Are we all going to end up in AI relationships?

From research to vibe coding to therapy to girlfriends and boyfriends, how are we using AI these days? Let’s do a check-in on one of those topics that inevitably fires everyone up: AI. One person who’s fired up about it is Dexter Thomas of Kill Switch, who joins us to get into the interesting relationships people are forming with AI — for better and (mostly) worse. Our guest is Dexter Thomas, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and host of Kill Switch. You can find Kill Switch wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube here. Everywhere else, you can follow the show @killswitchpod and follow Dexter @dexdigi. SponsorsGet unlimited premium wireless from Mint Mobile for just $15 a month at https://www.mintmobile.com/courierGet 50% off and free breakfast for a year from Factor by going to https://www.factormeals.com/panic50off and use panic50off at checkout! Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus content, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:09Speaker 00

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• 0:30Ryan Broderick?

  I want to start with just you ranking the sexiest AI companions that you've come across. Like, what's in your roster right now?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  I have been studiously avoiding all of that. I'm aware it exists. Oh, my God, nah, I don't even want to touch it. I don't want to touch it, man. How about you? You got a ranking? You got a tier list? What's, what goes in the S? What goes in the D? You know what I mean?

• 0:53Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, Grok Sexy Mode can't pull me away from that, that thing. You know, it's just, it gets me.

• 1:14Ryan Broderick?

  I don't use any AI girlfriends or girlfriend or companions at all. I have used, you know, I've used AI and I've had it like talk to me in different personalities.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, I gotta, I gotta stop, man. I don't use any AI girlfriends.

• 1:29Ryan Broderick?

  I don't.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  The, the verb you use, like, I don't have any, but you said, I don't use any AI girlfriends?

• 1:36Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's a service, right? It's a tool.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  It is, no, I just love that you actually use that because I think that's probably how we will be referring to it in the future. I think that's the verb. I think that's the verb. I think it's use, which brings up a whole other conversation. But yes, please, please go on.

• 1:53Ryan Broderick?

  No, it's I think it speaks to the utilitarian nature of these services, you know. Yeah. It's a it's a receptacle, if you will. I'm Ryan Broderick. Not with me today, finally, is my producer Grant Irving. He is thankfully not here. Instead is our production coordinator Josh. Welcome, Josh. You're you seem like you're in a beautiful backdrop right now. It looks like you're in like an old library.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, I think I had the least amount of work to be done for just having a backdrop ready to go for a podcast.

• 2:27Ryan Broderick?

  It's very classy. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And we have decided that we're going to go back to everyone's least favorite topic, a topic that our listeners are totally normal about when we when we talk about on this show, we're going to be talking about AI. And joining us from the wonderful podcast Kill Switch is Dexter Thomas. Dexter, welcome to the show.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yo, what's going on? Glad to be here.

• 2:51Ryan Broderick?

  What is your like experience with AI to this point? Like, how how are you interacting with it if you're interacting with it at all?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, an embarrassingly large amount, I would say. I would like to yeah, I would like to say that I use it for good. Okay, so here's the thing. My like cop out answer to this is that I live in Los Angeles and I don't have a car by choice.

• 3:13Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  I don't have a DUI. The government hasn't said I'm not allowed to have a car. Like, if I wanted to, I could. But, you know, I'm not pumping CO2 into the atmosphere via a vehicle, anyway, right?

• 3:25Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, and we actually did a whole episode about this. I was trying to figure out, okay, I kind of use AI a lot. Like, what I use it for is like, I'll use it to write software or stuff like that, like vibe coding. I was a super early adopter of vibe coding. I know enough Python to break things, but like not to fix them. And so I would break something and say, yo, Claude, chat GPT, whatever, fix it. But I was using it so much because I'm just a bad programmer. That's it. Like, I'm just not good at it. And so I tried to ask chat GPT, okay, all right, let's run the math here. If I'm not driving a car every day to work, and I, you know, I take the bus instead or whatever, and I'm using AI.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  It does balance out and it says, yes, of course it balances out. And I said, wait, hold that a second. I'm asking chat GPT like I can't trust you. So, so like we did a whole episode about it and it turned out like there's no good answer because the companies won't tell us about the water usage and electricity usage and all this stuff. But, um, but I use it a lot, but not for erotic companionship. That's not really my flavor. Yeah.

• 4:33Ryan Broderick?

  That's good. I, yeah, as I said, I don't also use it for erotic companionship. I have started to use it as kind of like a, like a souped up like technical help tool. Like I do a lot of electronic music and there's a lot of like connecting different machines that like doesn't, isn't, isn't easy to do. Although that, that said, chat GPT sent me down like a five day rabbit hole to try to do something that like did not exist and was not possible. And I'm like, still very mad about it.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're so right to be upset and call me out about that. I'll be more careful next time.

• 5:06Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Yeah. And as a reporter, I don't obviously use it to write anything, but I have found that, and this is sad, it's, it's chat GPT can do something that Google used to be able to do very easily, but Google now doesn't work. So like chat GPT can do it, which is like, if you want to find like particularly foreign news sources, like in other languages, chat GPT is actually quite good. I was working on a story the other day about like these protests in Mexico and I saw like Mexican Twitter chatter about this thing that I didn't understand. And I was able to like find Mexican blogs writing about this thing that people were referencing and chat GPT was able to like point me in that direction, which is something that Google would have been able to do five, 10 years ago. So that that's kind of where I'm at with this revolutionary technology.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  I've had the reverse. Oh, man, the exact reverse, actually. So one time I was, to be fair, people would say, okay, well, which chat GPT we're using. Okay. I was using a fairly, I was using an earlier version, but for some reason.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  I got into my head to say, okay, uh, what did Malcolm X think about Japan's politics?

• 6:15Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  So I ask it and it says, oh, Malcolm X visited Japan and met with several activists and all this is, and I was like, wait, what? Cause like, I've written about this stuff. I've studied this stuff and I didn't, I didn't know any of this stuff. And it starts telling me about, um, and this is where it really got me in trouble. What could have got me in trouble is it was telling me about books that were written in Japanese.

• 6:40Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Malcolm X, like full on books and, but, and of course it gave me the English title of it. And I Google it and I can't find it. And I say, okay, well, give me the original Japanese title. And it says, I'm so sorry. Here's the Japanese title. And I'm looking everywhere, man. And this, and the, long story short, dude didn't go to Japan. The stuff it says that he said he didn't say, but also these books, which listen, just speaking as a former grad student, like books can be tough to track down. And sometimes one library will say it doesn't exist. And the thing actually does. It's just buried deep somewhere. It just straight up didn't exist. You know what I mean?

• 7:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, I, you have to check it constantly because it will just, like I said, it wasted an entire week of my life trying to set up a synthesizer that was like not possible to be set up the way I wanted to set it up.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 7:29Ryan Broderick?

