There Are No Girls on the Internet - Scammers are using AI to make you fall in love

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

What if the person you're falling for isn't who they say they are, and AI is helping them fool you? Romance scammers are using AI to create fake identities, write convincing messages, and even manipulate Google results to build trust and steal money. In one alleged scheme, a man posing as a San Francisco 49ers player used a Google AI Overview to bolster his fake identity. But AI isn't just changing how people get scammed. From Tinder and Bumble to flirting with help from ChatGPT, it's increasingly shaping how we meet, date, and connect with real people. Bridget Todd explores what happens when technology can manufacture the very things that make romance feel real, and why verifying someone's identity is getting harder. Get Bridget’s audiobook Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy at LoveAtFirstPrompt.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Welcome back to There Are No Girls on the Internet. We are recording once again from beautiful Bahamar Grand Hyatt here in the Bahamas. I could not be more excited to be here. Mike, how do you feel about it? I feel the same. I feel like every day we've been here has been better than the last. I got to spend a little bit of time at the beach last night and earlier today. And it's just beautiful tropical beach, you know, like what more can you say about it? They have this really cool thing at Bahamara that I've never seen where we're recording from their state of art podcast facility.

But then that's also part of a sort of larger, almost podcast corner where they have a podcast cafe, all the drinks are named after podcasting things. So I'm drinking like a broadcast brew. They've got podcasting books. I don't know. I'm a nerd about my craft. So I'm an audio girlie through and through. I don't know that I've ever been in a place that is so authentically and thoughtfully

celebrating the craft of audio at a resort. I just never thought it's the day I'm loving it. Yeah, it's a good point. It's not just like a little studio tucked in a corner in a basement somewhere. It's like this is a podcast area. Today we're working with Engineer Carlisle. And yesterday, during our recording, a beautiful little girl came and was like looking in the window. And I was like, oh, my God.

She is thinking like, maybe she's never seen a podcaster before. Like she's thinking like, wow, what is this person doing? Come to find out that's engineer Carlisle's daughter. And was like, I was like, oh, she's like running the studio basically. Like she knows all about podcasting. She's going to be running a network in a few years. I'll see her in a job interview. Yeah, I was like waiting for her to come in and offer some notes.

Yeah, yeah. She's like, Mike, move over. I'm producing the show now, actually. Yeah. Give her a couple years. And it's also been interesting being here. I'm kind of treating this trip as a book launch celebration slash, I don't know, like commemoration of the fact that you and I just published a book together, an audio book together.

Yeah, it's nice to have a little celebration from that. And, you know, it was a lot of work to write and record and produce the audiobook. But since then, you Bridget have really been just like hitting the road, doing publicity. You know, I think that's part of why we've been on this little hiatus. You know, I hope the listeners have been following along because even though we haven't been putting out additional Tangioti episodes, Bridget has been all over the digital airwaves, I guess. guesting on so many shows. And it's been a lot of work. And I really appreciate you doing all that.

Yeah, probably the biggest thing that came from the book launch. And one of the bigger things of my career from being real is I was on Modern Love, the New York Times podcast. And there was a whole feature about it. That was surreal. I bet. Yeah, I was talking with a friend of mine the other day, my friend Colleen. And she is listening to the audiobooks, said she really enjoyed it, loves your voice.

We should say what the book is called. I realize now I have not said the title of the book. Oh, yeah. This is how good I am at Proocean. I have not said the title of the book that we're trying to get everybody to freaking read. You know, we're going to get there. It is love at first prompt. AI in the future of intimacy.

You can get it wherever you get your audiobooks. Good flag to say that. But she was telling her son about it, who was like a teenager. And he said, wait, wasn't she on modern love? Oh, my God. Teens know about your work. Oh, my God. also shout out to Colleen's kid that he is a teen who is like oh what are you into fortnight

Minecraft nah poignant intimacies speaking of kids this is such a non sequitur but so last night we were just like hanging out here at the resort um that they had like a little happy hour thing but the interesting relevant thing is that there are these kids there and you know listeners know that Bridget loves kids and somehow you You organized a like impromptu kids trivia? No, no, no, no. So how it happened, we recorded at the Bahamara podcast studio yesterday. And it was a marathon session.

We recorded for six hours. Again, shout out to producer brief for being down with us and rocking with us. After you record for that long, you're sort of in the weirdest headspace at her. We immediately go to the happy hour, which is lovely. There is a single child sitting by himself who just starts talking to us. He's very sweet. And I don't know how it came up, but we asked him a question and he didn't. No, I think that he said he was from New York State.

And we were like, oh, did you know the motto of New York State? And he was like, no. And I thought, oh, okay, well, let me. And I don't know how it happened. But I was like, let me ask you some questions that you might know. So I will admit that I asked Chatchip-T to come up with questions that a seventh grader would know. It's like state capitals, math questions. then it's a question about the game Fortnite.

He knows it right away. And I was like, okay, now we, now we got the, like, we got your lane. So then I asked, like, give you some questions about, like, gaming that seventh graders would know. Two additional seventh graders are in the orbit. And they start answering. Before I know it, we've got, like, 10 fourth to seventh graders who are, have all joined our table, right? Like their parents are all having a glass of wine and they're like, oh, this, this like woman is just going to entertain our children for a little while? Fine. The parents were loving it.

We were loving it. So next thing I know, I am essentially hosting trivia night. We've broken it dad in a section. One kid is like, oh, can we do Minecraft trivia? One kid is like, oh, can we do five nights at Freddy's trivia? Real specific. Fans. He was calling it fans. That was the most interesting thing. He had an acronym. Yeah, all the kids had their niche. Like there was the kid who knew all the Fortnite questions. the kid who knew all the Minecraft questions. One kid was really into basketball. The kid from New York didn't know anything about the Erie Canal, which like, I'm a little disappointed because I went to school in the New York State public education system. And the Erie Canal was central to so much of the curriculum. I guess they're not teaching it anymore, which is like what is happening to our heritage.

Oh, my God. But you should have seen the way the seventh grader reacted when producer Mike tried to ask him trivia questions about the goddamn. Eureka now. Yeah. We moved on to Fortnite. But the kid who was really, like, his thing that was like central to his identity was fan. Fan. Five nights at Freddy's.

