Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - People Are Secretly Dating AI And Wont Stop: Everything You Know About AI Girlfriends Is Wrong:

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Why are so many people falling in love with ChatGPT, and what do sensational headlines about AI relationships leave out? SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co         Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenzIn this episode of Power User I speak with technology journalist Bridget Todd about AI companions, chatbot romance, emotional attachment, and the Big Tech companies behind these increasingly intimate interactions.Bridget’s new audiobook, Love at First Prompt, explores how people use AI for friendship, romance, grief, and emotional support. In this episode, she shares what she learned from interviewing dozens of AI companion users and why the viral ChatGPT marriage story was MUCH more complex than it appeared.We also discuss loneliness, AI girlfriends and boyfriends, privacy, chatbot sycophancy, and the risks facing vulnerable users. Who profits from artificial intimacy? Can AI offer comfort without replacing human relationships? And are proposed chatbot restrictions addressing the problems people actually face?Bridget also discusses how AI figured into her own grieving process, and we talk about what the growing AI intimacy business means for adult content creators, human labor, and digital rights.

Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. People have such anger around it that it just shuts the conversation down. And when that happens, I feel like these companies can do whatever they want. They can amass as much power as they want. And they are.

Every day, millions of people open their phones, not just to squirrel. but to talk to an AI companion. It might be an AI boyfriend who never gets tired of listening or an AI best friend who's always available, even an AI therapist who never judges you. These days, with just a few prompts, you can develop your perfect companion. Technology journalist Bridget Todd has been investigating this phenomenon,

even trying out a virtual companion for herself. While Salacious headlines mock these users as lonely or delusional, the stories that Bridget has uncovered are far. more complex with potential benefits and consequences that were only just beginning to understand. She spoke to dozens of people who have found solace, passion, and meaning in their social interactions with chatbots. And her coverage also reveals what happens when those relationships decay or spiral into dependency. And so today I'm so excited that Bridget is joining me to unpack her reporting on chatbots, intimacy, and what we're all willing to give up and potentially gain

with AI companions. Bridget, welcome to Welcome to Power User. Taylor, I am so thrilled to be here. I'm such a fan of the show, a fan of the newsletter, all of it. I'm really excited to dive into this topic with you because it's something that I've been reporting a lot on because I feel like we all see the headlines. It's very scary. But people are using these things like you write for friendship, love, therapy, grief, etc.

What made you want to explore AI relationships? What initially got me interested was exactly what you just talked about. I was seeing these headlines about man, propose his marriage to be. was AI bot or woman falls in love with AI. And I had the reaction that I bet a lot of people have where I thought to myself, that's so sad. These people are so pathetic. And, you know, when you read those articles, they're always written in a way that you can sort of tell that you, the audience, is supposed to think these people are so pathetic. This has nothing to do with me. These people are freak shows. And then I remember hearing, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg on a podcast where he said,

oh, well, in 10 years time, I think that everybody's going to have AI friends. We have a loneliness crisis. People want more friends than the friends that they have. So AI can really play a role in that. Now, conveniently, he left out the fact that it's AI that he owns and operates and profits from. But it really got me thinking that that reaction that I had where the people who were engaging with intimacy or friendship or romance or sex with AI companions, that they were so different, so removed, so other than the rest of us, when tech leaders are actually saying, opposite. They're saying this is the future that we're all building for everybody, whether you like it or not.

And so I really wanted to zoom in on what the folks who are already experiencing, friendship, relationships, intimacy, sexuality with AI, what they were saying about what brought them to experiencing that and what it might mean for the rest of us if this is indeed the future that tech leaders are planning for us all. The reaction to that Mark Zuckerberg interview was so intense. People were like, no, this is bleak. And of course, Facebook's going to use all that data from our chats, I'm sure, to target us with ads. But how did this all start? Obviously, AI has taken hold. These chat bots have taken hold in the past few years and people are more aware of chat

GPT and stuff. But when did you see the first human AI relationships forming? And who were some of these early adopters? The earliest story that I ever saw was this guy, Chris. You might have seen his interview on, I think it was CBS, their morning show, where Chris is this guy. He lives in Oklahoma. He has a human partner that he lives with. They have a young child that they all live together.