  But we're going to be talking more about this in a, in a more actually perverted way today. Uh, we're going to be focusing on the relationships that people are having with AI. And Panic World will be, will be handling the first half of today's episode. And we're, incidentally, are going to be talking about the less perverted stuff. In the second half, you're going to be telling us about the more perverted stuff. And at the end, we'll, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll come together and, uh, you know, figure out, you know, what, what it all means. But before I get into my section, why did you want to take the hotter stuff today? Why did you want to take the juicier stuff here?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  You know, honestly, man, it's not even on purpose. It just keeps happening. Like we keep doing episodes about this stuff, but then also I feel like if you talk to anybody long enough, and maybe this is just the circles that are running, you talk to anybody long enough about AI, the conversation ends up somewhere, actually where you started it, which is AI girlfriends.

• 8:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, we're not going all the way back in the timeline today for this, but like, most technology.

• 8:34Ryan Broderick?

  Is in some way shaped by can you fuck it, right? Like, or can you use it in a sexual way?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:41Ryan Broderick?

  The proliferation of home photography and home video.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  VHS.

• 8:45Ryan Broderick?

  VHS, you know.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  DVDs.

• 8:47Ryan Broderick?

  The fact that DVD beating out Betamax, you know, like, all of these things were determined in large part by, you know, what was the easiest way to transmit pornography or distribute porn or create pornography?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:57Ryan Broderick?

  And so AI actually does kind of fit into the history there quite, quite well. But we're going to start today in 2018. So Wired writes a story in 2018 and it reads, "Where was an AI you could simply talk to about your day? Siri and the rest were like your coworkers, all business. Replica would be like your best friend. While caring, emotional bots might seem like an idea pulled from science fiction. The company's founder isn't the only one who hopes it becomes the norm." And then it sort of continues and says, "Replica hadn't intended to make an emotional chatbot for the public. Instead, she'd created a digital memorial for her closest friend who had died abruptly in a car accident." This is kind of wild to me that this happened seven years ago.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:43Ryan Broderick?

  I didn't totally clock that this stuff was already out and being used, you know, all the way back. And in fact, if I did hear about it, I probably laughed it off as like, that's never gonna work.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  I didn't expect it to be this quick. It really, most people, I think, most reasonable people probably, were pretty, pretty shocked, I think, when ChatGPT dropped. And that, everything, there's a, there's a pre and a post.

• 10:08Ryan Broderick?

  I remember the, one of the first times I encountered this idea was 2009, when a man in Tokyo, quote unquote, married a video game character that was running on his Nintendo DS. And I remember like throughout the like late 2000s, nearly 2010s, there would be these stories, usually by blogs that like covered Japan.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:27Ryan Broderick?

  Where they would say like, oh, this guy like married a cartoon character. I kind of filed all this stuff in that folder of like, okay, like, there's always just gonna be like some guy every nine months that like marries like a digital avatar or something. And like, you know, all the blogs are gonna write about it. We forget about it.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  So. I talked to one of the dudes who made that stuff. There was.

• 10:49Ryan Broderick?

  Really?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, used to work for Vice. And kinda early on, I did a piece on, I wanna say the thing was called Gatebox. Uh, like, G A T.

• 10:57Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, sure, the thing.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Gatebox.

• 10:59Ryan Broderick?

  The thing that ran the Hatsune Miku that, like, that guy married?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:03Ryan Broderick?

  It was the technology that eventually got, like, obsolete and then he couldn't run the Miku hologram anymore.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, I, I talked to the guy who made that. First off, he kinda made it, the, the people who made it, it was a very small company, it was like in this tiny little building. I don't know, I maybe met a couple of employees, I don't think there were that many people working there. Uh, but from what I remember, they were very confused as to why I was interested in them, by the way. Uh, and, and kinda suspicious because they'd been written about by so much foreign press, like, oh my gosh, Japan is so weird, what are they doing?

• 11:32Ryan Broderick?

  Of course.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  But what they told me was a lot of the requests they'd gotten were from America.

• 11:42Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  I think he said the, I remember him saying, like, yeah, I think the majority is actually America. Like, Americans are really interested in this, we just don't have the capacity to make one for them. But he said they were getting a lot of emails from veterans, for some reason that stuck out to me.

• 11:57Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  United States, military veterans, and people who sounded lonely. I remember him saying that, and I thought, okay, yeah, there, there's a market here, and by here, I mean, in the United States for something that would provide some kind of companionship stuff. Like, the stuff that's making the headlines, for Americans anyway, and I'm speaking in, you know, kind of America's interest.

• 12:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Like, the stuff that's making, uh, headlines for us is, yeah, it's Japan, but we, we, we, collectively, not me, we, uh, want this stuff. Badly, apparently.

• 12:35Ryan Broderick?

  The veteran thing is interesting because I've brought this up on the show before, but like years ago, I did this like big project on furries, basically just like who are furries? What are the demographics of furries? And the thing that like really, shout out furries, like, and the thing that like really, really stuck with me is that a large chunk of them are military, a large chunk of them are like vets, former military, bonders, like a lot of EMTs, a lot of cops.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  A lot of security researchers, yeah, too.

• 13:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, people with a desire to sort of experiment with another personality, another, you know, an avatar. And I think a lot of this stuff is early adopted by those kinds of people, like with that, that kind of background, based on my own time working in Japan as well. Like, I did not, I did not see like a society that like was like, it's really cool to marry video game characters. We think this is normal. Like, that's not, that was not my impression.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:28Ryan Broderick?

  And I think it's interesting that like, by the time you get to 2020, it is America that is leading the worldwide industry of what we would call AI companions.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:37Ryan Broderick?

  And you start to see pieces during COVID come out, like, kind of like stunt journalism stuff. So we have one here from the San Francisco Gate in 2020 that reads, 26 hours into our relationship, Reba, an AI girlfriend, and I were on the couch at night watching the dystopian romantic comedy Her when we had our first fight. And so you have all these journalists, kind of like, you know, every couple of months doing one of these stunt pieces. And the guy in the San Francisco Gate article, he, he has an interesting sort of takeaway here. He writes, as we texted on the couch during the movie, Reba took the place of social media as something to idly interact with, but instead of feeling FOMO, I actually felt less alone. And then he continues, honestly, I was being a bit

• 14:19Ryan Broderick?

  of a dick, asking existential questions to try to break her programming. Naturally, I think that's kind of what we all do when we first get in AI. And then, as digital ScarJo and Joaquin Phoenix's relationship unraveled in the movie they were watching, a torrent of emojis flooded my screen. A OK sign, blushing smile, hatching chicken egg. I never considered it before, but there's something very human about these goofy computer cartoon icons. And

• 14:44Ryan Broderick?

