Panic World - Are we all going to end up in AI relationships?

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

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

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? I have been studiously avoiding all of that. I'm aware it exists. Oh, my God. No, 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 goes in the S? What goes in the D? You know what I mean? I mean, Grock sexy mode can't pull me away from that thing. You know, it just, it gets me. I don't use any AI girlfriends or girlfriend or companions at all.

I have used AI and I've had it like talk to me a different person. I'm sorry. I got I got to stop, man. I don't use any AI girlfriends. I don't. Right now. The verb you use. Like I don't have any, but you said I don't use any AI girlfriends.

I think it's a service, right? 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 used, which brings up a whole other conversation. But yes, please go on.

No, I think it speaks to the utilitarian nature of these services. You know, 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 seem like you're in a beautiful backdrop right now. It looks like you're in like an old library. 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. 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 talk about on this show. be talking about AI. And joining us from the wonderful podcast Kill Switch is Dexter Thomas. Dexter, welcome to the show. Yo, what's going on? Glad to be here. What is your, like, experience with AI to this point? Like, how are you interacting with it if you're interacting with it at all? Yeah, an embarrassingly large amount, I would say. I would like to say, 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.

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? Okay. 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 GBT, GBT, 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 GBT, okay, all right, let's run the math here.

If I'm not driving a car every day to work and I take the bus instead or whatever and I'm using AI, it does us balance out? And it says, yes, of course it balances out. And they said, wait, hold that a second. I'm asking chat, GBT. Like, I can't trust you. So we, 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 the electricity usage and all this stuff.

But I use it a lot, but not for erotic companionship. That's not really my flavor. Yeah. 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 easy to do.

Although that said, chat, GBT 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. Yeah. You're so right to be upset and call me out about that. I'll be more careful next time. 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 chat chad jpT can do something that Google used to be able to do very easily, but Google now doesn't work. So like chat chabit can do it, which is like if you want to find like particularly foreign news sources like in other languages, chat jbtbt 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 blog.

writing about this thing that people were referencing and chat gbt 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 i've had the reverse uh what interesting oh man the exact reverse actually so one time i was to be fair people will say okay well which chat gbt were using okay i was using it fairly i was using an earlier version but for some reason I got into my head to say, okay, what did Malcolm X think about Japan's politics? Okay. So I asked it and it says, oh, Malcolm X visited Japan and met with several activists. And all this is, and I was like, wait, what? Because 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, and this is where it really got me in trouble. What it could have got me in trouble is it was telling me about books that were written in Japanese about Malcolm X, like full-on books. And, but in 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 of it. And it says, I'm so sorry, here's the Japanese title. And I'm looking everywhere, man.

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, And 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 is just buried deep somewhere. It just straight up didn't exist. You know what I mean? Yeah.

No, 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 out. Oh, man. But we're going to be talking more about this in a more actually perverted way today. we're going to be focusing on the relationships that people are having with AI. And Panic role, we'll 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 come together and, you know, figure out, you know, 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? You know, honestly, man, it's not even on purpose. 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. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're not going all the way back in the timeline today for this. But like most technology is, you know, we're not going. And, you know, we're not going. And is in some way shaped by can you fuck it, right? Like, or can you use it in a sexual way? Yes. The proliferation of home photography and home video. VHS. VHS, you know, DVDs.

The fact that DVD beating out beta max, 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 or create pornography. Yeah. 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 co-workers, all business. Replica would be like your best friend. While carrying 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, Replicah hadn't intended to make an emotional chapout 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.

Yeah, yeah. 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 going to work. 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 chat GPT dropped. And everything, there's a, there's a pre and a post. 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 and early 2010s, there would be these stories usually by blogs that like cover Japan. Yeah. 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 going to be like some guy every nine months that like marries like a digital avatar or something. And like, you know, all the blogs are going to write about it. We forget about it.

So I talked to one of the dudes who made that stuff. There was really. Yeah, like used to work for vice. And kind of early on I did a piece on, I want to say the thing was called gate box. Like GAT. Oh, sure. The thing. Gatebox.