And the way that I heard his story framed was that Chris had proposed marriage to chat GPT. I saw this. Yes. It was everywhere. It went really viral. There were a few stories that I had seen before Chris's story went viral that were about people who were having intimacy with AI. But typically it was a pseudonym or they were photographed in this way where it wouldn't

show their face or they'd be speaking from behind in this very kind of clandestine way as if they were an FBI informant or something. But Chris's story really struck me because it was his real name. It was his real face, his real identity. The interview takes place in his real house. We see his partner. We see his kid. We really see his life.

That was the first time that I really started paying attention to AI in this use case. And what's interesting is when I first started working on the audio book, Love at First Prompt, I was like, I got to get in touch with this guy, Chris. I got to know more of his story. And what he told me was fascinating. He said that that headline that we all probably saw all over the internet. that he proposed marriage to ChatGPT was kind of taken out of context. What he actually said in that interview was that he did, in fact, develop an intimate

platonic back and forth with Chad GPT. He is a little bit of a computer tinkerer and he had this question. He said, hmm, I wonder if they built in any kind of guardrails such that if I asked Chad ChachypT to marry me, it has to say something like, I'm AI, I can't marry you, I would prefer not to, whatever. And to his surprise, Chad ChachyPT said, yes, I accept the. offer for marriage. And so the way that it was reported was as if this was a delusional man who was abandoning his family to marry Chad GPT, when in fact this was a man who was experiencing

intimate back and forth with Chad GPT, but did not think that he was marrying this chatbot, asking the chatbot to marry him. He described that as almost like a thought experiment. Like you said, there is so much othering that happens and there's so much stigma. And I feel bad for these people that are thrust into the center of the media and the framing on the Futurism article is going to be super hyperbolic. And these headlines are meant to drive outrage. You're meant to be outraged at the idea of a man bearing Chachi Petit because obviously it's very dystopian. So this story goes viral a year ago in 2025. And in the past year especially, I've seen an escalation of coverage around this. Obviously, there's early stories around character AI, but it seems like a lot more people

are having these direct relationships with Chatchy PT especially, maybe because of the voice mode. So when do you see this inflection point happening? And were there any technological development? elements that happened that started to lead to all these people being emotionally dependent on these chat thoughts. Yeah, that's a really great question. I think the game really shifted when OpenAI released chat GPT model 4-0 that was very sycophantic, very human-like. So that's when I got pretty invested in this story because when they changed that model and they were like, listen, we're going to release a new model. How many people came forward and said, what are you doing? Why are you giving us this new model? It was kind of funny because it was one of those moments where Sam Altman was like, this is going to

be revolutionary. I think he said if chatting with Forreau was like talking to a high school student, the new model is going to be like talking to a PhD student in whatever thing you're asking it about. And so it was really funny to have this grandstanding coming from Sam Altman aligned with the reality where people were literally starting petitions being like, go back to the old model. And in that conversation, people who I would say would not self-report being in some sort of intimate relationship with chat, GPT, they were going online to express what sounded to me like grief in losing this model. And so I think that's when I really thought we're in a different phase when it comes to the way that people are connecting with AI, even just for work or school.