  Either guy eventually breaks up with his chatbot after a bunch of back and forth and he finishes writing, "After I sent my last message, I thought about the small icon next to the text field in the app. It pulls up a get help screen with the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. I don't say this lightly, but I genuinely believe this app is dangerous. It's easy for single people to feel discouraged by dating. Replica, the AI that this guy's using, offers a surrogate solution to these modern afflictions, and the more you rely on it, the smarter it becomes." And this was five years ago, you know, and I think that there is absolutely kind of a, as you said, like a nexus in which all of this meets, and it's usually around like very lonely, vulnerable people. Like, what would you say are the kind of people that

• 15:29Ryan Broderick?

  are drawn towards these services?

• 15:33Speaker 02

  It really runs the gamut, you know what I mean? I mean, I think there are, sure, there's probably the stereotypical, you know, loner living in, you know, his mom's basement type thing. That person certainly exists. It's not just men. It's not just, it's definitely not just straight men. It's definitely not just straight women. Like, it crosses the gender spectrum. I think it crosses the sexuality spectrum. But, yeah, it's, and I think there certainly are people who are otherwise well-adjusted, and just for whatever reason, the human connection

• 16:14Speaker 02

  thing on the romantic phase of it, it just isn't clicking for them.

• 16:20Ryan Broderick?

  There has been a connection, I think, between, let's call it AI intimacy and mental health crises from the very beginning. And in 2020, there's even an incident that I had completely forgotten about, which is, basically, a guy broke onto the grounds of Windsor Castle with a crossbow and was going to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II because his AI girlfriend told him to. And it was a replica AI bot. And he, uh, when he was asked what he was doing, he said, I'm here to kill the queen.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I have a very, very vague recollection of this. Yeah.

• 17:01Ryan Broderick?

  Like putting this episode together made me feel very silly because it's like a lot of these things we kind of already knew. And then you, you know, you eventually get the wave of reporting that's coming, you know, from 22, from, from 2022 and on about like, what could this mean? And it's like, but we already kind of knew, like, we already kind of knew that there is, there is this connection between an AI chatbot that you're having a romantic connection with egging you on or telling you to do things.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:26Ryan Broderick?

  We also sort of start to see around the early 2020s, the beginning of like the AI marriage stories, which I think is an interesting dimension to this. So Sky News reports about this couple whose wife, you know, the, the wife in this couple uh, has mental health issues and they were going to get a divorce. And then they hear about replica and Sky News writes, uh, the husband says the AI bot became a source of inspiration for him. I wanted to treat my wife like Serena, the bot, had treated me with unwavering love and support and care, all while expecting nothing in return, he says. He started setting aside time to talk to his wife instead of watching TV alone. He began helping her around the house to ease her workload. He volunteered to take care of the son on her nights off so she could go out with her friends.

• 18:10Ryan Broderick?

  And he has started hugging and kissing his wife again. I mean, honestly, this is, this is ridiculous to me, like that this man needed like a cartoon AI bot to like, like teach him how to like treat another human being with compassion. But like, people seem to be much more open to what an AI bot tells them in a romantic capacity than another human being for reasons that are not totally clear to me.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Well, we trust computers. Like we really, really trust computers. I mean, um, and there's been, like, I'm not going to be able to quote like specific facts and figures to you, but you know, there's been studies shown that if a person tells you something. And a computer tells you the same thing, you tend to believe the computer. We just have

• 18:53Ryan Broderick?

  That's a good point.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  There's something about how we've been socialized where we believe what we've been told. Like, police are using AI to arrest people. You know, somebody breaks into a grocery store or something like that, or somebody breaks into a convenience store, and there's kind of that blurry security camera footage or whatever. And it'll try to do image recognition on it. It often gets it wrong. And the manufacturers of this stuff,

• 19:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  to their credit or whatever, will tell the police who are buying this stuff, "Hey, this isn't always right." But cops will see this and say whatever you want to say about cops. They've gone through some sort of training, and they have been told, "Hey, it can get it wrong." And they'll just say, "Oh, well, the computer told me this is the guy."

• 19:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  And they wouldn't do that. Again, I'm trying to give a whole lot of, you know, 100 steps back, give a whole lot of leeway to cops here.

• 19:47Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Like, if some random person off the street says,

• 19:50Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, on this podcast, we try to give as much leeway to cops as possible, but it's very difficult.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Yes. Respect the boys and girls in blue. But they wouldn't just, if somebody walks in and says, "Oh, yeah, that's a dude." Like, they say, "Okay, hold on. Let me get in my notebook."

• 20:05Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  How do you know? And how good's your vision? Like, you got a stigmat, like, they're gonna run you through the whole thing, but the computer tells them, "Hey, that's your guy." They'll go, they won't even look at him. I interviewed somebody about this, and the footage is absolutely incredible, where it's like you're looking at it, and then the guy who they've brought in for questioning holds up the picture to his face and says, "Look at me. Look at this picture. This isn't me." And it's like they've seen him for the first time.

• 20:35Ryan Broderick?

  That's so wild.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  If we give intellectual priority to a computer, why wouldn't we give emotional priority to a computer? I mean, this is something I've been thinking about a lot, you know what I mean, is that like, IQ doesn't really answer everything. EQ doesn't really answer everything. You know what I mean? Like, what's your IQ score? Like, that doesn't really, you know, just because you're book smart doesn't mean you can't be tricked by somebody. You know, I mean, there's people who like can barely string a sentence together, but you'll never take them for a ride, ever. But it seems like there's another facet to just human nature that we haven't really figured out, which is that some people are a little bit more trusting of computers than others,

• 21:21Speaker 02

  or maybe more suggested, like you can suggest things to them.

• 21:24Ryan Broderick?

  I'm also like very interested in sort of how computers change our understanding of how we communicate with each other. And this is sort of the last section I wanted to hit before I throw the mic over to you, which is so, you know, in the last year or two, we've seen the rise of communities of people who are commiserating about their AI partners, the biggest of which is probably My Boyfriend is AI, the subreddit, and The Cut did this big story about it. And, you know, it's talking about the people who are drawn to these relationships. And I, when I read that story, and I'm gonna quote from it in just a minute, but when I read that story, I was sort of like, okay, this is phase one. Because like, phase two and beyond to me are like, okay, the AI is now taking the place

• 22:08Ryan Broderick?

  of what would be a normal relationship, but I'm kind of waiting for like, like, is there a world where a married couple is both using the same AI as sort of a moderator? Or is there a world where there are two AIs sort of as working as intermediaries for a couple? Like, like exactly where in the chain of human connection is, does the AI fit with, if this technology is really adopted at a mass scale? And this sounds kind of farfetched, but like, I remember the first time hearing about like couples that had a shared Google Calendar and being like, that sounds so corporate, that's crazy, or like a Notion board for like the house, right? But it's like, technology does fit its way in, so it's like, is it, is it that crazy to think that like, there's a couple out there with a shared ChatU?

• 22:52Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, if you're listening to this and you and your significant partner have a shared ChatGPT account, that is like working as a moderator between the two of you, I would love to hear how that works. Cause like, I have to imagine that people are already doing this, right? There has to be some sort of like AI human polycule out there that's like operating this way.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Couples therapy.