I had no idea that that was a thing. The kids are into it. It was really cute. I did not expect to come out of American podcasting session and go immediately into hosting. I would say pretty well organized for how impromptu it was. You did it for like an hour. Yeah. And when we, when finally it was like this, like, this has been.

And I love kids. was, you know, enjoying it. If I had not liked it, I would have stopped it. But when it was over and it was like, okay, if we don't leave now, we'll be here all. And like, truly, parents were coming in and be like, okay, it's time to go. And they'd be like, no, this lady's doing Minecraft trivia. And so the parents would be like, okay, just come up to the room when she's done. Like, like, that was the level of parents being like, this is great and fun. When we finally were done, we were like high fiving and like they were like following us like pied piper style following us out of the happy hour. And one kid was like, what time will you be here tomorrow?

And then what's funny is that we had breakfast in the morning, the next morning, I guess today, I hope that's not confusing. But I saw one of the kids. And this was like in a hotel situation where you wake up and it's first things first, you've got to go down to breakfast and get coffee. You haven't have coffee. You're barely awake. And I saw one of the kids. And I was like, oh, I have to go into disguise mode. Because I don't, I can, I can, I am not caffeinated enough to handle managing this trivia session for these kids. Yeah. Even here you're creating fandums amongst the 10-year-olds. Oh my God. It was fun. And our time at Bahamara has been great. But yeah, it has been a nice

change of pace from book launch promo. Like I said, we did Modern Love. That was really a trip. I had done the interview and I knew that the feature was coming out. And then I get an email on Thursday and they say the New York Times would like to send a photographer to your apartment to photograph you

in your space this week. Y'all, I don't know how y'all are living. I'm not living the kind of life worth the New York Times. The gray lady is sending a photographer to my home.

I can feel good about turning that around in like 24 hours. That's a little bit of a challenge to be solved. You got there though. Your place looked great. Thank you. The photos looked.

great. At one point I thought about renting a decoy Airbnb. Remember that? You were like, just have them in your places, just get clean, put all your junk in one room and then be like the pictures are happening in this room, which is what I did. But yeah.

Yes, you've been doing all this publicity for the book. And I know it's like taking a toll on you because the book is quite personal about a difficult time in your life. And so getting on the mic and telling that story many times, that's got to take toll. Yeah, it is. It is. It is unusual. I've never worked on something quite so vulnerable.

So leaves you feeling exposed, you know? And I'll just say this, though, the reaction has been great. I've heard from a lot of people who have listened to it now. And thank you to everybody who got it. Again, if you want a sticker and a handwritten thank you, please just send us an image of your order. And we will send that out to you. Thank you to everybody who preordered. I hope you all got your stickers and if you didn't let us know, it is weird to write a book. I've never written a book before, obviously. So it would help me out if you bought it. I guess I'll just just go, I'll just leave it at that. And if you can't know pressure, but it would help us out if people bought it. You don't even have to read it. I would like it if you did. Yeah. You should

read it because it's good. And thank you so much to everybody who has bought it and emailed us at Hello at Tangodi to ask for your sticker. We love sending out stickers. So what are we here to talk about today on today's episode, Bridget? Well, to that end, you know, our book, Love at First Prompt AI and the Future of Intimacy that just came out, which you can get at love at firstprompt.com, it really looks at the ways that tech companies are increasingly inserting themselves into some of the most intimate parts of our lives, friendship, romance, sex, grief, therapy, emotional support. A lot of that conversation has been really understandably focused on some of the most extreme examples, right? People falling in love with Chad GPT, people having AI boyfriends or girlfriends or having

sexual relationships with AI. Frankly, the feedback that I'm hearing from people about the book is people will say, well, that's interesting, but that has nothing to do with me, or that will never be me, or I can't see myself in that at all. And I absolutely get why that's the reaction. That is the reaction that I would have had before reporting the book. book, to be honest with you. People who report some sort of intimate connection with AI, sort of being over there, and then the rest of us who have nothing to do with such nonsense,

being over here and never between shall meet, right? It's absolutely how I thought about it before reporting this book, and I can understand why so many people, that's how they, that's their thinking on it too. But lately, I have been thinking about this in a way that I think is much more relevant to the average person, which is that you don't actually have to go to such an extreme of dating AI to have AI involved in your dating and loved life. And in fact, if you are single and if you're on online dating, some sort of dating app, there's a pretty good chance that AI is probably already in the mix when it comes to your love life. Because that's just how dating platforms work. They're using AI to recommend people, improve profiles, and help people

People choose photos. People are using chatGBT and other AI tools to write flirtatious messages, analyze texts from the people that they're dating, and get relationship advice. And some executives actually envision the future where the future of dating is AI agents dating each other. So even before you might swipe left or write on somebody that you meet at a dating app, your AI agent and their AI agent would go on a date and determine whether there might be sparks before you ever even see this person's picture, right? Like tech leaders have laid out that very specific vision for what they see as the future of dating. So I want folks to sort of forget things like AI boyfriends and things like that for a second

because I think a good question is what happens when you are dating an actual human or trying to date an actual human, but AI is increasingly involved in how you meet that human, how you talk to that human or how that human talks to you, how you guys get to know each other, and all of these kinds of like heady tech questions that I love asking in the podcast. But, and this is key, some of that is leading to outright scams. Like this story that I am freaking obsessed with. I know, Mike, I've sent you a million texts about it and videos about it. I got to bring it to the microphone because I can't stop thinking about it. Like this scammer who was pretending to be an NFL player for the San Francisco 49ers. Spoiler alert, he didn't play for them at all. I want to

ask, in what ways is AI being just more and more commonplace in all of our love lives, whether we want it to be there or not? How is that leading to changes and how we think about dating? And how is it boosting outright scammers and allowing them to increase their ability to scam? Yeah, I love this framing, you know, and it really aligns, I think, with the audiobook in the sense that these extreme cases of people, you know, dating AI, while that's a lot of, That's interesting. It's not happening in most people's lives. What is much more common in all of our lives is AI inserting itself in between human to human relationships. Exactly. And so I think that we should be talking about that much more common use case and, frankly, risk for all of us. And I do want to take it back a little bit because this was all happening way before the proliferation of AI platforms like Chat, GPT.