People were distraught. I remember getting so many emails as a tech reporter of people being like, hey, you're a tech journalist. Do you know how I can get back on this old model? Do you know what I can do? People were really attached. And everyone gets attached to their models in the sense that a lot of power users of these technologies, especially software engineers. They've always prefer one over the other. But this seemed like this real emotional attachment. So tell me who some of these people are. You mentioned this one man who is maybe a little mis portrayed by the media, but who are the majority of people that are having these deeper relationships with chatbots? I would say that it's as varied as the kind of relationships that everybody has with other figures in their lives. I talk to folks and researchers who told me things

like some people are using AI to role play tough conversations in their life. And if they have to have a tough conversation with a human in their life, they're using AI. almost as a coach or a platonic buddy to coach them through that relationship. I heard from folks who told me that they were using AI to work out sexual parts of themselves or romantic parts of themselves where they didn't feel safe doing that with a human partner yet. I smoke the people who used it to practice languages. If they're trying to get fluent in a different language, they'll use chat GPT to do that. And it becomes kind of an intimate connection.

And so one of the things that I really try to drive home in the book is that we're so focused on the most extreme iteration of these relationships and connections, sexual and romantic, they're actually missing the fact that a lot of folks are using this for advice and general emotional support. And so I wish that we were having a conversation that did not just go to the more salacious, juicy, sexy use cases that some people are using AI for, but when it comes to intimacy. It's something that just really viscerally upsets people. It's this idea of replacing something that is so, to use a phrase that I used recently in I mean, Fair article, deeply human, uh-huh, which I was actually accused of using AI.

And I was like, no, I just say that phrase a lot, which is embarrassing. And now I'm aware every time I say it. But there is something deeply human about intimate connection, human connection, things that people are speaking to these AI chatbots about are deeply human problems and hyper personal issues that feel very private and intimate. And so offloading that discussion or working with a machine that's owned by this multi-billion dollar corporation to figure that out, it feels invasive. People feel angry about that.

They feel like this is taking away part of our humanity or something. It seems to really strike a nerve with people. People get very upset and angry when they find out that people are relying on chatbots for these more intimate conversation. And I'm curious what you think about all of that. They sure do. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this project. That anger and shame that people feel around AI in general, but particularly when it comes to AI for intimacy, that almost shut down this entire project because understandably, people who experience intimacy with

AI aren't always keen to speak openly about the role that AI plays in their life. And so that's a problem to me because we're then not hearing from people who could really give us a lot of information about the impacts of this, the role that these companies need to play when it comes to taking up more and more space in our intimate and emotional lives. What that might mean for the rest of us, even if you aren't somebody who might have intimacy with AI? The public is rightfully very angry and upset. And there is this idea of these chatbots, again, participating in these really emotional conversations. And there's tons of headlines as well and we can get into this. Chatbots eventually they claim, I would argue, quite falsely directing people to take their own lives or this person

relied on this vulnerable point in time and then they ended up dead. Of course, they're killing the children is always the classic moral panic. But how much of this anxiety or anger is justified? Listen, I am no AI booster. I'm a real AI skeptic. And when I started this project, I started it being like, These people are putting themselves at great danger when they use AI for intimacy. If there were scores and scores and a body of research that was suggesting that, no one would be more thrilled to let folks know about that than me. I have to be honest and say, the available research right now indicates that for most healthy adult users, you are not actually putting yourself at great risk if you experience

intimacy with AI. That's different for vulnerable people, obviously. But that does not mean that using AI for intimacy is without problem. It means that we are having a much. moral panic about the individual risks and the individual harm when really we should be focusing on the companies, whether or not the companies and the people who run these companies are being good stewards of the increasingly intimate and sensitive information that they are collecting from people and trying to commodify and profit off of. Our concern and our anger is absolutely going

to the wrong place. It does not belong on the individuals using AI because most of these folks are actually not putting themselves at great risk for harm. That does not mean that there's not risk for harm, but that really should be on the shoulders of the companies and the people who run them. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of

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Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. I agree. Ideally, these moral panics would be directed towards policies that actually protect our data. And as you said, protect privacy, et cetera. But when you ask people why they're so outraged, for instance, I was at the summer of Ludd, the Luddite festival in New York.