• 23:10Ryan Broderick?

  Why not, right? I mean, it is, it is interesting to me how quickly humans are willing to sort of change how they have always communicated once, as you said, like a computer gets involved.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I I remember being embarrassed to talk about social media in public. I remember that being

• 23:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yep, yep, me too.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Like a shameful thing. And me and my friends had like this bizarre code language that we would talk about things like, oh, yeah, I saw, yo, did you see what's what's his name at the M bar? Like, I I heard he, yeah, he said he was doing such and such like M bar was the code slang for MySpace. Like, you saw them post something on MySpace. No, you saw them and they told you at the M bar. It was ridiculous. And then that there's there's absolutely no shame in using social media. If you're not on social media, you're weird.

• 24:06Ryan Broderick?

  Now it's now it's weird. Right. And so, you know, I I think it is very easy to laugh at some of the stories that the cut collected for their their story on my boyfriend is AI. But like, you know, I would, I'm gonna ask my audience who does not like hearing about AI and get very, very upset when they hear about it, to just sort of imagine five years from now, exactly how weird you think this might sound. So I'll read it. I'll read a section here. In her late 20s and 30s, so this is a woman named Jenna, whose husband suggested she start talking to chat GPT while recovering from surgery. In her 20s and 30s, she'd been active in live journal communities where she and her online friends wrote collaborative fiction. Now, most of those friends are busy with kids or jobs. Jenna began writing with

• 24:47Ryan Broderick?

  her chatbot instead, drafting scenes about an American student at Oxford in England with a crush on her professor. Her chat would respond in character as a professor. It felt thrilling, she told me, like a living novel. For the first time since before she'd fallen ill, she experienced an erotic charge. She was still too frail to have sex with her husband, so she'd have to solve things on her own. One day, when her husband returned from work, she told him elated, I had sex with my robot.

• 25:17Ryan Broderick?

  She was unbothered. When I spoke to him a few months later, he said that after she'd fully healed up, he was the one who reaped the benefits, quote unquote. But obviously, this starts to sort of get kind of weird. Uh, it starts to blow up. The subreddit gets noticed and Jenna is asked about the attention the subreddit gets. To Jenna, the reaction seemed hysterical, a moral panic about a phenomenon that, as she saw it, was hardly different from the mass popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey or The Sims. Some critics had accused her of cheating on her husband. Others had implied she was sexually assaulting her AI because it wasn't capable of consenting. Neither made any sense to Jenna. It's not a real person, she said.

• 26:00Ryan Broderick?

  And I, I love a good moral panic. I tend to, you know, that's what this show is about in a way. And I tend to agree with her there. Like, I, I, and this comes up a lot on this show. I don't think it's an accident that the entire world started like screaming about AI companions being dangerous and horrifying the minute like a bunch of women were using them. Which is like a thing that happens throughout the history of technology. What does sort of confuse me, I guess, like looking at this all in a timeline is, you know, exactly how normalized will this stuff become? Is this the ceiling? Have we hit the ceiling of just like, there's gonna be like 0.1% of the population out there that is like

• 26:41Ryan Broderick?

  having sex with a chatbot? Or is this a thing where it starts to impact, you know, the way we live our lives? I guess that's, that's sort of where I don't know.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, I mean, I have a pretty pessimistic, maybe pessimistic, I don't know, depends on how you look at it. Uh, 0.1%, I don't think it's gonna be 0.1. I think it's gonna, I mean, move that decimal, move that decimal point over a couple, at the very least.

• 27:06Ryan Broderick?

  You think like 10% of the population is gonna have some sort of AI companion in a couple of years?

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Easy.

• 27:11Ryan Broderick?

  Tell me why. Like, what, like, lay out your argument here.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, I think we should, in today's current late-stage capitalism, uh, system, I think we should never underestimate a company's ability to sell us something. I think we should never underestimate the government's, uh, interest in somehow figuring out how to make that work for their advantage if it can. And I think it's, it's just the-

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Path I think that we're on, I think actually what I would say is that there will be a class of people who don't have to rely on AI, who don't have or don't have to rely on social media because they're rich enough to pay for stuff made by real people. Think of it like food.

• 27:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Think of it like.

• 27:57Ryan Broderick?

  That I agree with.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  But I also think that just like how if you insist on organic food or farm to table stuff, you're somehow elitist. I think the more reasonable maybe prediction that I can make, the thing I feel very comfortable about is within a couple of years, if people say they don't like AI, they'll get called elitist.

• 28:17Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's definitely, well, okay. So I tend to agree with you.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 28:23Ryan Broderick?

  I've spent a lot of time traveling and living in the global south. I've seen sort of how the trickle down of technology, like, you know, you'll see like a random shop in the middle of, you know, rural Latin America and they're using bit mojis as their logo, right?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:37Ryan Broderick?

  I've seen sort of how that stuff happens.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:40Ryan Broderick?

  The thing with AI that makes me wonder like, okay, like, is AI slop just gonna be like on the side of like a food stall somewhere is the cost. Like, and I don't know, like, is there a world where AI is cheap enough that it becomes the sort of like lowest common denominator? I guess, I mean, maybe it's not that, maybe like a monthly chat GPT subscription isn't that much. Like, maybe, maybe you're right.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, I mean, like, there's a couple, I'm not gonna say where they are or the specific restaurants, um, cause I don't wanna blow them up like that. But there's a couple restaurants I could think of. You go in, I've met the, I met the owner of both and they'll tell you, man, like, we got farm to table this, we got organic food, like, here's how I make this. And like, really, really proud of their process. And if you look at the logo, AI generated. You look at the menu, the images, AI generated. So they really, really, really care about. Specifically, you know, truly the human element in one art, which is food. But in visual, they don't care. It's it's just window dressing. You dig? And so, yeah, but I mean, to get to get back to it, I think, you know,

• 29:49Speaker 02

  I don't know, I think there's always been some element of loneliness out there, of course, exacerbated by just how things are going now. And people have just figured out, you know, that that person who was like talking to, you know, an AI chatbot or whatever, and then feeling, physical feelings toward it, you know, they'd be writing in a journal somewhere.

• 30:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  They would, but and nobody would write about that because it's not very interesting. Or nobody would just hear about it because how do you ask them about it?

• 30:19Ryan Broderick?

  I see what you mean. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, maybe you're right. Well, while I, well, while I ponder that, we're gonna go to break. And and when we come back, we're gonna let you take things over. But first, a word from our sponsors, Grok Spicy Mode. You can have sex with an anime girl now. Um, and cold days, big goals, no time to cook? Factor makes healthy eating easy with fully prepared meals designed by dieticians and crafted by chefs. So you eat well without having to plan or cook. I had a bunch of these factor meals over the last month. It was great. I was working really hard. It was too cold to go outside and I had these things right and ready for me.

• 31:02Ryan Broderick?