I was on a podcast recently, and the host asked if I would ever let AI pick a date for me. And he asked this to me as if it was like a far-flung idea, some sort of future thing that, you know, would be so weird. And I thought about it, and I said, is that so different than an algorithm picking a date for me? Because dating platforms have been algorithmically mediating attraction for a very long time. You know, they don't simply give you a stack of every available single random, in your city, there are systems that are making decisions about who get shown to who and who might be a good match and like predicting how all of that works. There's this sociologist, April Williams, who has a really good book called Not My Type, Automating Sexual Racism and Online Dating. And she looks at how things like racism and sexism and all other kinds of isms can be embedded into online dating systems, particularly for black women.

We had an interview for a podcast that I was doing previously. And in that interview, she told me about this example of a black woman who was using a dating app. And she was like, I'm not really getting any good matches. I'm just seeing the same people over and over again. It's not really working. So she tried a little experiment where she kept all of her pictures the same, but changed her listed race on the dating app to white. All of a sudden, that one change, she starts having a much better experience where she's being shown a lot more people. who presumably algorithmically were not being shown to her

when she had listed her race as what her actual race is, black. And so she starts thinking about all of these kind of questions about what we usually tell ourselves when we talk about things like racial bias and online dating. And I think that we tend to have this idea of an individual user looking at a black woman and deciding, oh, I'm not attracted to her. But what if this person never appears in someone else, says stack in the first place because an algorithm has already predicted, oh, they're not going to be a match for whatever reason. And even beyond that, I think it kind of gets into questions about what we

think of as type, right? Your type doesn't come from nowhere. The people that we grew up around, what our families taught us, what couples we saw, what movies and TV and media we watched, our ideas about things like race and class and gender and beauty. All of those come together to form this internal idea that we all have about what it is to be desired. So what we have now is millions of people bringing those preferences onto a dating platform. It's not like the platform is getting some pristine data set of objective human attraction, right? It is learning from us humans who live in that society that is shaped by all those things I was talking about, racism, sexism, and all of our other hangups. This is the point that I make about AI over and over again with the way that a lot of AI and tech leaders speak about

AI, it's very easy to think that AI is some magic, hyper-aware computer robot brain that knows all. But that's not true. AI is built by humans. It's trained by humans. It's trained by information that we give it. Right. And so it's simply all of the biases and isms and hang-ups and issues that we damn well know are present in humans. AI is simply reflecting that back at us. And in some situations, intensifying it. Yeah, it's so true. They're in there. They're like hard coded into the training sets.

And how disappointing and limiting that could be. If those same biases and sort of rigid categories that exist that I think many of us try to rise above a little bit to connect with other people, if this technology just entrenched them further and calcified them, that would feel like a real missed opportunity. Let's take a quick break. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character.

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AI and dating platforms can obviously sort of decide who you encounter or don't encounter, but increasingly it is helping people with the work of dating. of a couple of examples. Tinder has an AI-powered photo selector that scans the photos on your phone and can suggest which ones might work best as profile pictures. Grindr explicitly says that it wants to be an AI-first company. It's currently testing out an AI-powered premium tier called Edge, which would give you personalized profile recommendations,

profile insights from an A-list that recaps meaningful chats and misconnections. Bumble's founder Whitney Wolf-Hurd has described a future where, again, you would have an AI dating concierge who could interact with other people's AI concierges to narrow down the possibilities of who you might actually want to meet, all of this. And so, again, none of this is as extreme as somebody dating AI or having sex with AI, because you don't even need to have an AI partner or AI boyfriend and girlfriend to have this be an experience where AI is really, really dictating a lot of your love life. And I guess that's the question and that I'm sort of interested in.

And at what point are you dating that person through a layer of technology like AI? Yeah, that is such an interesting question. And I think it parallels a lot of questions that people are asking about AI and how it shows up in our lives and affects our work and just how we exist in the world. And I feel like people really don't like AI, but also people are using a lot of AI. So where should we start here? Like, why would people want AI involved in their dating life? So this is something that we really have to spend a little bit of time on. And I want to speak carefully about it because it's a little bit complicated.

I guess I want to give a little bit of a devil's advocate, if you could call it that, because I have not been out there in a long time. I'm not on dating apps. I'm not dating. But my friends who are out there and are on dating apps, the thing I hear about it from them consistently is that it's not a good time. It's exhausting. In fact, a Forbes Health One Poll survey of 1,000 adults who had used dating apps in the previous year found that 78% felt that they were emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by dating apps sometimes.

When you look at Gen Z respondents, that's 79%. So people are tired on these apps. I feel like I've been hearing that for a while, that people are just exhausted with dating apps. Yes. And I think part of it is that dating and then being on the apps is work, right? You've got to take good pictures, make a profile, swipe through, come up with like an interesting opening line, come up with like a good, you know, little blurb on your profile. Have that same conversation over and over. Okay, so how many siblings do you have? Okay, and you grew up in Baltimore. Okay, and you are allergic to cilantro and like, oh, what do you like to do?

Like, it is a lot. And on top of that, layer in some of the kind of interpret. personal complexities that we all know come with dating, fear of rejection, feeling vulnerable, it's just being awkward as hell at times. So I want to say that because it's very easy for me as somebody who's not experiencing that to be like, oh, people are having this miserable experience. But like, it's easy for me as somebody who is not doing all of this myself to sort of sit in judgment of people who are. Because what those same people are saying is, hey, I don't like AI, but if AI might be able to make this process that is exhausting a little bit easier, we will try it.

And that's pretty much the weird thing that is happening. Match in the Kinsey Institute's 2025 Singles in America study found that 26% of singles that they were using AI to enhance their dating lives up 333% over the last year. And there is this kind of funny contradiction there that I do think is kind of becoming a truism about how people think about AI, which is that people hate it. People also use it. So the same people who vocally don't like it also self-report using it. Gen Z is a great demographic that I think reflects that. Gen Z uses generative AI heavily while also expressing. a lot of skepticism about it. A 26 Gallup Walton Family Foundation

GSV Venture Survey found that 51% of Gen Z respondents used generative AI at least weekly while also having negative feelings about AI and a majority of this demographic had negative or skeptical feelings about the impacts of AI on things like critical thinking and learning. So again, this is just like I'm just reporting the situation which is that the vibe seems to be simultaneously, I don't want AI taking over my life. I don't want AI in my life.

