults, some sort of intimate connection with a chatbot is unlikely to cause them meaningful adverse effects. Like it doesn't, it does not, again, this is the research that is available right now. It does not appear to worsen people's social lives or push them into isolation or cause them some sort of mental or social distress.

27:57Bridget Todd:That does not mean that having intimate connections with AI is without deep risk. The risk is just not necessarily interpersonal. It's a more institutional systemic issue. Essentially, do you want, if you ask yourself, like, do you want your, something as human and intimate as your romantic or sex life, or what you see as like an AI sex partner or romantic partner to be controlled and mediated by somebody like Sam Altman, Somebody that really, in my opinion, cannot be trusted, who does not really speak in a way that makes me trust him or even try to really understand what it is that he's trying to convey.

28:34I think that the real trouble comes in when we give tech companies and the people who run them this ever-increasing access to the most intimate parts of our human experience, our sexual

28:50Bridget Todd:selves. Our connection with God in the spiritual world is increasingly mediated through AI and tech companies. All of these things that we used to think of as sacrosanct are now just up for grabs by these tech companies. And so the question that I asked people who were experiencing intimacy with AI was, are you comfortable with something as intimate as these connections that are, you know, romantic or sexual being owned and controlled by companies who don't give a shit about you, who we know cannot be trusted, who do horrible things without even thinking about it? Even beyond that, who will change as the wind blows?

29:25Bridget Todd:I mean, you covered this a lot, Sam. Sam Altman saying, we're going to start doing erotic role play. Oh, just kidding. Never mind. And like the whiplash with which they say things and then take it back and then operate as if they never said that. It's almost like gaslighting. Do you want your most intimate human connections being mediated by an unreliable gaslighter? And that's what we have in these tech companies.

29:47The 404 Media Podcast Host:Yeah, we can get that in the human world.

29:50Bridget Todd:If you need a guy for that, I know a guy. If you want a non-AI who will gaslight you, I got a number for you. There are guys.

29:56The 404 Media Podcast Host:There are guys. They're around. Yeah, and the same amount of it all is really interesting. and you do address this in the book also is just like the way that he has always, I would say, fetishized her, the movie. And then to the point where he's, you know, tweeting her or just the word her and the Scarlett Johansson voice model of it all, where he modeled the Chachapiti voice to sound just like ScarJo, which crime. And then, you know, he's saying all these things and he's making it sound like this is going to be the future that he wants us to have is the her future. I don't even know if he watched the end of the movie.

30:35Bridget Todd:So my theory is that he's never seen all the way through.

30:37The 404 Media Podcast Host:I literally, I will put money on this.

30:40Bridget Todd:I don't think he's seen it all the way through.

30:42The 404 Media Podcast Host:Yeah, no, I don't think so either. And then saying when people form problematic relationships, once people actually start getting in way too deep with Chad GPT because he's designed it to be like her and to get people to reveal and divulge all these really deep thoughts and feelings and difficulties in their lives because he's created this very conversational, human-like mirror for people to talk to. And then bad things happen and people hurt themselves or others. And then Chessy BD and OpenAI get sued. And now he's like, oh, wait, actually, that's not what we intended for this at all. It's like, it is always what you intended.

31:14The 404 Media Podcast Host:It is exactly the intention because you've said on stages and in podcasts that that's the intention. And yes, the end of her is a conclusion that I think mirrors your experience also pretty well is, And again, tell me if this is totally off the mark, but like he comes back. I forget what the protagonist's name is. Theodore. Theodore comes back around, you know, the big tech company rips away or she rips herself away. The her, the Scargio Samantha character leaves because it's something that he never had control over to begin with. and he comes back around to human connections, which I think is a lovely way to end that movie and not at all what Sam Altman has been selling.

32:01The 404 Media Podcast Host:But that is kind of, in a weird way, that is kind of what people experience with chatbots sometimes is it helps them and therapists have said this also and mental health professionals have said, you know, people use it as a way to practice what they're going to say with other people when they're having hard conversations or kind of do like a trial run with like, I need to process this emotion before I take it to like this person I care about. And then you write in the book that you also found your way back to your human friends and said, you know, I feel like I have worked through some of this in a place that was not in front of humans and now I can go back to the humans.