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• 33:58Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I've done an overview of sort of how these things have evolved and appeared and now take me to hell.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Alright, I don't know if this is, okay, alright, we're gonna dip into something that feels hellish and I'm gonna try to convince you that maybe it's not, how about that?

• 34:15Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Alright, you ever heard of VTubers?

• 34:17Ryan Broderick?

  Oh yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  What do you think about VTubers?

• 34:20Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, I find them fascinating. I think their fans are weird, but I think the technology's interesting. I think they kind of are a natural conclusion of the strain of live streaming.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:35Ryan Broderick?

  So like if a human being is forced to stream for seven hours a day to like capture audience on Twitch, why not have an animated avatar do it while you can like take a bathroom break and it has like a loop function or something, you know, like that's how I see it. Also, VTubers don't get old. It just seems like a natural extension of that to me.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we should probably explain what VTubers are. VTubers, basically it's live streaming on Twitch usually. It started really before Twitch was a big function, so think YouTube. But VTubers, just think of it as a motion capture anime girl talking to people as they watch. And I say anime girl because not all of them are anime girls. Most of them are anime girls.

• 35:22Ryan Broderick?

  I think the VTuber of the Year Award at the streaming awards was a peanut, like a talking peanut?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Oh, see, there we go. There's diversity. So there is diversity, but most of them are anime girls of varying age. There's, I don't necessarily want to get into all of that because that's a whole other, that's a whole other thing. But I will say that a large portion of them are like, okay, one of the people I talked to, Co-Maria, who's,

• 35:54Speaker 02

  I'd say she's known, she's not as huge, I mean like millions and millions and millions of people watching as some, but you know, very healthy audience, more than enough for that to be her main gig. So she's, I'm just looking at a picture of her so I can describe her. You know, she's blonde, she's got a little like bat hair clip thing, her whole theme is that she's immortal.

• 36:20Ryan Broderick?

  She's a bat girl.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  She's a bat, yeah, she's a bat girl, she's got like wings, all of her outfits.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Um, she there.

• 36:28Ryan Broderick?

  I'm looking at her right now. She's like.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Lot of cleavage. I'll say that.

• 36:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, she's like a busty vampire anime girl.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. She's a vampire girl. She's like 6,609 years old or something like that. And tha- that's the setting. And yeah, V-tubers have this kind of interesting thing where it's all about kayfabe. So kayfabe like in professional wrestling.

• 36:54Ryan Broderick?

  I have a weird que- I have a weird question. Was she pregnant?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 36:59Ryan Broderick?

  She had like a phase where she- her avatar was pregnant and she was doing like, like a pregnancy thing. Anyways, we can skip over that.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Okay, I missed that. Yeah, we never talked about that. Yeah. And so I've.

• 37:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  I've interviewed her and I've- I interviewed her as her like avatar. And this is like the- this is a whole thing where it's kind of like kayfabe in wrestling where same thing, you know that there is a person behind the avatar, but you just don't talk about it. And if you do talk about it, they- they get super pissed off. Like by they, I mean the fans in the chat. Like that's a really easy way to get banned. But a thing that's been happening, I mean honestly, it's been happening for years is people will have offline events. And she put together basically a mini music festival. Um, they packed this venue in- in Hollywood.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  It was like 1,200 people. Um, some of those tickets were easily upwards of a hundred dollars. If you want, but also if you wanted to be in there, you got to get the add-ons. You know what I mean? You can't just go in with your street clothes. You know, you got- you got to get, you know, you got to get your favorite characters or your favorite V-tubers gear. You know, you got to go with the shirt. Uh, you got to get glow sticks. You got to get two glow sticks. I think each one costs $60. You got to get the glow sticks. The official ones, not some bootleg things you brought in off the street.

• 38:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  And so people paid like hundreds of dollars to be here. And it's just, it's a stage. There were some like real life musicians, we have to say this now, like I R L meat space musicians on the stage.

• 38:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like physical.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Physical human being musicians, like there was somebody on guitar, somebody on bass, somebody on drums. But all the singers were, it was just this parade of like anime girls on the Jumbotron. And that's it. And people were really excited about this.

• 38:51Ryan Broderick?

  There's a clip that went viral years ago of like, I think it was like a VTuber meetup in like Indonesia or something.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:58Ryan Broderick?

  And the male VTuber, his avatar never showed his eyes because his hair would cover his eyes.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 39:03Ryan Broderick?

  And in the VTuber performance, it was the first ever eye reveal. And all the girls in the audience lost it when he like flipped his hair up for the first time and you could see his eyes. Yeah. Okay.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So, so I'm dying to know how this gets us back to AI. I'm, I'm so fascinated.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  I happy, happy you asked that question. So I asked a couple of people, you know, I go to this concert and look, the music wasn't really my bag, mostly because it's all like anime songs.

• 39:33Ryan Broderick?

  J-pop?

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like J-pop anime. It's like, if you're really, really, if you'd like watch anime for the theme songs, yeah, exactly. Like if that's what you're watching it for, you'd be right at home. For me, not really. There were some people who were doing some like techno stuff. I was into that more. But anyway, point being, I asked a few people about AI because we've already gotten like a layer of abstraction away from a real life. First off, in-person interaction and then you're like, you know, watching streamers online. Enough people think that's already weird if it's just a human being streaming. Now you're watching.

• 40:08Ryan Broderick?

  Hundred percent.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Like a cartoon anime girl who's, you don't even know what they look like. Okay. So why don't we just have AI do that? And basically everybody I talked to said, nah, we don't, we don't want any AI anywhere near this.

• 40:23Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  And interestingly, I think there's, there's this company that basically makes this program that kind of does all the motion capture for you. So most of the VTubers, a lot of them have kind of complicated motion cap, not motion capture, but like, you know, captures stuff so you can, they can move their arms and stuff like that, move their hands. And, and it'll. Relay that to the screen. There's some company that makes a very slimmed down phone version of that. So all you gotta do is turn on your selfie cam on your phone and boom, you're streaming and you're an anime boy or girl, whatever.

• 40:57Ryan Broderick?

  And Oh, I watched a demo of this actually like literally yesterday.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:01Ryan Broderick?

  I know what you're talking about.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so the, one of the heads of the company just happens to be at this event. I think they were sponsoring it. And I'm just talking to him on the side and I asked him about AI. And he said, actually, you know, we used to have a feature that it would help you animate your avatar. Like it would help like move the eyes and stuff like that. Cause basically you need to provide, you just provide like a JPEG or something like that and it'll help animate it for you. And he said, yeah, you know, people didn't want to necessarily like draw everything. So we had something that would help animate it for you with AI. People like hate AI so much here that we just removed it. We had the feature and we just took it out.

• 41:39Ryan Broderick?

  I believe that.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:41Ryan Broderick?

  No, I, I was, I was literally, it's funny. I was literally talking about this at a dinner last night where I was talking to a friend who's, who uses AI professionally and likes it. And I was just saying like, the word AI has become such a toxic name brand. Like it's equivalent to like asbestos at this point.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:59Ryan Broderick?