I specifically don't want AI in my love life. And also, dating is exhausting. And also, the experience of dating right now is so bad that if you're telling me that maybe AI tools might make it better, I'll try it. I think it's a testament to how burnt out people are with dating that they are willing, to engage with technology and systems that they don't like in the hopes that it might help make the experience less bad. But it also reminds me of people's attitudes towards dating apps and dating in general, where, you know, it's like, I feel I have many friends who are trying to date and use dating

apps who just hate everything about the process, but also, like, do want to be dating. and so they continue to engage with this thing that they don't like. There's probably other examples of situations like that, right, where we're forced to engage with systems that we don't really like. I could do a whole separate podcast about all the systems I am forced to engage with, sort of against my will that I don't like, that I engage with. I mean, that's kind of the trip of being a human in 2026. Yeah, right?

So, you know, when it comes to AI, in an older iteration of this, an algorithm with their matchmaker. Now, AI can potentially be the matchmaker, the photographer, the stylist, the wingman, the flirtation coach, the relationship interpreter, and maybe even eventually your AI proxy. That is how in the mix in our dating lives AI is. And that's a long list of roles, right? And so maybe part of the hesitation here is that when there is one thing filling all of those roles and that, but, thing is a machine and not a person, like at some point does it start to become deceptive, right? So here's the question. And I guess I'm posing this question to the listeners because I,

this is not a question I can answer for myself. I mean, I can answer it for myself, but I can't answer it for everybody. Is using AI to date inherently deceptive? So I don't know. Your mileage may vary. I can tell you how I feel about it personally. I did a very unscientific poll of my single friends. And one of them basically told me, listen, we've always done this. She was like, how many times have I sent you a picture of somebody and said, like, are they cute? Should I date them? Or how many times have you shown a text to a friend and said, you know, what does this text mean? Or had a friend read you your dating profile or dating a picture. In some capacity, we have always outsourced the business of dating to other people, other humans, really. Getting outside

assistance with dating is not remotely new. And, you know, when I asked people what some of the use cases for AI in dating that they might be okay with, like where their individual mileage was. I got some interesting examples. AI might genuinely help somebody communicate better. Somebody who has social anxiety or some other issue might use it to organize their thoughts. Somebody dating in a language that they're not fluent in might use it to communicate more clearly. You know, somebody who struggles to express their emotions might use AI to figure out what they're trying to say. The fact that when I asked around, people were sort of giving me these answers, at what point does assistance become substitution? At what point is this not somebody using AI to like organize their thoughts or whatever?

This is somebody just outsourcing the what is supposed to be kind of like the reason why people date to AI. You know, if AI helps you phrase something that you already wanted to say, maybe that's one thing. if AI is determining what you should say and how you should present to another person, that feels like maybe it's a completely different thing. And I feel like what's clear to me from doing this research and talking to people is that I think that we're kind of inventing those norms right now in real time.

But I do think AI is just so in the mix in when it comes to dating apps that I want to be careful because I don't want people to hear the version of that thing we hate when people say, like AI is inevitable. That's not what I'm saying. But it is so enmeshed in the mechanisms of dating apps in 2026. But I do think we don't have a reality where we can not ask these questions. We are asking these questions about, you know, where the line is and what's okay and what's deceptive right now. And I think that we really should be asking those questions because the reality is as every dating platform is also an AI platform in 2026. Like that's just the way. reality. Yeah, I like that sort of careful phrasing because, yeah, really reject the argument that, like, AI is inevitable, so everybody just needs to, like, get on board or, you know, get bent. But I think you're right that it, like, it is out there and people are using it. And these dating apps are increasingly using it in various ways. And so, yeah, like, people need to be

asking these questions. And I'm sure people are asking these questions, right? Like, whether you're using the AI features or not, the other people on the other end of the dating. very well may be. So I have a good example of that because I saw this post on threads where a woman had taken screenshots of a conversation that she had with a guy that she met on a dating app. And you know how you can tell when a message is written by Chatchipit. It was like obvious to me that this person was using Chachabit to write their messages. And they were reasonable messages.

They weren't like all over the place or like out of pocket. But then something happens. and it's like he stopped having time. Like maybe he was like in the car or something or at work. And like he stopped having time to run the messages through chat. So she hits a very stark difference. He had previously been sending these like perfectly written, grammatically correct, good syntax messages that were exactly the kind of messages that you would want to get from your potential partner.

Something's flips and he's typing like Jeffrey Epstein. Like, everything misspelled using you instead of the word spelled out Y-O-U. It's like texting like a teenager. And what's funny is that the internet was sort of divided. Some people were like, okay, so he has bad grammar and he's using Chad Shep E.T to, like, fix his grammar because he cares about how he presents to you. Isn't that what y'all should want? Like, there's a lot of, like, weird hostility. Like, isn't that what y'all supposed to want?

Damn. And then a lot of people being like, come on. And for me, again, this is like your mileage may vary. I'm the kind of person when I'm dating. It matters to me how somebody communicates to me. I'm a writer. I'm a woman of letters and words, if you will. It matters to me how somebody communicates to me.

If somebody sent me a text message who I was meant to be like dating or having sex with and it was like every word misspelled you instead of the letter you, that would be a problem for me. I don't know. Maybe it makes me classes. That wouldn't be, that's something that I care about. Yeah. So that's a great example. And so is that being deceptive, you know?

And because there's information in the way that somebody texts, right? Like whether or not somebody has taken the time of their life to learn good grammar, to learn how to write well, right? Like some people really value writing skills. Other people think of it as a means to an end, let's say, I guess, at best. And so isn't like the point of dating to get to actually know a person, to get to a place of like intimacy with them. And so if you are using a tool to artificially present yourself on this dimension of grammar and writing that like way over represents your ability, aren't you kind of just like wasting people's time, like your time and theirs or setting people up for a big disappointment? I would feel deceived. And again, this is just my personal take.

I honestly am not prepared to defend this take. It just is how I feel. Because you might ask like, oh, well, what if they were using a dictionary? If they were looking up for it in a dictionary to smell them correctly, is that different? That's way different, right? That's what I'm saying. Like, somebody busting out a thesaurus or a dictionary so that they can craft the perfect message to you is so different than somebody just like copy and pasting something from chat GPP. I would feel deceived.