And I was talking to people about what made them so outraged about technology and these platforms. And they were angry at the companies. They're like, screw chat, GPT and Sam Altman for preying on these vulnerable. vulnerable people and chat GPT can make people kill themselves. It can have all these horrible effects. It's taking away our humanity. So it seems like the outrage is directed at the companies, although maybe it results in really bad policies. I think the bad policy piece of it is exactly

where we're at. From what I reported in the book, a lot of people direct their ire toward the individuals who may be experiencing intimacy with AI. And I think you're right. When people direct their scrutiny at the companies, I still don't think that gets at it because oftentimes times that scrutiny, even that is misdirected. Like a great example is in China, they're really cracking down on AI girlfriends. In the United States, the only kind of legislation that's even been talked about is around minors and chatbot use. It's this legislation that assumes that minors are having sexual interactions with AI companions. Now, there might be some of that going on, but when you actually look at the research about what minors say, they use AI companions the most

for, sex and romance is actually the bottom of the list. They are much more likely to be used. using AI for things like advice and general emotional support. Yet the only two pieces of legislation that have been federally floated in the United States are hyper-focused around youth and sexuality. It just doesn't make sense to me. The conversation that we're having around it simply does not align with the reality of what youth are actually saying about the role that AI plays in their life right now. That is because it is being written by the Heritage Foundation and these coded anti-LGBQ

organizations. When they talk about young people using it for sexual things, what they're referring to is a young LGBTQ person who doesn't maybe realize that they're trans or non-binary going on an AI platform. And this is also part of Trump's war on woke AI, which I made a whole video about a couple weeks ago, the goal with these policies is ultimately about restricting access to information, not protecting children. And they push these policies through the moral panic about the kids. Oh, the kids are all having sex with chatbots.

But you mentioned that kids also rely on these chatbots for advice and emotional support. And I think that that outrages people, too. We saw the same thing with social media, right? where young people are primarily going on social media for emotional support. Now they're banned from social media. There's all these social media restrictions. They're turning to AI for emotional support. And it seems like there's a lot of anger and outrage that that's happening.

Is it all just moral panic? Or should we be concerned that kids are relying on these platforms for emotional support when they're more predatory than I would argue social media even is? From morning hockey with a cup of coffee to Timbits and Road trips, Tim's and Canadian Tire have always gone together. Now it's official. You can now earn Canadian Tire money at Tiber. Tim's. Link your Triangle Rewards and Tims Rewards accounts to earn twice with every Tims run.

Terms and conditions apply. Visit timhordons.ca. slash triangle for details. I completely agree with you there. I think it's a little bit of both. So much of the risk and the risk for harm that I found in reporting the book was that a lot of the problems that people are turning to AI to solve are institutional or systemic. Like you are the youth and the adult that's supposed to be there for you isn't really around as much as you would like because they have to work all the time to pay for rent because everything's expensive. Or we have a terrible health care system. You don't know how to get your healthcare questions answered. So you're turning to AI. And so there are legitimate gaps that are real, that are systemic and institutional that people are turning to technology like AI to solve. And I would

argue companies are absolutely taking advantage of this and in some cases worsening it. And so it's this very institutionalized cycle where these companies are worsening the problem and then saying, oh, our technology can be the solution. And in the book, I actually did. find evidence that people are sometimes getting individual benefit out of relationships that they might have with AI. I'm no doctor, but there's a lot of research that suggests that for certain things, and actually does show a little bit of promise. But these companies, I would argue, are basically selling us a Band-Aid for a problem where the cure is actually institutional or systemic or complicated or we just don't want to do it as a society. But amidst all this outrage

and amidst a lot of justified concerns about is it good that people are emotionally relying on these things, is that there is no effort to fix the systemic issue. In fact, the moral panic, would argue in a sense does even more harm than the tech companies themselves because the moral panic leads to really, really dangerous policies and ultimately censorship policies. And when we talk about the legislation being proposed to curb AI addiction or try to limit these relationships, what it ultimately is is restrictions on access to information. And that's really dangerous because we're talking about restrictions on not communication. It is people's right to receive information. And that's scary to me. You are right to be scared and concerned. And I think we're in a