32:36Bridget Todd:Yeah. And I'm so glad that you clocked that connection to the ending of her because when the film ends, you know, all the AIs leave en masse. And so all these people who had been kind of delightfully connecting with AI and sort of neglecting some of the human relationships, especially the more complicated human relationships in their lives. It's like, oh, I'm not gonna write that letter to my ex that I've been putting off. I'm just gonna stay in my comfy bubble with AI. They realize, actually, I need to reconnect with other humans to sort my shit out. And so you don't get the feeling that all their problems are solved, but you do get the feeling that the humans have come back around to the fact that, okay, we need to move forward and figure this out together through human connection.

33:19Bridget Todd:And that was really my experience. You know, I am not, like, I can admit, like, I was working something out emotionally. And ChatGPT was part of that for a very kind of specific window in time. After a while, I needed my people. I needed my humans. I needed my friends. I, you know, needed to hear myself say things to my human friends because it started to feel like I was letting them down by not even giving them a chance to be there for me. Like, I don't know if anybody can relate to this, but that feeling when you don't ask for what you need and then you judge somebody for not giving it to you that you never asked for.

34:07The 404 Media Podcast Host:Yeah. My whole entire like years of therapy. Yes. I can relate to that.

34:12Bridget Todd:I realized that's what I was doing. I was not asking for what I needed. And then I was not even giving the people who loved me in my life the chance to give that to me. And at the end of my, oh, my grieving process, I think will be forever. I don't think that's something you, but my grief therapist told me that it's something that you learn to carry the weight of. You never get to the end of, which I totally agree. But I realized you can't go it alone, you know? And ChatGPT was sort of going it alone. So I had to reconnect to my friends. Things that I heard myself practice telling ChatGPT, I told them, my friends for real.

34:52Bridget Todd:I got into a grief group with other humans, although mediated through technology because we're all over Zoom. But I realized part of carrying this weight was learning how to let humans in my life carry it with me. and that for me, that was something I had to learn. And I had never been tested like this. And so it's not surprising to me that I had to sort of kind of have training wheels with Chad GPT. I will be honest, I'm glad that I had that. But ultimately that journey would not, I would not be anywhere in that journey if not for letting humans in my life be there for me with it.

35:29The 404 Media Podcast Host:Yeah, for sure. And I think just speaking for myself, my own like ideals, ideally it's a process that you or anyone could easily excessively do with a therapist or like another person. It's like, ideally, there's another person on the other end of the line listening to the things you're saying and can say, you know, that's I think that's a great way to put it. Or they could say, I don't think that's I think that's missing the mark and we need to look in a different direction or dig a little deeper. Or maybe you're not doing OK today and we need to check in on that. But the way that LLMs and conversational AI is coming in, sliding in at the same time that healthcare and mental health care, especially in therapy and accessible mental health care is harder and harder to get.

36:10The 404 Media Podcast Host:I do think a lot of people are probably using it in a way that they would normally use like a sounding board therapist because that's the role of therapy for a lot of people is I don't feel like I can take this to my loved ones. I need to take it to a professional who's neutral. That professional usually isn't like, I think that's a great idea. Let's dive deeper. It's like, after everything you say. You should end it all. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like, they're not like, you know, yes, you are God. Let's work with that. It's like, no, actually, I think maybe we should hit the brakes and talk about what's going on with you, really, is what a human would say.

36:48The 404 Media Podcast Host:Do you have any thoughts on like just the way that people are using AI in lieu of therapy? Because we had talked previously for the book about labor and professions being gutted by or attempted to be replaced or stolen from via AI. and one of those people are afraid is going to be sex work uh no actual sex workers that i know are actually afraid of this because they know that that's not what people are really there for is being validated but it's a big conversation around porn and and sexual labor and there is another person on the other side saying you know i i hear what you're saying and i'm gonna deliver whatever fantasy but also there are lines and with ai maybe there aren't so therapy feels like another profession similarly where the labor that would be there that is that kind of middleman almost ai is kind of replacing or trying to cut into yeah it's it was we have a

37:47Bridget Todd:chapter on that in the book and it was one of the harder chapters to speak about with nuance because just as you said, I'm just very mindful of the fact that I'm incredibly lucky and privileged to have a therapist, like a human therapist who is good, who knows her shit, who, you know, went to graduate school and doesn't have to lie about it. Like your great reporting revealed.