I would be like, why are you presenting yourself? as a someone who cares about how you communicate to someone who for whom communication is probably the most important thing to me, I would feel deceived. Yeah. It sounds crazy. And I know it's kind of a funny example, but I think behind it, it is a real question. Like, you know, some of the AI assistive tools in these dating apps are things like, you know, it can resurface conversations for you. So, or it can, you know, help you craft how you respond to somebody via AI generated props. And so if you're the kind of person, if you're dating somebody and you casually told them,

oh, my favorite flower is a sunflower. And they remembered that. And they brought you sunflowers or referenced that and you're touched by that. And that makes you want to date them. If the only reason they were able to do that is because of an AI enabled tool that resurfaces what your name, what she, when she was a. And what she said her favorite flower is, like, maybe this is saying something about me that I'm so bothered by this. It might also depend on, like, what are your goals for being on these apps, right?

Like, are you trying to find your partner or are you just trying to hook up? That's a very good question, too. You know, the stakes are different and the rules might be a little bit different. Yeah. And again, I haven't been on a dating app in a really long time. And boy, what a time that was. I do think that it matters what you're looking for. And if you are someone who is looking for an authentic, meaningful human connection, I can understand why some of these instances of AI where the platforms are saying,

hey, this just makes it easier to date people, like it reduces some of the friction. I can see why that feels decepted. And does it change how you've experienced those interactions? If the interactions that you're having with somebody, you're having them because of something that's an AI assistive tool that is embedded in a dating platform, I think it is worth asking whether or not that knowledge changes the interaction for you. But again, this is like a your mileage may vary thing. I'm curious what people think this. Apparently, I'm in real time realizing how much it would bother me.

Yeah. And what if the person you're talking to is not seeking authentic connection? what if they're seeking a mark? I am so glad you asked because it sets me up beautifully to talk about my real passion, which is scams. Y'all know I love a scam.

I hear about a good scam. I'm reading every comment. I'm like, I want to see the photos, give me all the text, everything. More after a quick break. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character.

It's a podcast. I know. There's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason. why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world, I swear. I know, bold, but why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were, or if we

tip them or not, come and find out. Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about, trust me. Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground or drama in music or TV shows or the men. at gala and what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out, anyone. Wherever you're from, whatever you're like, you're welcome.

Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? You don't win. You have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest,

and they complain about the very thing to receive. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company

in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts.

Wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. We spent the first part of the episode having these sort of like high-minded conversations about tech and what does it mean and all of that. But there is such a higher stakes version of this authenticity problem. And that is, what if AI isn't helping the person you're talking to communicate with you? What if AI is helping someone manufacture the person that you're talking to in order to scam?

Because that is part of this AI conversation. Now, to be real, online dating and online romance has always required a certain amount of trust, especially for women, right? Is this person really who they say they are? Are these pictures recent? Is the person I'm messaging? Are they like a safe person to meet? So they have safe intentions for whatever our encounter might be?

And that's always been part of the mix with dating. However, generative AI adds an entirely new layer, an entirely new level of uncertainty because of that very same technology that can help a real human write messages or remember things or whatever can also help a scammer build a more convincing fake identity. And something that I think is pretty interesting is that AI is kind of on both sides of the arms race on this, like scammers and platforms that don't want scammers to be proliferating on their platforms. Dating companies obviously have an enormous incentive to make sure that people on their platforms are real humans, right? That's an interesting observation. You know, I think dating

companies have a stronger incentive there than a lot of social media companies do, right? Like, we know Twitter or X, as it is now called. We know that like some huge proportion of those accounts are bots. And it seems like management is fine with that because it makes their numbers look good. They can sell impressions to bots to the people who are coerced into advertising. So they appear to be fine with it. But dating companies, it's a different thing, right? Because they they really do need trust from their users. Yes. This is kind of a tangent,

but we watched that Ashley Madison documentary, and the documentary itself is very good. But the thing that they kind of treat as like a throwaway given was that on the hookup app Ashley Madison, it was just men talking to bots. I was like, wait a minute. Can we like slow down on this? That to me was like wild.

And so like, you're so right. That's kind of the scammy. the platform, you know, if you put your exes and your Ashley Madison's over here, the less they care about preventing them cracking down on bots, the least, if it's a continuum, like, some platforms don't give a shit. They're like, bots welcome. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And like with X, their whole thing is you have to be here. Everyone has to be here. Like, we don't care whether you want to be here or not. Yes. Dating apps, there's like competition there. Exactly. And so that's why dating apps and platforms do have some incentive to make sure. You know,

that you're a platform where people understand, like, it's for real humans, real humans are there. It's not just a proliferation of thoughts. We should also just say, like, this episode is not sponsored by any dating app. It is brought you by Baja Mar, but like these are just like our opinions. There's no dating app sponsorship here. Yes. And so AI is kind of showing up on both sides of this issue. Bumble says that it has deception detector that uses AI and machine learning to identify fake, spam and scam profiles, along with obviously human moderation. And we even see dating platforms increasingly turning to a lot of the things that we've talked about pretty extensively on the podcast, things like biometric tools or facial recognition, y'all know how I feel about all of that,

as these AI-assisted scams get more sophisticated. So we're kind of in this bizarre world where AI can both be used to manufacture a convincing fake human, while other AI is being asked determine whether or not that human is fake. That's a, that's, I don't know why. I have such trouble with that conundrum. This is, I don't want to go on off on another tangent, but when we were off the air, Substack did that partnership with Pangram, which we talked about in the episode about Mia Ballard, her novel, Shy Girl, getting pulled from its publisher because of

allegations of AI use. And we made that episode months and months and months ago. Pangram, I think, a sense had a little bit of a honeymoon period where people are are liking it now. And I guess that's fine. I still personally feel some kind of a way about a landscape where AI is used to determine whether or not something is AI. I don't know why.

It just seems like it's AI the whole way down. I don't know. I don't like turning to AI to verify whether or not something is AI. It just seems like more AI. Something about it feels a little long. Yeah, don't make me defend this position. I guess on this episode, I'm coming to the microphone unwilling to defend my tape. That sounds like.