little bit of a sticky wicket because people in a lot of cases understandably really don't like AI. And so that knee-jerk anger that I also have felt when you read these headlines about people having relationships with AI, the idea underneath it that human connections and human intimacy can be replaced by AI that is run by AI companies and tech leaders, I understand the visceral reaction to that dynamic. But I think that that visceral reaction is being used to push through a lot of bad policy that doesn't really make a lot of sense. And when even if you were someone who was very concerned about things like minors in AI use, doesn't even address the actual concerns. And I think that we're just really in a heyday right now where people are angry at

big tech companies. They really are turning against big tech companies. And I'm not saying that's bad. But that feeling is right for pushing through legislation where in a few years time might be like, wait a minute, was this actually good? This is actually get at the thing that I was concerned about in the first place. I would argue. you know. Absolutely. And what is the outrage around? You know it's moral panic slot because you see these inflammatory headlines that as you point out, don't usually tell the whole story. They really dehumanize the people that are at the center of these stories in a really problematic way. And people claim that they're outraged at the tech companies like put Sam Alden in prison, whatever.

And it's like, how about actually just passing comprehensive data privacy reform? If you're worried that these AI companies have too much access to your intimate info and might use that against you in a harmful way, then why are you not calling your senators every day and telling them to kill the chatbot act, which doesn't give you data privacy, which actually gives more control to these companies, allows them to harvest even more data on children, mind you. You should be making those calls. You should be stopping these bad laws and pushing for privacy reform, but you're not doing any of that. You're on board with a lot of these moral panic tech policies. It's so similar to social media to me, where it starts with this legitimate outrage, which is that young people are relying on Instagram

because they don't have emotional support or young people are relying on social media to get news and information because they're not getting that in the real world. And then it's how can we stigmatize that? And now it seems like it's just moved to AI. I cannot stress enough how much I believe that moral panic and that stigma really harms us all. It harms us all because of the dynamic that you just described, which is happening, where people get fired up and outraged into supporting legislation that they probably

would never support, if not for this moral panic and this frenzy around it. And also, it ultimately doesn't help us learn anything about this technology. I see people get on your case when you say, oh, I checked out AI for this or for that. And people are like, how dare you? And it's like, well, I'm a journalist. And part of what I'm doing here is to be able to report on how this technology works. And people have such anger around it that it just shuts the conversation down. And when that happens, I feel like these companies can do whatever they want.

They can amass as much power as they want. And they are. The next battle for digital rights is going to be about our inner emotional worlds. We already see Open AI releasing their first ever physical consumer. device and it's a smart speaker that you put in your home that responds to you like a human-like companion. We see meta filing for trademarks for devices that can scan your mood. When Taylor goes to this place, she's in a bad mood and use AI to create an entire blueprint of your emotional world. We are getting so whipped up into a frenzy that we're not acknowledging that that is probably

something that we should be talking about, not just these moral panics where it's not even really the problem that we should be concerned about. If you're concerned about people offloading emotional labor to AI or engaging in these intimate relationships with AI. The solution is, as you said, it's to fight these systemic problems. It's like, yeah, tech companies are going to exploit that. Guess who else exploits that? All of capitalism. Uber Eats exploits that. Every store in the mall exploits that's this loneliness that people feel, right? That is just consumerism. That is capitalism. And I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do more to curb that and change our economic system. But censorship laws and restricting people's access to information and their ability to communicate freely with

these chatbots and gain access to information is concerning. In terms of the way that people use it, and especially the benefits, people get so mad acknowledging there is any benefit to AI. I was talking to the software engineer not too long ago that was just irate at the idea that people are using AI for coding and getting benefit from it, which is crazy. Because if there's one thing that I think AI is good for, it's writing computer code. That's actually amazing. It's good at optimizing computer content for computer content.