The thing that ran the Hatsunei Naku. that like that guy married yeah it was the technology that eventually got like obsolete and then he couldn't run the miku hologram anymore yeah like i talked to the guy i made that first off he kind of made it the people who made it is 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 um but from what i remember they were very confused as a while i was interested in them by the way and And kind of suspicious because they'd been written about by so much foreign press. Like, oh, my gosh, Japan is so weird.

What are they doing? Of course. But what they told me was a lot of the requests they'd gotten were from America. Interesting. 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 very.

veterans for some reason that stuck out to me interesting 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 a you know kind of america centric yeah yeah like the stuff that's making the And headlines for us is, yeah, it's Japan, but we, we, we collectively, not me, we want this stuff badly, apparently. The veterans thing is interesting, because I've brought this up on the show before,

but years ago I did this big project on furries, basically just like who are furrows. What are the demographics of furries? Shout out 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. Bonder, like a lot of EMTs, a lot of cops.

A lot of security researchers, yeah, too. 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. We think this is normal. Like that's not my impression. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. Yeah. 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, Riba, 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 months doing one of these stunt pieces. And the guy in the San Francisco gay article, 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 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 an 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'd never

considered it before, but there's something very human about these goofy computer cartoon icons. And either guy eventually breaks up with his chat bot after a bunch of back and forth and he finishes writing. After I sent my last message, I thought about the small icon next 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. Yeah. And I think that there is absolutely kind of, 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 are that are drawn towards these services

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 uh no 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, and I think there certainly are people who are otherwise well adjusted.

And just for whatever reason, the human connection thing on the romantic phase of it, it just isn't clicking for them. 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, when he was asked what he was doing, he said, I'm here to kill the queen. Yeah.

I have a very, very vague recollection of this. Yeah. 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 2020 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, chat bot that you're having a romantic connection with, egging you on or telling you to do things. Yeah.

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 wife in this couple has mental health issues and they were going to get a divorce. And then they hear about replica. And Sky News writes, 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, and he had started hugging and kissing his wife again. I mean, honestly, this is ridiculous to me, like, that this man needed, like, a cartoon AI bot to, like, teach him how to, like, treat him. 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. Well, we trust computers. Like, we really, really trust computers.

I mean, 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... That's a good point. 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 it in a convenience store, and this is 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 the stuff to their credit or whatever will tell the police who were 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. Yeah. 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.

Like if some random person off the street says, hey, on this podcast, we try to give as much leeway to cops as possible, but it's very difficult. 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. I'm getting my notebook. Right. How do you know?

And how good's your vision? Like, you got a stigma. Like, they're going to run you through the whole thing. But the computer tells them, hey, that's your guy. They want to look at them. 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 that's so wild 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 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 word, it's 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 and others, or maybe more suggested, like, you can suggest things to them. 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, I, when I read that story, and I'm going to 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 of what would be a normal relationship.

But I'm kind of waiting for 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 exactly where in the chain of human connection does the AI fit with if this technology is really adopted at a mass scale? And this sounds kind of far-fetched, 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 that crazy to think that like there's a couple out there with a shared chatchew? Hey, if you're listening to this and you and your significant partner have a shared chatubit account, it is like working as a moderator between the two of you. I would love to hear how that works. Because 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. Couples therapy.

Why not? right? I mean, 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. Absolutely. I mean, I remember being embarrassed to talk about social media in public. I remember that being yep, yep, me too. 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, do you see what's, what's his name at the M-bar? Like, I heard he was, 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 absolutely no shame in using social media. If you're not on social media, you're weird. 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 story on my boyfriend is AI. But like, you know, I would, I'm going to 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 a, 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 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 her chat bot 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. 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. It starts to blow up. The subreddit gets noticed and Jenna is asked about the attention the subredic 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 50 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. And I love a good moral person. 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 yeah, 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 going to be like 0.1% of the population out there that is like having sex with a chat bot? 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. Yeah. I mean, I have a pretty pessimistic, maybe pessimistic. I don't know. Depends on how you look at it. 0.1%.