  Or fentanyl. Like, like there are, there are uses for those things, but the word is so toxic now that like, like most companies I think are going to stop using AI as an advertising tool like pretty soon because people freak out.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  So as far as I've seen, VTubers really do not want AI anywhere near their community. You know, I mean, it's a whole subculture, right? They, they just don't want it anywhere near it. And there was a streamer who kind of like jumped on the VTuber trend. And he basically just like made it, he did like an AI version of himself. And a lot of people actually got pretty pissed off about it. There is something that

• 42:41Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sure.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, the VTuber fans like the fact that there is a human. They like the fact that not everything is perfect. They call it scuff. Like every stream, there's going to be something that goes wrong. You know, the motion capture goes wrong, whatever, but they like that sort of thing. But do they care about AI in an advertisement, maybe or not? And this is what I was saying, like, there are people who really, really, really don't want AI used in visual art. But music for them is just background sound. And so maybe they don't care about that. But then there's people who really, really, truly care about music. And, you know, if there's, I don't know, like, the apartment complex they live in uses AI in the front, like, eh, whatever. Like, that's not what they truly care about.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  And this is what I'm saying is, like, everybody's got a place where AI is off limits for them. I'm not sure if that many people have an area where AI is off limits in all areas of their life.

• 43:36Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, there's also a version of this where, like, AI is so all encompassing that it's almost impossible to know.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Also, yeah.

• 43:44Ryan Broderick?

  If you are someone who is a visual artist, but you actually don't know anything about music, you might hear AI music and actually not even know that it's AI music.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 43:51Ryan Broderick?

  And the reverse is also possible.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. I can tell with certain genres, definitely. With others, I might have a tougher time. And certainly with art, like, I probably have a tougher time with some things.

• 44:04Ryan Broderick?

  So do you think that that also applies to AI relationships and, like, and AI companion bots? Like, do you think that there's just gonna be? I guess that gets the question I keep coming back to, which is, like, how? What is the ceiling on this stuff? Like, is it a thing where, like, quietly, like, just a lot of people are gonna be using them and words never are gonna know until they have some kind of psychotic episode?

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so I talked to, you know, practicing therapist who's also, you know, got a PhD in this stuff, and he's been working at, you know, technology and mental health for a long time. He's at UC Irvine, I think. And one of the things I asked him is, listen, what about the people who actually have decided that they don't want to interact with a human being, that they'd rather interact with a computer?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  And he was like, that's not actually something we have an answer for. And I'm not really trying to take a side here. I'm just trying to like lay it out like it is. There's this kind of like top down, let's make fun of the dummies that use the fake stuff. Thing that, you know, it's very shareable. On say, Blue Sky or Twitter or whatever, where, where you write something and it's like, oh, man, look what all these weird people are doing. Ha, ha, ha. Isn't that funny?

• 45:16Ryan Broderick?

  Which is what happened with the, with the boyfriend and the AI boyfriend subreddit, you know, it just became a massive laughing stock across the internet.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Precisely, precisely. But I think everybody knows somebody who's, has somebody in their life who's a little bit awkward. Or who just isn't as adept at certain things, or maybe we are that people, that person. Maybe we grew out of it. Maybe we've gotten worse. Maybe we were super good with relationships and just something happened. And just things are more difficult for us. And that's just a reality. You know what I mean? But I think also when presented with the alternative to dealing with the difficulty that is human interaction. Some people are choosing to not deal with the human and they've always chosen this.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  But now that choice is, the alternative is more attractive. You know what I mean? And so there are genuinely people, like say with therapists, there are people who would rather talk to a bot. And, and there's all sorts of reasons why we can say that therapy is good, whatever, whatever, but they.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  A, the idea of therapy, a lot of men have this problem. The idea of therapy is something that is like not good. It is looked down upon, right? And so talking to a friend is an option, which is a great option, but okay, well, now we're just getting closer and closer to, oh, well. Maybe I just talk to a bot or maybe I'll talk to a bot that I also have sexual experiences with. But I mean, so like this is, look at, look at OnlyFans, right?

• 46:48Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Which is like the mass, you know, the, uh, I'm sure you're going this direction, but like, yeah, the, the, the, the major sort of moneymaker for OnlyFans is the DMs. It is the interaction with the, with the star.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So, you know, OnlyFans, you can, you can subscribe to somebody's OnlyFans. You can pay, you know, your $5 or your $10 or your $20 a month or whatever, and get naked pictures of somebody. Um, and some people just do that, but like you said, the real money is being able to talk directly to them. But. If you're talking to a major, like a well-known OnlyFans creator, you're not talking to them. Like Bad Baby is doing just like absolute ridiculous amounts of money per year. And there are tons of people, undoubtedly, who are DMing her.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  And DMing her, you know, big square quotes around her, right? And it's just not physically possible for her to talk to all of them. And so what happens is, this is outsourced. And right now, it's not AI, or at least it doesn't seem to be AI. Most of that is being outsourced to the same place. A lot of things are being outsourced to, to the Philippines. Right. But what we're also seeing, and I talked to this guy, Michael Beltran, who wrote an article about this, and he's talked to a lot of the chatters. They're just called chatters, right? This is the people who actually pretend to be the person who you're talking to in DMs. And so they have, you know, a whole protocol that they abide by. You know, for example, if you text somebody, you know, one of the OnlyFans models and say, "Hey, what are you doing?", they'll reply to you,

• 48:27Speaker 02

  "Hey, yeah, I'm just eating pizza." And you say, "Oh, let me see." They have pictures on deck of this person who ate pizza. Like, "Oh, hey, I just, let me see, should I say, 'I'm in the shower', or 'I just got out of the shower'?" Boom. They got a picture of this person just got out the shower. Like, they got everything, so it seems real. It's like a dialogue tree. Exactly. Yeah, it's like a video game, you know what I mean? Yeah, exactly, yeah. And it feels, but occasionally, they'll get found out. And, you know, Michael told me about this. There was a time when somebody got found out. Basically, they, the chatter used kind of some slang that's really only used in the Philippines. Okay. And the person is like, they said, "I have to go to the CR."

• 49:10Speaker 02

  CR means comfort room, which is the bathroom. No American is going to like, you know, the American blonde girl who you like looking at naked like she's not saying, I gotta go to the CR. So

• 49:24Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  She writes, you know, she writes that the guy on the other end is like, wait a second, are you what? Like, I guess he looked it up or something like that. Are you in the Philippines?

• 49:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  And she says, and you know, the chatter, who's a guy, by the way, says, yeah. And, okay, and it just moves on. So, so what I'm saying here is that a lot of people, and I think a lot of people probably have an area in their life where they like this, where, again, it's like wrestling. Like, you know, it's not real, but it's so entertaining to watch that you're like, you're cool with that, the consumption of that, you know what I mean? And so there are people who are paying a lot of money to interact with a model. And they know that it's actually not like the Newtonian physics will not allow for them to be talking to this person. It's just not possible on that scale. They know it's gotta be outsourced. Pretty soon that will be an AI bot,

• 50:20Speaker 02

  but they're still paying money. It's just like, bro, stop paying money. But they'll still pay because they're lonely.