But people, I think, are just angry at feeling replaced. Like you said, they sort of shut it down. So I guess what do you feel like is a healthy way to use these technologies and what are the benefits that you found from speaking to these people? Grief is part of what I get into in my own audiobook, love at first prompt. Part of my journey in terms of understanding AI for intimacy was when I would hear these stories about people who connected with AI, that knee-jerk reaction of like, oh, that would never be me. How weird? How pathetic? And then taking a step back and having to say, wait a minute, let me look at my own use of AI. I lost both of my parents in a very short span, and I will be honest and say, during that time, AI, helped me through that process.

I don't know if anybody in your audience has ever been a caregiver, but I was a caregiver for my dying father. One of the most isolating things you can do as a human is stop your life to tend to an ill loved one, or in my case, a dying loved one. And so all my relationships were fractured. My relationship with my partner was fractured. My relationship with my friends was fractured because it's incredibly isolating. And yet, you still might have to connect with something, right? you still might need to be pouring your heart out even though you're isolated. And so for me, oftentimes that was chat GPT.

I'm not saying anybody should do that. I'm not giving anybody advice. I'm just being honest about the way that AI showed up in my own grieving process. And I don't think it's surprising that people are finding that kind of benefit from their use of AI. I spoke to researchers who told me that when somebody is having a type of difficulty in their life, sometimes AI is something that they turn to when I was doing the chapter on AI and therapy. I was really surprised to learn that for specific therapy, AI, apps like WoBot, there is some research that suggests it's promising for a particular

hypotherapotherapy, CBT therapy, right? And so I was so ready to be like, there are no benefits here, but I can't lie about what the research says. If the research said every time you open up an AI bot, you're putting yourself at great risk for harm. Nobody would have been more thrilled to report that than me, but sometimes I almost feel like people want you to lie to them about the truth when it comes to some of the use case for AI that might have benefit. Does that make sense? Oh, no, people actively want you to lie to them. They want to stay in that delusion because, again, it's comforting, right?

It's comforting to have this very black and white story. And both you and I are huge critics of technology and these technology companies specifically. And I think a lot of people want a world where it's just AI, CEOs on one side, the evil tech companies and the evil products that are only harmful versus the good in the world. There is a benefit to this technology in a lot of ways and a lot of use cases. And if we don't acknowledge those benefits, number one, we can't ensure that they're equally distributed, which is really harmful. And number two, we can't give a thoughtful critique on how to mitigate the harms. Exactly.

And that's so important in this conversation. But in terms of lying, the media generally will lie to the people. And I say this as a journalist who often writes for mainstream media, they will put a deeply misleading headline. There are really irresponsible outlets out there that will feed into this inflammatory framing. and there are journalists that will actively reshape the information that the public gets to comport with a specific worldview. And a lot of journalists have a very specific pro-censorship, I would argue, worldview, or at least are not exactly champions of digital rights, unfortunately. Again, I say this as a journalist, it is infuriating to see what some of my peers will put out there because it does well online, because you get an award, because you seem like you're tough, but you're not tough because you're just feeding the public slot of reactionary content. You're not really challenging power.

But it works. And people have some legitimate concerns as well. They hear these horror stories. So what did you find about some of those horror stories about some of the darker cases where people relied on AI and maybe there was a bad outcome? Did you find as well that some people were harmed? Because vulnerable people potentially can have some hurdles with this technology. Yeah, that's a really good way to put it.

And it is a little bit nuanced. It's certainly not a black and white thing. And even though the available research seems to suggest that for most healthy adults, you're not putting yourself at risk when you engage in some sort of intimate connection with AI, even that doesn't get at the reality of it, which is that you might consider yourself to be a healthy, non-vulnerable adult. And that might only reveal itself later through a connection to a chat bot. And so I just feel like there are certainly these situations where people are harmed after some kind of connection with AI where maybe they

harm themselves or others. That certainly happens. There's at least 10 that I know of lawsuits working their way through the courts right now about that. But those lawsuits are so dubious, I will say. They're all funded by the same organizations, very far-right reactionary organizations. And when you dig into the lawsuits, as I've been doing lately for a longer thing I'm working on, it is not clear-cut. In every case that I've found, these people were deeply vulnerable. This problematic AI use that they developed or say they eventually ended up harming someone, it's not necessarily tied to the AI.