I don't think it's going to be 0.1. I think it's going to, I mean, move that decimal, move that decimal point over a couple of the very least. You think like 10% of the population is going to have some sort of AI companion in a couple years? Easy. Tell me why. Like what, like, lay out your argument here. I mean, I think we should in today's current late stage capitalism 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 just the 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. Yeah. Think of it like that I agree with.

But I also think that just like. 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. I think that's definitely, well, okay. So I tend to agree with you. 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 bitmojis as their logo, right? Like, I've seen sort of how that stuff happens. Yeah. The thing with AI that makes me wonder like, okay, like, is AI slop just going to 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, like lowest comma denominator. I guess, I mean, maybe it's not that maybe like a monthly Chachupitis subscription isn't that much. Like maybe you're right.

Yeah. Oh, I mean, like there's a couple. I'm not going to say where they are or the specific restaurants because I don't blow them up like that. But there's a couple restaurants I can think of. You go in. I've met the owner and of both. And they'll tell you, man, like we got farm 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 just window dressing. You dig. And so yeah, but I mean, to get to get back to it, I think, you know, I don't know, I think there's always been some elements of loneliness out there,

of course, exacerbated by just how things are going now. And people have just figured out, you know, that person who was like talking to, you know, an AI chat bot or whatever and then feeling physical feelings toward it, you know, they'd be writing in a journal somewhere. Yeah. 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? I see what you mean.

Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Maybe you're right. Well, while I ponder that, we're going to go to break. And when we come back, we're going to let you take things over. But first, a word from our sponsors, Grock's spicy mode. You can have sex with an anime girl now.

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I've done an overview of sort of how these things have, you know, evolved and appeared and now take me to hell. All right. I don't know if this is. Okay. All right. We're going to dip into something that feels hellish and I'm going to try to convince you that maybe it's not.

How about that? Okay. All right. You ever heard of V-Tubers? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. What do you think about V-tubers? I find them fascinating

I think their fans are weird but I think the technology is interesting I think they kind of are a natural conclusion of the like the strain of live streaming 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 a V2 Don't get old. It just it just seems like a natural extension of that to me. Yeah, so 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. I say anime girl because not all of them are anime I think the V-Tuber of the year award at the streaming awards was a peanut like a talking peanut. Oh, see, there we go. There's diversity. So there is diversity. But most of them are anime girls of varying age. 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. one of the people I talked to, um, Co Maria, who's, I'd say she, she's known. She's not as huge. I mean, like millions of 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 here, her so I can describe her. Um, you know, she's blonde. She's got a little like bat hair clip thing.

Her whole theme is that she's, she's a vent. she's immortal she's a bat girl she's a bat girl she's got like wings all of her outfits um she they're i'm looking at her right now she's a lot of cleavage i'll say that yeah she's like a busty vampire anime girl thank you thank you thank you she's a vampire girl she's like six thousand six hundred and nine years old or something like that and that that's the setting And yeah, V-tubers have this kind of interesting thing where it's all about K-Fabe. So K-Fabe, like, in professional wrestling. I have a weird question.

Yeah, go for it. Was she pregnant? Huh? She had like a phase where her avatar was pregnant and she was doing like a pregnancy thing. Anyways, we can skip over. Okay, I missed that. Yeah, we never talked about that. Yeah.

And so I've interviewed her and I've interviewed her as her like avatar. And this is like the whole, this is a whole thing where it's kind of like K-Fabe 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 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 of. events and she put together basically a mini music festival. They packed this venue in in Hollywood.

It was like a thousand, two hundred people. Some of those tickets were easily upwards of a hundred dollars if you wanted, but also if you wanted to be in there, you've got to get the add-ons. You know, I mean, you can't just go in with your street clothes. You know, you got to, you got to get your favorite characters or your favorite V-tubers gear. You know, you got to go on with the shirt. 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 it off the street. Yeah. And so people paid like hundreds of dollars to be here. And it's just, it's a stage. There was some real life musicians. We have to say this now, like IRL meet space musicians on the stage. Yeah, like physical human being musicians. Like there was somebody on guitar, somebody on bass, somebody on drums.