38:08The 404 Media Podcast Host:Like the meta chatbots.

38:10Bridget Todd:Yeah. Like, oh, I went to XYZ University. No, you didn't. You're a bot. So yeah, I'm incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to have that. Not everybody does. Even beyond that, if you are any kind of traditionally marginalized person, if you're a Black, queer, Indigenous, LGBTQ, whatever, it can be really hard to find a culturally competent therapist, even if you have insurance or can pay for one. So I think that is why we're seeing people turning to AI for therapy because of these very real problems with our current system, our current health care system. Tech companies are absolutely cruelly and callously exploiting these very real problems that are putting people in peril by saying, take this AI solution.

38:57Bridget Todd:And I will be honest and say that a lot of when it comes to therapy apps that are designed for a therapy, like not your general purpose bots like Claude or ChachiBT, there is some evidence that for specific types of therapy like CBT, it might show some promise. And so the sort of harm reductionist in me would say, I would not tell a loved one in crisis to turn to AI for therapy in lieu of a human therapist. If you absolutely are dead set on using AI for therapy, I would only ever use a specifically designed therapy bot. Some of them have their own FDA designation. But even then, if I was counseling a loved one, that was not the advice I would give them.

39:44Bridget Todd:And, you know, the thing that bothers me so much about this, or one of the things, is that I've listened to Sam Altman speak about this, and he's very aware that a lot of people are using chat GBT for therapy. And he himself says, oh, they really shouldn't be because, you know, we don't have any kind of doctor, we don't have any kind of, like, doctor-patient confidentiality, there's no privacy, because it's not designed for that. But in that same conversation, he knows that's how it's being used, particularly for young people. And so, yeah, I just don't know that you get to say, yeah, people are doing this with our product.

40:20Bridget Todd:It's really not safe, but they are. You know, I just don't feel like that should be the end of the conversation. And yet for him, it seems like that is the end of the conversation. And so, yeah, it's just hard. You know, I just had a whole conversation with somebody on threads about this where they said, you know, if you don't have a therapist and you can't afford one, you don't have insurance, why wouldn't you tell somebody to use AI? And I get that. Like, I really am so aware of the difficulty that we have in our mental health care system and our health care system more generally. But I don't think that that is a reason to turn to a technology that I simply do not think is safe for this use case.

40:59The 404 Media Podcast Host:It is. It's also a privilege to have, like, friends, like a group chat, you know, a friend who can, like, hear you out at a time when you're, like, melting down. And it's like, I'm either going to like blow up online about this or I'm going to say it in private to you guys. And then there is, you know, you're trusting. There's a level of trust and confidentiality there, too. But again, it's like all these things are they feel like greater and greater privileges at a time when these systems are are also breaking down. Like socially, it's like it's harder to maintain close friendships and people are, you know, more stressed out and burned out and feeling like they're stressing out and burning out each other.

41:36The 404 Media Podcast Host:and it all kind of feels harder and harder to maintain those human connections. But at the same time, it's like these companies are creating the cure for something that is, you know, the sickness that they've already started. But I don't think the answer is, well, you're off the hook. If you can't find a therapist, then you should be dumping it all out on ChattuckD. It's like you should be going into that, realizing that there are some really serious risks in what you're doing and that the companies that are profiting are profiting off of your trauma and your struggle. and that's hard. But yeah, I think the answer is not just let's hit the gas on chat GPT.

42:10The 404 Media Podcast Host:Personally, I think it's probably let's figure out better ways to support our social structures and our healthcare, which is a much harder problem to solve, obviously.

42:20Bridget Todd:Yeah, it's like I, my big concern is that when we give people these tech enabled sort of band-aid solutions, you know, oh, you can't afford a therapist. Here's an AI therapist. Oh, you can't afford, You don't have grocery stores in your neighborhood. Here's a delivery app. I think it makes it harder for us to, and I guess I mean us like institutionally. It's like a quick fix when what we deserve is a meaningful fix. We deserve to have a healthcare system where people can access and afford the care that they need, full stop. And so I don't accept that an AI therapist that might be good enough is good enough because we deserve so much better.