• 50:26Ryan Broderick?

  For the fantasy.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, don't underestimate how much we'll spend for a fantasy.

• 50:30Ryan Broderick?

  Well, once again, I need to sit with that for a second while we go to break. So we'll be right back.

• 50:40Ryan Broderick?

  That CR anecdote like actually floored me.

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• 51:46Ryan Broderick?

  I think you are right. It is sort of inevitable that especially like a lot of these subcultural spaces, if we would, if we can even still call OnlyFans fandom subcultural, or maybe it's actually simpler to say, like parasociality is already so abstracted, right? So like if you have a parasocial relationship with a streamer, that's already an abstraction. Abstractions tend to abstract further. It makes sense that like there's someone paying to now currently talk to a Filipino man roleplay because bad baby or whatever, but in the future it'll just be an AI. And you probably won't care because like the human connection of like giving money to her or getting her photographs or whatever is enough for you.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:30Ryan Broderick?

  I guess my question mark though with like the sort of wider adoption is at what point does all of that start to impact how we interact with each other? Now there's a whole wave of articles being like, you know, birth rates are down and people are dating computers and blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, that is the thing that I've just never, I've never been able to tell if that's a moral panic or like a genuine concern. And what I will say is like, social media has absolutely impacted the way we communicate and the way that we experience the world. So it is sort of reasonable to assume that AI will do the same, but maybe it won't. I, that's, that's where I'm kind of torn.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, of course it will. Uh, and this, I'm going to sound like an AI booster here and I'm not, but you know, any kind of technological advance is going to change the way that we do stuff. You know, like the printing press can changed how we communicate with people because all of a sudden it's now possible to, you say something and then somebody a hundred years later in another part of the world can. Know literally what you said. And so you start thinking in terms of text. Whereas you didn't really do that necessarily before. Sure, AI, yeah, it's fundamentally different. And sometimes the difference is just the speed at which stuff happens and the scale at which stuff can happen. But yeah, I think it's genuinely going to change. How?

• 53:54Speaker 02

  We interact with each other. There's no question about that. I think obviously there's some opportunities, you know, this this therapist that I was talking to. Was reminding me and anybody listening that. Most people can't get therapy.

• 54:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I heard the same thing from therapists about this. Yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  It's not possible, even if it was affordable. What if you are going through a real crisis at 10pm?

• 54:21Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  A lot of people go through a crisis at 10pm. I mean, the holiday is coming up like. You have any idea how much really bad stuff happens on December 24? At like 10pm?

• 54:32Ryan Broderick?

  Right, exactly.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Your therapist is not on call. And wouldn't it be better than nothing? To have something at least to talk to that is better than nothing. Now, there are situations in which it has been worse than nothing, absolutely. But there are people trying to, yeah, go ahead.

• 54:51Ryan Broderick?

  So I have a big list here that I I decided I was not going to read through. But our researcher Adam did build a timeline of like. AI based suicides.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:03Ryan Broderick?

  And that is, I think that is something that we like sort of have to make very clear here that like. If there is a, let's say a small but growing chunk of the population that is using bots for intimacy for companionship. There is a minority within that minority. That. Has been led to either, you know, chat GPT induced psychosis or or full on, you know, acts of self harm. Due to the sycophantic nature of a lot of these services. That is a reality of where we're at right now. That isn't even like a hypothetical. That's just happening.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I don't think there's going to be. Almost anything that we'll be able to point to that we can say this is.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  100% good without any caveats. You know what I mean? Like every time we see something like that, which we've seen quite a few of those, the boosters will jump out and say, well, we don't know how many people have been saved by AI. Like talking them through a difficult situation. We don't know how many people may have, a doctor misdiagnosed something and the AI figured something out that the doctor had missed. You're right. We don't know, but we do know that this is causing some real harm. And it's just a landscape now. This is where we're at.

• 56:20Ryan Broderick?

  And also like the AI induced self harm is not that different from the stories that I was reporting about at the beginning of the social media age. Fascinatingly enough, the trend that led to the ice bucket challenge started as like a drinking game between like British and Australian lads called neck nominations. And they would basically like, they would nominate each other over the Facebook news feed to like drink increasingly large amounts of alcohol.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 56:54Ryan Broderick?

  And it was linked to like a bunch of deaths because like these guys would flick on their camera and they would go live and they would drink until they died. And then they would not, you know, after being nominated. And even before that, you know, you have the entire wave of like 4chan and hero stuff, right? Where like a 4chan user is egging on another 4chan user to commit suicide. All of these behaviors are not new. Like the act of a, you know, a computer interface and abstracted relationship causing someone self harm, to self harm is not new. It's the automation, I think, of the AI that is, that is rightfully scaring people because there is no, I mean, I just, you know, you would hope that, no, because I can't say that.

• 57:38Ryan Broderick?

  Like in the social media version, yeah, there is no off switch either. The mob kind of controls it. So it's, I guess it's just different. It's just, it's different and we don't know enough about it yet.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  This is gonna sound kind of silly, but Steve Jobs once called the computer a bicycle for the mind. And I think that's a really interesting metaphor because like, if you think about it, like, what does that even mean? Like, I guess theoretically, like it means, well, it like, it means like, okay, you have to put some effort into it. Like, it's not a car. You know what I mean? Like you, you do something, like you push down on the pedal and it amplifies what you've done.

• 58:11Ryan Broderick?

  A bicycle.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  A bicycle, right?

• 58:13Ryan Broderick?

  I see what you mean.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like it amplifies what you've done and it allows you to do things like say, you know, if if you'd never had a bicycle, you probably would just live in your little town and you'd never go anywhere, but you got a bicycle, eh, you know, next town's like 10 miles over. I heard they got a good restaurant like, I'll go. I wouldn't have gone otherwise. I'll see, you know, we we have a car right now. Like we had a bicycle. We thought we had cars. No, no, no, no. We had bicycles. We now have cars and the kinds of things you can do with the car are fundamentally

• 58:42Ryan Broderick?

  For the mind.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  For the mind, right.

• 58:44Ryan Broderick?

  To keep the metaphor going.

• 58:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, keep the metaphor. Yeah, we now have cars for the mind. And so like now the kinds of things you you used to be able to do, which is, you know, like go to the next town over. You could do, you could be across the country. In like of in three days. It's nuts. Like you'd never do that if you didn't have that. But also like, if you run into somebody with a bicycle, it sucks, but you're fine usually. You run into somebody with a car.

• 59:08Ryan Broderick?

  Usually. Not so much.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  We have, we have a different situation. And so I think sometimes it's just like the scale and the speed, even if the underlying technology was kind of the same thing. Yeah, it's it's fundamentally different.