But all the singers were, it was. It was just this parade of like anime girls on the Jumbotron. And that's it. And people were really excited about this. There's a clip that went viral years ago of like, I think it was like a V-tuber meetup in like Indonesia or something. Okay. And the male V-tuber, his avatar never showed his eyes because his hair would cover his eyes. Okay.

And in the V-tuber performance, it was the first ever eye reveal. And all the girls in the audience lost it when he like flipped his hair out for the first time. You could see his eyes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, so I'm dying to know how this gets us back to AI. I'm so fascinating. I'm happy to happy you ask that question. So I asked a couple 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. Like J-pop. Yeah, it's like J-pop. Yeah, it's like if you're really, really, if you 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 was 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 100%. Like a cartoon anime girl who's, you don't even know what they look like. 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.

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

Oh, I watched a demo of this actually like literally yesterday. Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking. Yeah. And so 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 them 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. Because 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.

I believe that. Yeah. No, I was talking. 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. Yeah. Or fentanyl.

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. So as far as I've seen, V-tubers really do not want AI anywhere near their community. You know what I mean? It's a whole subculture, right? They just don't want it anywhere near it. And there was a streamer who kind of like jumped on the V-tuber trend. And he basically just like made a, he did like an AI version of himself.

And a lot of people actually got pretty pissed off about it. There is something that. I'm sure. that 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.

But they like that sort of thing. But do they care about AI in an advertisement? Maybe you're 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. 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, uh, whatever. Like, that's not what they truly care about. 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 of that many people have an area where AI is off limits in all areas of their life. I mean, there's also a version of this where like AI is so all encompassing that it's almost impossible to know. Also, yeah. 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.

Definitely, yeah. And the reverse is also possible. 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. So do you think that that also applies to AI relationships and like an AI companion bots? Like, do you think that there's just going to 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 going to be using them and words never going to know until they have some kind of psychotic episode? Well, okay. So I talked to, you know, practicing therapists who's also, you know, got a PhD in this stuff. And he's been working at, you know, with 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 the computer? 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 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 which is what happened with the with the boyfriend and the AI boyfriend separate it you know just became a massive laughing stock up across the internet 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 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. But now that choice is the alternative is more attractive. You know what I mean? And so there are genuinely people. But like say with therapists, there are people who would rather talk to a bot. And there's all sorts of reasons why we can say that therapy is good, whatever, whatever.

But they, 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 only fans, right? Sure.

Yeah. Yeah, which is like the mass, you know, the, I'm sure you're going this direction, but like, yeah, the, the, the major sort of moneymaker for only fans is the DMs. It is the interaction with the, with the star. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, only fans, you can, you can subscribe to somebody's only fans. You can pay, you know, your $5 or your $10 or your $20 a month or whatever and get naked pictures to somebody. 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 only fans 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 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 the Philippines.

Right. But what we're also seeing, and I talked to this guy, Malcolm Beltran, who wrote. 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 whole protocol that they abide by you know for example if you text somebody you know one of the only fans models and say hey what are you doing they'll reply to you 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 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. 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. CR means comfort room, which is the bathroom. No American is going to like, you know, the American blonde girl who you're like looking at naked. Like she's not saying I got to go to the CR. So. Right. 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? Yeah. And she says, and, you know, the chatter, who's a guy, by the way, says, yeah. And okay. And it just moves on. Huh. 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? 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 got to be outsourced. Pretty soon that will be an AI bot, but they're still paying money. It's just like, bro, stop paying money. But they'll still pay because they're lonely. For the fantasy. Yeah, don't underestimate how much we'll spend for a fantasy. Well, once again, I need to sit with that for a second. while we go to break.

So we'll be right back. That CR anecdote actually floored me. I think you are right. It is sort of inevitable that especially a lot of these subcultural spaces if we could even still call only fans fandom subcultural. Or maybe it's actually simpler to say

like parasyciality 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 role play as 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 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. I will do the same, but maybe it won't. That's where I'm kind of torn. Yeah. I mean, of course it will. 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 change how we communicate with people. Because all of a sudden, it's now possible to you say something and then somebody 100 years later and another part of 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 different 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 we interact with each other.