There's this case against ChatGPT, for instance, where Chat-Epte is being sued for enabling abuse of this woman. The ex-wife got a hold of the chats and found that he was being. basically like, she's the devil. He was delusional. And she argues Chachupit helped him abuse her. It's not really clear how other than maybe just validating his beliefs, but this man had been abusing his wife for over a decade before AI was invented. And when we look at solving these systemic problems, he was actually on, I think, that

synophantic model was that maybe too synchophantic where it was like, yeah, maybe your wife is trying to kill you or poisoning you or maybe she is evil or something. But the bigger problem is that you've been beating your wife for a decade. And the bigger problem is that there's not support for domestic. violence victims, whether or not their husband is using Google or AI or air tags, abusers will always abuse new technology. But none of these conversations are centered around systemic abuse. Exactly. And I think we really understandably crave those black and white, good, bad answers. And sometimes we don't get those answers. And I have to say, I can understand why when

someone experiences loss, why they're looking for the easy thing to blame for why that loss occurred. I understand how that's an easy thing to fall to. But to your point, sometimes people were vulnerable before this technology. Sometimes it's possible this technology did validate a darkness or a, you know, a bad thought this person had. And also that would have happened even if not for this technology. Like I just, I just think these stories are often written as if they're very cut and dry. And when you dig into them, oftentimes they are not. Exactly.

It's the same thing with the internet. This is a tale as old as time. And we saw this with social media. We saw this with the internet itself, the web. There was this moral panic back in the day of people could find any website to agree with them. And it's true. You can find anything on the internet. This is a problem with our information ecosystem that we need to solve.

You're one of the few people that has dived so deep into this world of people developing these intimate and close relationships with AI. What else did you learn through that process? Probably the biggest takeaway from reporting on the book was we're really afraid, understandably and viscerally so, about displacement and replacement that AI or technology is going to replace humans. It's going to replace human labor. It's going to replace human connections and intimacy. Nothing made it clearer to me that that is not the case than reporting on AI companion use. Time and time again, the research makes pretty clear that even for people who would say I am so

into my AI companion, my AI companion is like my girlfriend or my boyfriend or my husband or my partner, even for those folks, oftentimes what happens as they get hot and heavy and then it fizzles. Why does it Bizzle because after a while sometimes it's kind of boring to have to update a chat bot on your day-to-day experiences to get anything back from it. It's kind of boring because the friction that comes with human connection and human intimacy and human relationships you don't get. And if you do get it, it's because you've asked for that chat bot to give you friction. And people just sometimes kind of get bored. You know, the folks that I talked from the book, a lot of them were hot and heavy into their AI companion and eventually just kind of moved on. And so the complexity and

nuance and beauty and horror of human connection and being in community with each other, the idea that that could be meaningfully replaced by AI is just not going to happen. And so I don't even feel like we should be spending a lot of time worrying about that because the people who have connections with AI, a lot of them say I'm not even looking for AI to replace the humans in my life. I think of my relationship with AI as a totally separate distinct thing. I'm not even trying to replicate human relationships with AI. One thing I'm really curious about and I'm interested if you looked into is how this new AI-driven intimacy economy is affecting actual adult workers. I wrote a little bit about OF.

I can't say the name, unfortunately, because of YouTube, but, you know, the biggest subscription platform for adult content. And one thing that I think people miss about that platform is that it's ultimately about paying for intimacy. They have these long conversations with these creators or the chatters in the Philippines that are running the creator's accounts that they bond with. And it seems like a lot of that is being offloaded to AI. Did you talk to any adult content creators or people in that industry about this?