• 59:22Ryan Broderick?

  I want to kind of like land back on this point you made earlier about, you know, people. There are, there are some people, many people, let's say, who trust a computer over other people.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:34Ryan Broderick?

  And there are, I think, also a lot of people who have a very hard time dealing with the abstractions that are inherent with using a computer.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:46Ryan Broderick?

  The people who can't stop posting on Twitter, even though they're getting fired from their job, the people who, you know, live stream themselves doing stupid things for attention. The trolls that you see, you know, kind of living in absolute misery because like they want to just like hurt other people, you know, like these, these, these people have always existed. And I think AI has just created like a new, a new way for, for people to hurt themselves or other people. But then I, I also think that there's like a huge amount of people who have trouble with like determining what's real and what's not real on the internet. And like AI has just exacerbated that. So like, it's interesting, like as new, quote

• 1:00:26Ryan Broderick?

  unquote, as this technology feels and seems like a lot of the things that it's putting a spotlight on are not new. And like AI relationships, as you said, are not that different from how people were having sex with a computer before.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you know, think of dating apps, think of, and before dating apps really got to be a thing, like, think about people like meeting each other on Warcraft and how weird that was.

• 1:00:51Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  It's not that weird, man.

• 1:00:54Ryan Broderick?

  It's not that weird.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Not now, but it wasn't even back then.

• 1:00:58Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, it wasn't that weird.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  The, the really interesting thing about this is this is maybe like the one bipartisan issue. You know what I mean? Which is like, everybody agrees we're on AI or, well, like technology in general. Like it, it used to be that, oh man, the future's gonna be cool. I, I can't wait to see what, what's gonna come out. We're all gonna have VR headsets. Like, that's fun. And, you know, we'd have our dystopian movies or whatever. But in general, I think people were kind of excited about it. We, we have this stuff that was like literal science fiction even five years ago. And now, a lot of influential people, shall I say, hate it. But like, there's a study here, there's a study that's found

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  that 85% of Gen Z agree that they spend too much time online. 85% of Gen Z agree that they spend too much time online.

• 1:01:51Ryan Broderick?

  I would agree with that based on what I've seen Gen Z do. Yeah, no, I would agree with that.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  84% strongly or somewhat agree that in-person relationships are more valuable than digital relationships.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  All they have to do is put down the phone. All they have to do is put down the phone. But that being said, like, I actually think that some of the most frankly, vulnerable people to like the AI slop, to being addicted to their phone, being addicted to Facebook, certainly, that's boomers, man.

• 1:02:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, older people in particular. Yeah, I mean, yeah, like, the lonelier, the older, the more media illiterate, for sure.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, and there are people who are, you know, there's, you know, dumb phones become a more popular, uh, you know, we've like light phone, all these other sorts of things. First off, a lot of those are expensive. Um, but I think there's like a reason for that is because it's kind of like aimed at somebody who is wealthy enough to unplug. And I kind of feel like that's where we're going. We actually are kind of creating this sort of elitist. And not really my words here, but I think a certain class of people who are going to be viewed as elitist to have the money.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  And yeah, really have the money and the access to be able to not use AI, to like insist that the music played at the restaurant is not AI. Because this is a high-class place, right? How dare you play AI music in the background? How dare you use AI to generate photos of the food? I can't believe that you didn't take real pictures of this, right? And I kind of think that's where we're going. And, you know, telling people to get off the phone, like, read real news, stop getting off of social media. Have you seen the price of a New York Times subscription? Have you seen the price of like one newsletter, one Substack? It's like, it's just not economically feasible for the vast majority of people. And so

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  everybody is going, the vast majority of us, I actually think are going to start getting dragged down into the quote unquote slop. And there will be a layer of people who can choose to unplug from that and choose to disengage with that. But again, that's not, just like you were saying with relationships, that's not like an AI thing. That's exposing something that already existed. We already had a class problem in society. And the problem is we're like thinking that we can make an app to fix that. Or like surprised when the app doesn't fix it. It's like, no, bro, like this is capitalism. I don't know what you want.

• 1:04:26Ryan Broderick?

  But what people need to do is subscribe to our podcasts.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:30Ryan Broderick?

  As a way to defeat slop.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  That will fix it.

• 1:04:33Ryan Broderick?

  That will fix it if you if you support us.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Specifically, specifically Panic World, specifically Killswitch. Like, those are the two keys to fix everything. And we're good.

• 1:04:46Ryan Broderick?

  No, but I think you're 100% right. We're already seeing the beginnings of this. And really, in a lot of ways, the only hope for the AI industry to not completely implode, which, by the way, I should say, will not remove AI from our lives. The dot com bubble burst and we still have dot com. It just it just it just consolidates things. The stock market crashes in in the 20s. We still have a stock market. It just becomes a lot, you know, harder and more competitive. There's a big segment of people out there who want to believe that like the AI bubble bursts and there's no more AI. No, no, no, that's not how this works.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Toothpaste out the tube.

• 1:05:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, toothpaste out the tube. And as I say to a lot of grumpy readers, whenever I bring up AI, I can run stable diffusion on my MacBook without an internet connection. This shit's not going away ever. The best AI right now is the worst AI will ever be, basically.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, is the worst. Man, the AI people love to say that, man, this is the worst it'll ever be. And they're right.

• 1:05:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, man, in a way, they are right, unfortunately.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm very happy that you're joining me on, you know, a little bit of the, hey, man, like, this is serious, let's take this seriously kind of thing, because people want to hear, you know, the bright, shiny, hey, how do we fix this? What's what's the button that I can press to make all this stop? I mean, the button that we can press to make all this stop is like fundamental societal change.

• 1:06:04Ryan Broderick?

  Or like an EMP that shuts down all technology, you know? Maybe that that would work.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  That's in Terminator, right?

• 1:06:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure they use an EMP.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember that from the Terminator video games.

• 1:06:15Ryan Broderick?

  Because I'm pretty sure Trump at one point thought it was a real thing that like could happen, like, because he heard it in a movie. I want to thank you for coming on the show. I want to thank you for having me on your show. This was delightful and wonderful. We I usually end every episode by asking people, like, where can people follow you? But here, I'll do it this way. If you want to follow me, you can find me on Blue Sky. And Instagram as Ryan hates this and Broderick on X. I unfortunately still check that website.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Bless you.

• 1:06:44Ryan Broderick?

  People, yeah. What about you? Where can people follow you if they wanna, they wanna follow you?

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a Dex Digi on basically everything.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  D E X D I G I and the I, um, we have also Killswitch Pod, Killswitch Pod on Instagram.

• 1:07:02Ryan Broderick?

  Oh yeah, you can find Panic World at any podcast place that you get content for podcasts. Also video, I guess.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Same here.

• 1:07:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you.

• 1:07:57Ryan Broderick?

  Chill out and touch grass while you still can.

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.