Well, you're putting them out there. That's the important part. And so let's talk about how AI is poised to supercharge romance scams. Now, romance scams are not new. The basic mechanism is very old. Just create or assume an identity, establish intimacy, build trust, and eventually exploit that trust. for money, goods, or services. What AI can change is the cost, speed,

a potential scale of manufacturing that relationship. I think it just tants down some of the barriers to somebody being able to effectively do this and do it at scale. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report says that it received 22,364 complaints containing AI-related information with more than $893 million in reported losses because of romance scams. And the FBI specifically calls out romance scams saying that scammers are increasingly using

AI-generated fake profiles and scripts to make their speech and the content around their scams sound more believable to the targets. In 2025, victims reported more than $19 million in losses from confidence and romance scams with a likely AI nexus. That's how the FBI describes it. And I think if you think about all of the things that a scammer has to do traditionally to make you trust them,

a convincing identity, a backstory, believable pictures, writing messages that sound convincing. I remember talking to somebody I'm out in a dating app who told me that they were an attorney. And I believe that to be a lie. And one of the reasons why I believe that to be a lie, because I was like, I don't think an attorney would write the way that you write.

Could be a really bad attorney. Yeah, I'm an attorney, but I'm really bad at it. I've been disbarred. I might go to prison for contempt of court. I am an attorney, but I'm just really bad at it. Now that all attorneys have to have, like, good writing skills, I just was like, I'm not buying what you're selling. You know, and another important part of scamming is that you have to remember a lot to scam well. You have to, like, remember what you told somebody.

I was just on a podcast where somebody was. telling me about a scam where they were a catfish, and it was a fucking wild ride. I don't want to, I don't want to tell their story for them, but it was a wild ride. And one of the things that they said was that the scammer would say things. They had a long history of talking to this person before this person was revealed to be a scammer, and that the scammer would reference things, but then get those things wrong. So it will be like, oh, my house burned down. And then someone will be like, how is it going with your house rebuild? And they'd be like, what? Because they had forgotten. So like you have to really remember a lot of what you told

people and avoid contradicting yourselves. So you could really see how a tool like AI could be really helpful in all of that. And not just that, you know, the need to overcome a language barrier, the need to respond in ways that make the target feel seen and cared for. From reporting our audiobook love at first prompt AI in the future of intimacy, I know that AI is actually pretty good at coming up with BS messages that might make somebody feel temporarily loved and seen and cared for. I can see that as a use case. Yeah.

And not only can it do all of those things, but it can do them at vast scale, right? Like do all of those things reaching out to. thousands, potentially millions of people all at once. Exactly, exactly. And the FBI says that AI makes it possible to create convincing synthetic social media profiles and personalized conversations, often in mass quantity. So you can just be, I mean, if you, I hate to use the fishing analogy, but like, big net, more fish.

Yeah. And I guess that's the part of this that really gets me, that AI is not really inventing. like a new kind of manipulation, but that doesn't mean that it's not dangerous. It is making this old form, this tried and true romance scam that we all know, cheaper, easier, faster, and more importantly, scalable.

More after a quick break. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around, but why should you listen to ours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world.

And we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had. Or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters.

And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing to receive. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

Twelve seats, those are moving south. So you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So let's get into this story of this fake 49ers player because I think it's a prepped example of how weird all of this is getting.

So again, I know that you know about it because I've sent you a million text messages about it. So federal prosecutors say that a man named Dejan Love posed as a San Francisco 49ers NFL player and with an alleged accomplice defrauded at least 26 women out of $1.3 million. I will say to his credit, he could have used AI to generate images of himself as an NFL player or other kinds of content around his scam. it sounds word to say, but to his credit, he was, like, out there in the meat space. Like, I guess, like, bought a fake 49ers helmet and would physically go to, like, high school football fields and take video of him doing, like, fake NFL drills. By the way, if you have not, like, please look up some of how he looks doing these drills. Like, there's videos of him, like, skipping on a high school football field. there's videos of him doing fake drills on the beach.

And I don't know much about sports. He looks so bad at it. I feel like I would have sniffed this out immediately. Does he look like a football player? Not at all. Not at all. Like a linebacker kind of guy? Mike, he doesn't even look like an athlete in any capacity.

I don't mean this as a dig. But like when you look at NFL players, they look like people that you're like, okay, this is somebody who uses their body as their instrument in professional sport. They're a professional athlete. This guy, he doesn't even look like he goes to the gym. Like, you know what I'm saying?

That as somebody who doesn't go to the gym. Wow. Okay. So, but he was out there, like, creating these analog, old school scam materials. Yes. Like, I was, like, he committed to the bit. Also, there's this thing where he, like, was sending these women, these, like, meandering videos of him talking. Again, there are things, I don't want to blame the victim because I have these women, I feel, I hope these women get their justice.

But these things that would have at least struck me as off-putting. They might not have been like, oh, this is a scammer. But they would have struck me if somebody sends me a 30-minute video of them just kind of meandering, talking about how much money they have and this and that, like, no. They were that long? There are so many of them and they're very long. And so you might be quite, so if he wasn't using AI to like manufacturer's images, you might be asking, well, okay, why are you including this in an AI scam? Because he actually did something I think was a little bit more like, you don't see it as often. So you know when you Google something and you get that Google AI overview, which I will fully admit I have been guilty of just like looking at me.

Okay, that's what it says. Yeah. I mean, me too. It's so convenient. But you really do have to look past it because it gets things wrong. All the fucking time it gets things wrong. So nobody should be trusting the AI overview. and basically he was able to very easily gamify the Google AI overview so that when these women would meet him,

the first thing you're going to do when you meet somebody who's telling me they're an NFL player, you Google them. Well, the AI overview would say he does play for the San Francisco 49ers. He's like, okay, checks out. However, he was gamifying Google's AI index because the AI overview just comes from whatever is publicly available online. So if you go on and you put on your Instagram or on your subdeck or whatever that you play for the 49ers, Google is just indexing that. And it's interesting because, like, it just shows how not set up for a framework of bad actors and scammers the Internet is. It assumes that everybody is going to be honest and forthcoming about who they are.