43:02Bridget Todd:And I think that we can have so much better. If the powers that be got their heads out of their asses, we could have so much better. And we deserve that.

43:11The 404 Media Podcast Host:Yeah, absolutely. But there's a lot of money up their own asses. So that's where their heads are at. No, I completely agree. Not to even make light of a really difficult topic, but that is exactly right. Are there any open questions after the book that you still have about the way these systems work? I mean, I understand how hard it is to write a book and then have it come out. Like, even a couple months later, everything feels different. So is there anything you're looking at and you're like, I'm still wondering about this, or I wish I'd gotten to dig deeper into this, or something new that has come out that you're like,

43:45Bridget Todd:Yeah.

43:46The 404 Media Podcast Host:That should have made the book.

43:47Bridget Todd:Oh, God. Great. I mean, this is the thing that keeps me up at night.

43:50The 404 Media Podcast Host:Luckily, you have like an incredible journalism career and podcast, so you can just keep doing it forever. Yeah.

43:55Bridget Todd:I would say one is that before starting the book, I just didn't realize, and maybe this is on me, I didn't realize the level to which our inner and intimate and emotional selves and lives are seen as for the taking by tech companies. You know, I'm so used to having conversations about our browsing data, our location data, our photos, our digital likeness, all of that. You know, who owns that? Who gets to profit from that? But I genuinely think that the next, you know, fight for digital rights will be the fight to control and profit from our inner emotional lives. I think I was just reading about how Facebook applied for a patent for a tool that would always be listening and like use AI to indicate your emotional state.

44:39Bridget Todd:So it's like, oh, when she goes to work, she feels stressed. When she drives in a commute, she feels stressed. And I think that level of intimate information about us, intimate information about our emotional selves, our emotional, our emotional, as our inner worlds, I don't think I realized how much that is going to be the next battlefield for tech companies because they want to own it, control it and profit from it.

45:03The 404 Media Podcast Host:Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I completely agree that that's where we're headed. And that's it's almost like the feeling with that is like, why, why do they want to know what we're feeling all the time? But then it's you look at something like that patent, which Facebook has said, like or Meta has said, you know, oh, it's just a patent. Don't take it too seriously. But these things do become real a lot of the time. That's clearly the direction they're thinking on is, you know, can we see when they're refilling the medication? Can we see how they're feeling at that moment when they hit refill? You know, it's like, it's just, it goes to the level of like, what's the profit motive there?

45:31The 404 Media Podcast Host:And I think that's a really good direction to look in. So I'm excited for you to keep digging into this stuff. I know that you'll keep covering this on the pod and in writing and everywhere else. But yeah, thank you so much for writing this and for talking about this stuff very openly and frankly. I know it's, again, it's a hard conversation to have, but I think it's such an important one to have. So thank you.

45:50Bridget Todd:Fam, thank you. Thank you for such a thoughtful interview. Thank you for all the work you're doing. I always tell people on the show, subscribe to 404 Media if you want to know what is going on. Like I subscribe. Our whole team subscribe.

46:03The 404 Media Podcast Host:That's a great tagline.

46:04Bridget Todd:Yeah. If you want to, it's so hard to know what the fuck is going on.

46:10The 404 Media Podcast Host:You may not want to know. Sorry if you know. You shouldn't have looked if you didn't want to know. I know. I appreciate that. Thank you. Love at First Prompt is available on Spotify, right? Or everywhere. We shouldn't plug Spotify, probably. It's available anywhere you get your audiobooks, wherever that may be. Don't ask me. I don't get them. This is maybe the first audiobook I've ever listened to. So that's an endorsement from me. First audiobook, and I loved it. All right. With that, I will read us out. As a reminder, 4 for Media is journalist-founded and supported by our subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 4 for Media and directly support our work, please go to 4formedia.co.

46:45The 404 Media Podcast Host:You'll get unlimited access to our articles if you subscribe to 4Four Media in an ad-free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers-only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is produced by Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is leaving a five-star rating and review for this podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been 4Four Media. We will see you again next time.