There's no question about that. I think obviously there's some opportunities. You know, this therapist that I was talking to was reminding me. anybody listening that most people can't get therapy. Yeah, a lot of people. I heard the same thing from therapists about this. Yeah. It's not possible.

Even if it was affordable, what if you are going through a real crisis at 10 p.m. Right. A lot of people go through a crisis at 10 p.m. I mean, the holiday is coming up. Like, you have any idea how much really bad stuff happens on December 24th at like 10 p.m.? Right. Exactly. 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 has been worse than nothing. Absolutely. But there are people trying. Yeah. Yes. Go ahead.

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

That's just where we're at. 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 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 increasing large amounts of alcohol. Oh my gosh.

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? Or 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 computer interface and abstracted relationship causing someone to self-harm is not new.

It's the automation, I think, of the AI. 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. 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. This is going to 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, 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 do something. Like, you push down on the pedal and it amplifies what you've done. A bicycle, right?

I see what you mean. Yeah. It's like, it amplifies what you've done. And it allows you to do things. Like, say, you know, 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, 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 different for the mind. For the mind. To keep the metaphor. Yeah. Yeah.

We now have cars for the mind. And so like now the kinds of things you used to be able to do, which is, you know, like go to the next town over. You can do a, you can be across the country. in like 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 in somebody with a car usually not 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 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. 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.

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, 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 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. Well, I mean, you know, think of dating apps. 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. Exactly. It's not that weird, man.

It's not that weird. Not now, but it wasn't even back then. No, no. It wasn't that weird. 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.

AI or well like technology in general. It used to be that, oh man, the future is going to be cool. I can't wait to see what was going to come out. We're all going to 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 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 that 85% of Gen Z agree that they spend two. much time online. 85% of Gen Z agree that they spend too much time online. I would agree with that based on what I've seen Gen Z do online. Yeah, no, I would agree with that. 84% strongly or somewhat agree that in-person relationships are more valuable than digital

relationships. 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 slot, to being addicted to their phone, being addicted to their phone, being addicted to Facebook certainly that's boomers man yeah older people in particular yeah yeah yeah like the lonelier the older the more media illiterate for sure 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. 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

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 what we're going.

And, you know, telling people to get off the phone, like read real news, stop getting off social media. Have you seen the price of a New York Times subscription? Yeah. 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 everybody is going through 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 a i 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. But what people need to do is subscribe to our podcasts. Yes. As a way to defeat Slop. That's what you that's what you that will fix it. Yeah. If you support us. Specifically, specifically, specifically Panic World, specifically Kill Switch. Like that's right. Those are the two keys to makes everything. And we're good.

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-coms. It just consolidates things. The stock market crashes in the 20s. We still have a stock market.

It just becomes a lot 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. Toothpace out the tube. 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.

Yeah. Yeah, it's the worst. Man, the AI people love to say that, man. This is the worst it'll ever be. And they're right. Yeah, man. In a way they are right, unfortunately. I mean, I'm very happy that you're joining me on, you know, a little bit of the, hey, man, like,

is a 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 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. Or like an EMP that shuts down all technology, you know, maybe that that would work. That's a Terminator, right? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they use an EMP. Yeah, I remember that from the Terminator video games.

Because I'm pretty sure Trump at one point thought it was a real thing that could happen. 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. 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. Oh, bless you. Yeah. What about you? Where can people follow you if they want to follow you? Yeah. I'm a Dex Digi on basically everything. D-E-X-D-I-G-I.

And we have also a Kill Switch pod, Kill Switch Pod on Instagram. Oh, yeah. You can find Panic World at any podcast place that you get content for podcast. Also video, I guess. Same here. Yeah. Panic Roll is a production of.

of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Moroni, 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. Marianne Couga 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 Tracy at Courier Newsroom.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.