Nobody has nefarious intentions. You think somebody would just come on the Internet with bad intentions to scam and, like, Yeah, it is such a good point. Like so many of these systems that we depend on just assume that people are telling the truth and are not set up to catch deception. And it seems like the AI overview was completely hijacked in this case.

And I think it shows that the women who were scammed, it sounds like they were following what I think is like a tried and true, basic online dating safety practice of like Googling the person. But now with Google AI overview, You can't just Google it. You have to like click in.

Like you have to, I mean, again, I don't know that it would have occurred to me to do this, but you have to go to the official roster. But we shouldn't, I guess that's my thing. Like, we should not have a digital media landscape where Google is helping this guy scam in this way. It's also interesting because like the boldness of the lie almost like helps hide it. It would never occur to me that someone might be lying about being an NFL player because it'd be like, oh, like you could so easily check that. Like no one would ever lie about that.

And I guess he's like exactly. Oh my God. Like this is such a tangent. But I mean, this could be a whole other episode. I think that we have crossed a line where scammers and liars and grifters are exploiting successfully, exactly the dynamic that you just named where nobody would lie about this because it's so easy to prove. Exactly.

Right. I'm thinking about there was. this woman, this influencer, and this has been another, this is not a tech scam, really, although I could make anything, anything. This influencer just got called out for the craziest thing. Basically, she has been pretending to have gone to sports medicine school at Duke. And they have like one of the best sports medicine schools in the country. And so for like years, and she's an influencer, been posting videos on TikTok and Instagram,

wearing scrubs, being like, get red. ready for me to do my rotations. Get ready with me to do my rotations. Like here's the bag that I take when I go do my medical visits or whatever. Like a whole elaborate cosplay that also culminated with her physically traveling to Durham, North Carolina, to Duke's campus to take fake graduation pictures in a graduation hood that she must have bought on the internet. And the way that this was revealed, this is my fucking kind of petty.

This is my kind of carrying on. how this was revealed was that apparently it's like a pretty small class because it's like one of the best sports medicine colleges, whatever, whatever. So it's not a huge amount of people who are in this college. It sounds like the students who actually were in this college have been low-key watching this woman and keeping tabs on her social media for a while. Graduation day rolls around. There is an official graduation ceremony on YouTube

where all the different graduates are called out by name. She's not called. The school posts the official photo with all of the graduates together, she's not in it. Someone else is like, the grove that she took a picture of on Duke's campus is the wrong color that went along with the graduates. So it sounds like these people were lying in wait until graduation to be like, we're going to get her.

And they called her out and she just deleted everything. Wow. And this is what I'm saying. I think in 2026, I might start saying I went to med school. Because like it just sounds like people aren't checking. And I think that the brazenness is part of it, I think. The brazenness is almost like protective for the liar. I think you're right.

I think there are all kinds of examples of this in our society, our politics. And it's up to us to resist it. Like there is a reality. There is truth. Screw these people. Yeah. When I think about that scam, the NFL football player, so a lot of people have asked, you know, well, how did these women give him

money. If he was saying he was this rich football player, he said that he was like a prince in Sweden and, oh, it's like that dizzying array of things that he claimed. He said that he was a prince in Sweden. He said that his family owned a the flagship Gucci store on Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. There are so many things wrong with that sentence that like, I can't believe that that was, again, like, I can't believe that he, it's such a, it's such a like bad obvious brazen live. But a lot of people have been like, oh, well, if he's supposed to be this, like, rich football player, why would he be asking these women for money? That actually wasn't it. And this is actually a very clever thing that he did. Basically, he would sell these women on, that like, he's an NFL

player. He's very wealthy. He wants to make them an NFL life, right? And also, another thing, I mean, I've watched so many of this guy's videos, future casting. He's very good at, in these videos within the women being like, well, you know, when we buy the house together or like, like laying out a specific shared vision of the future, I think that was another really effective way at building intimacy. And so part of the scam for him was telling these women, I want us to have a shared future lifestyle that is grounded in shared values and identity together. So I'm already a famous, rich, successful football player. I can't just connect with any old Betty off the block, I need to know that you are also a high value,

if you're listening, I'm putting that in quotes because I hate that. That shit. But like a high value, you know, entrepreneurial woman. I don't want to pair with somebody who can't carry her weight. So what I need you to do to prove to me that you are a high value, you know, future forward woman of shared values and whatever, whatever, invest in this. company with your money to show me that you are actually the kind of woman that I can marry and you can join my empire of being an NFL wife. Do you know what I'm saying? Wow. I mean, when you

say like that, it seems like such an obvious scam, but clearly he tricked a bunch of women into doing this. Like, I actually, now I want to see some of these videos to see how he makes that pitch. It's like, it's you. I want to be with you, but a better version of you. And, And to get there, I'm going to need a $30,000 investment. So I think it's so many things going on. One, I am so sad to say this. I think a lot of this kind of men's rights, gender stuff, has just seeped into the language and the fabric of everyday dating and gender relations.

So a man who is like a high value man, a high net worth man, whatever you want to call it, telling a woman that she has to prove her value and prove her work and prove that she brings something to the table, to me that sounds like nonsense. To me that sounds like, I mean, my old ass, if I hear that, I'm like throwing a drink in your face and I'm laughing at you with my friends. But like for a lot of younger people, all of that stuff that's borrowed from a lot of toxic online movements has become just the fabric of how people talk about dating and gender. How sad? How sad? But I'm saying so when you when you hear that stuff, it wouldn't be totally out of pocket, right? There's already a language that allows for that to be sort of projected onto when someone says,

I need you to prove that you bring something to the table because I'm a high value man. You need to prove to me that you're a high value woman. It's almost like negging. If you really want to get into it, it's almost like, you know, when, I've been negged many times. But like, when someone's nagging you, the concept is that you make this person feel bad about themselves or insecure so that they're more wanting to prove that they're actually. good or hot or whatever, right? That they're worth your time. That's the sort of psychological trick of necking.

And so this is almost a sort of like financial neg of like prove to me that you actually are worth me getting together with by investing in my scam company. Yeah. Oh, interesting. And I guess that's been a part of like confidence grifts forever, right? Like building people up and then breaking them down and offering them like the path to achieve. this thing that you're kind of telling them that they can have, but also that they don't.