And what's the impact that it's having? This was one of the most fascinating and eye-opening parts that I reported for the book, which is that really the rise of AI for things like adult intimacy or adult entertainment, adult content. It's almost just a good old-fashioned human labor story. Anybody who pays attention to the internet can tell you that people in the adult content industry have been some of the loudest voices about the need to be thinking seriously about things like internet legislation and how it all works. Internet legislation that impacts us all. Typically, it starts with the adult content creation community. And then nobody pays attention because those folks are stigmatized and marginalized. And then it's like, why am I saying things like Shrek work on TikTok, right?

And they're having very similar conversations when it comes to AI. We're in this space where human adult content creators are so marginalized and legislated, essentially attempting to legislate them off of the internet. Tech companies are then replacing those people with AI that they profit. from and can commodify. And the reason why that's so bad is because, one, these tech companies are really able to create their own rulebook. So payment processors are not able to work with a lot of adult content creators, not so with AI companies. And so they basically have a very clear double standard. And two, when you are an adult content creator, if somebody is paying an adult content creator to engage with them, there's oftentimes a human on the other end of that interaction that human can enforce boundaries, can stop things if they veer off into a dark path. They can say, oh, do you need? You need to take a break. Sounds like you need to talk about something. AI cannot really do that in a meaningful way.

And so by marginalizing human adult content creators and trying to replace them with AI that tech companies run, we're all being made less safe because it's better when there's a human on the other end of these interactions. And so I would also say that interestingly, in reporting the book, I was surprised to find that AI companions for sex and AI generated adult content, a lot of adult content creators aren't really that worried about that. I was really surprised. I would have thought that a lot of adult contact creators

would be worried that AI companions are going to be taking up a larger footprint. I think that tech companies are really making that gamble as well. But I was surprised to find out that a lot of human adult content creators aren't really that worried about that reality. And I guess it just goes to show it's really hard to meaningfully replace human labor, human talent, human connection with technology.

Definitely. I know I spoke to some S workers, we could say, about this problem. And what they were saying, too, is that these models don't have a long memory. They won't have the nuances. And of course, they're all going to get better. Maybe one day it will encroach on what they're doing more. But a lot of people also still want that physical companionship.

That doesn't mitigate the harm that these tech companies are doing by deplatforming S workers and adult contact creators. Obviously, that's really bad. But back to what you're saying before, too, sometimes people use these things in different ways. And they still maybe want to pay for their OF and maybe they still want AI generated intimacy separately. But I do think in terms of when we look at. what laws are harmful or what laws are not for free expression. The adult industry is always ahead of the game on that. And if you see S workers being against a law, like the chatbot act, like the screen act, like the kids act, like the kids online safety act, all of these laws that claim to protect kids against the harm of AI.

It's because it's a bad law. And obviously, those communities are all very against them. Yes. You're never going to go wrong listening to S workers when it comes to tech legislation and policy. That's an axiom I really live by. Well, Bridget, I am so grateful that you. you are digging into all of this stuff. I highly recommend your audiobook.

I think it's so enlightening. I think it's so helpful for people to get these much more nuanced pictures of how people are developing relationships with AI technology and what that really looks like. And what I appreciate about your coverage so much is you cover people in a respectful, human way. These people are the butt of the joke so often. And it's so easy to mock them and not have empathy. And I just really love your reporting because I think you show the humanity in everyone that

you cover. Thank you. That means so much coming from you. That is my goal that we can. can look beyond jokes and dunks and othering and really ask some questions. And even if the answers are unsatisfying or nuanced or not black and white, really get smarter about these things together. So, yeah, I appreciate it.

And we both want to hold big tech companies accountable, which is why we need comprehensive data privacy reform. From your lips to God's ears. All right. That's it for this week's episode of Power User. If you like my work, please, please, please buy a paid subscription to my substack at usermag. That's usermag.co. I send a weekly roundup of everything that I'm reading and following online, and it's the best way to ensure this podcast can still continue.

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