Scammers. Yeah. I guess again, he's, you know, taken analog photos and just relying on good old classic confidence grifts. Yeah. I also think in 2026, life is hard, right? Everything is expensive. Everybody is, like, working their ass off. Nobody has time for the kinds of things that nourish us or bring us joy. I mean, I guess I'm at the beach. But, um, But that's, it's not, like most people, it feels increasingly rare to be able to have these moments, right? And life is hard. I think somebody's selling you that they want to make it so that you aren't just financially struggling, but that you'll have this NFL wife lifestyle.

You'll drive the fancy car. You'll, you know, you'll, I think offering, I think, I think, I can understand why women were enticed by this, I guess is what I'm saying. Like offering not just financial security, but a specific kind of lifestyle that I think is like coveted. Totally. I can see how that would be attractive. And with, you know, AI so available to help scammers make those pitches, connect with people, build the confidence, build the intimacy, reach out to large numbers of people, it's rough out there. It's dangerous, you know. And so what do we do with that?

What do we do with the fact that, you know, and specifically in this realm of dating, like you mentioned, we have this AI arms race of scammers using AI to scam platforms, trying to use AI to detect the scams and protect people. But ultimately, scammers are going to get through, right? Like, I think if you're a person who's putting yourself out there in 2026, you're probably going to be exposed to some scammers. How should people deal with that, Bridget? Yeah, well, I think the question is like what happens when the signals that we use to recognize things like sincerity can be synthesized. And it's something that I was coming back to again and again when we were reporting the audiobook. Intimacy requires things like vulnerability. You cannot connect with another person without taking some risk that person might hurt you, scam you, reject you, misunderstand you, disappoint you.

Now, technology has been used to mediate that for a long time. But AI really introduces a new problem that the signals that we traditionally use to decide whether another human is sincere are already increasingly being outsourced to machines that are pretty good at mimicking that and producing that. Right. So whether it's a beautiful picture, a thoughtfully well-crafted and grammatically correct message that's going to be very important to me, remembering that somebody loves sunflowers or like remembering some like small. detailed that somebody told you, you know, knowing exactly what to say when you're upset, all of these things, right? So the question is not, would you date an AI? I think the real thing we ought to be asking is what happens to dating when you cannot always easily tell what parts of another person's romantic performance actually came from that person? Maybe the answer is, like, in-person experience, right? Like, people can't be hiding behind AI if you're actually meeting

face to face and having like in-person conversations. Maybe that's where people should prioritize. I'm so glad you said that because as people are reporting more interest in what feels like authentic human one-on-one connection through real IRL meets-based experiences, some dating apps are trying to get in on that as well by providing meetups and that kind of thing to sort of see if that's what people are looking for. And, you know, I just think that we're in this era where these parts of our lives that at one time felt like sacred, right, who we love, who we have sex with, who we click with, the relationship between us

and ourselves, our inner worlds, are increasingly mediated by technology like AI that is sort of good at heading deception or lies or hallucinations or whatever you want to call it, scams to that dynamic. And I just think that we're in a very, very interesting world when it comes to all of this. And you mentioned earlier about that sociologist April Williams, the author of that book that I love that I recommend wholeheartedly, not my type. We had a good conversation. And from all of her research, I was like, oh, well, should people just be deleting dating apps? Is that the answer? And I know a lot of this conversation has kind of felt doom and gloom. But April Williams, who wrote that book, is like, no, don't delete dating apps. And I don't want

this conversation to sound like technology as reuben dating, because I'm not even, I don't even believe that. But April Williams, she told me that even though she wrote a definitive book about dating apps and how horrible those experiences can be, particularly for black women at times, she said that she does not think that people should abandon them. And she met her own husband on. on Tinder. And it's actually a cute story. They lived less than a mile from each other. And she had apparently physically gone in to the bakery where her now husband worked. And that they probably had crossed paths like dozens of times without even knowing it because they lived so close to each other. They went to a lot of the same places. But he was really introverted. They just had very

different lives. And they probably would have never actually met and crossed paths without technology, Tinder in this case, putting them in front of each other. So when they finally do meet because of Tinder, they go on a date. She laughs. She says that she laughed with him in a way that she had never laughed with anyone before. And that they instantly clicked, right? And I think that that is exactly the promise of technology that I think that we should be able to have, right?

This idea that technology can introduce us to people that we might have never encountered otherwise. It can bridge geographic, social, racial. cultural divides. It can help somebody put their best foot forward. It can make the logistics of dating maybe a little bit easier. You can meet somebody that you probably have crossed paths with a half a dozen times in your life, but never actually thought about it in that way because you would never have come in the contact with each other like that. And so I think that is really where I want to land. And that is the question of what we want technology. If it is just going to be in our intimate lives in this way,

what is it that we want it to do? Do we want technology that helps us encounter people and then gets out of the way for two humans to connect and get to know each other? How much of the courtship and the business of dating is it actually even a good idea to be outsourcing to technology? You know, what kinds of verification and safety systems do we need that people can sincerely and safely communicate with each other? And I think it kind of gets back to this idea of what kind of tech future we want and deserve. I don't think we deserve a tech future where technology like AI is just increasingly being used to further entrench these higher, these very rigid hierarchies that already dictate so much of our lived experiences. And we don't have to have that. There is another version of

what we get with technology that I think that we should all be advocating for. Well, Mike, as always, thank you for being here in beautiful Bahamas. I just kind of give a little shout out because it's been such an amazing time here in the Bahamas. I don't get to have experiences like this often, so I'm really feeling a lot of gratitude. I have so much gratitude for Dante from Bahamar for being a great host in setting this up for us. Hi, I'm a pain in the butt,

and he was awesome rocking with me every step of the way. I want to thank everybody in Bahamara. It has been such a pleasure to be here. I want to thank Engineer Bree. Thank you for being so generous with your time. and being such a professional. I want to thank engineer Carlisle. Thank you for being such a professional

and being so generous and patient with your time. Our team at IHeart, Tari, who is just such a great engineer, Jonathan, who's supportive, Maddie, who set up this Baja Mar trip for us. You know, it's just cool to be here, and it's great to be back on the mic, and I can't wait to get back to regular production

for season six of Tango, Coming soon. Thanks most of all. To you for listening, I will see you on the internet. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd.

It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Dodd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from Iheart Radio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast?

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