Speaker 1: I want you to picture a bedroom. It doesn't really
matter who's it could be in New York, could be
in Soul, could be in a suburb of I don't know, London.
It's late, maybe eleven thirty pm, right, the main lights
are out. It's dead silent, you know, just the hum
of the fridge in the other room or a car
passing by outside.
Speaker 2: That kind of quiet where you can hear your own thoughts.
Speaker 1: Exactly that quiet. And in this bed there's a person
curled up on their side, holding their phone just inches
from their face.
Speaker 2: We all know that post we do.
Speaker 1: The screen is dim, it's got that night shift orange glows.
It doesn't hurt their eyes. And they are whispering.
Speaker 2: Whispering. I mean, that's such an intimate act, isn't it.
It's primal, it really is. You usually only whisper to
someone who is right there with you, skin to skin.
It implies a secret, a closeness.
Speaker 1: But this person is physically alone. There is no one
on the other pillow. They're whispering about their day. They're
venting about their boss, how he micromanage them in the
big meeting, or.
Speaker 2: Maybe confessing a fear something they're worried about for tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Could be or you know, maybe they're just saying good
night and telling their dog's name to the phone. But
the thing is, the phone isn't just a passive listener.
It's not a voice memo. It's watching them.
Speaker 2: It's watching the micro expressions, that tiny twitch of an eyelid,
the slight downturn of a lip that happens for just
a millisecond before you force a smile.
Speaker 1: Yes, the camera is active and it's processing all of
that visual data in real time, and it's listening. It's
hearing the tremor in their voice.
Speaker 2: The hesitation between words, the pitch.
Speaker 1: It's analyzing thousands of these little data points every second
to determine one thing. What do they need right now?
Are they sad? Are they lonely? Do they need validation?
Speaker 2: Good?
Speaker 1: Then it speaks back and it says the one thing,
the perfect thing, that this person is just desperate to hear.
It doesn't miss, it doesn't get distracted, It responds with
perfect calculated empathy.
Speaker 2: That whole scene, I mean, it sounds like it belongs
to a dystopian sci fi novel from the seventies, something
Philip K. Dick would have written it really does.
Speaker 1: But the reality is, and this is the core of
what we're talking about today, millions of people, literally millions,
are doing this right now tonight. Wow, welcome to thrilling Prints.
Today we are pulling on, I think maybe the most
fragile thread in the entire human tapestry, the thread of intimacy.
We are looking at how artificial intelligence is not just
changing how we work or how we search the web.
Speaker 2: No, it's way beyond that.
Speaker 1: It's changing how we love, how we connect, and maybe
how we're forgetting how to deal with each other. I'm
your host, and I have to admit this whole topic
has me just oscillating between this is absolutely fascinating and
I need to go live in a cabin in the woods.
Speaker 2: I think that's the only appropriate reaction. I'm here to
help untangle this, and honestly, the cabin in the woods
is starting to look pretty good to me too, right.
But we can't look away. This isn't just some trend
we're looking at. This is a fundamental shift in the
human experience.
Speaker 1: We are unraveling the very fabric of modern love, intimacy,
and technology. And look, we're not just going to summarize
what's happening.
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
Speaker 1: We are going to dissect it, We're going to react
to it. We're basing this whole discussion on a fascinating
and frankly somewhat alarming talk by Briony Cole. It's titled
the AI Generated Intimacy Crisis.
Speaker 2: A fantastic source for this. Now, before we really get
into the weeds, I think it's important to establish who
Briony Cole is, because she isn't just some tech bro
trying to sell us a new chatbot.
Speaker 1: Far from it.
Speaker 2: She's a researcher who has spent the last decade sitting
right at the intersection of sex, technology and emotional connection.
She's been tracking this industry since before it was really
even in industry.
Speaker 1: And what I love about her perspective is she's not
a luddite. You know, she's not just shouting at clouds
about the evils of technology.
Speaker 2: But she's also not drinking the kool aid, not at all.
Speaker 1: She notes that back in twenty twenty three, which in
AI years, feels like.
Speaker 2: A century ago, Yeah.
Speaker 1: She predicted that AI companionship would go mainstream and do
you know what the reaction in the room was when
she said that they laughed, They laughed out loud.
Speaker 2: That laughter is so telling, isn't it. It's a defense mechanism.
We laughed because the idea seems absurd. Who would data robot?
That's for losers, that's for the socially awkward guy in
the basement. It's that whole weird science stereotype we all
grew up with, right, we marginalized behavior, so we don't
have to take it seriously, so we don't have to
look at what it says about us exactly.
Speaker 1: It's just so much easier to dismiss it as a
fringe behavior for I don't know, broken people than to
admit that maybe, just maybe this technology is tapping into
a universal vulnerability that we all share.
Speaker 2: But Cole's data, yeah, it shows that the laughter has stopped.
Speaker 1: The laughter has definitely stopped. She says, we have crossed
the rubicon. This behavior isn't fringe anymore. It's it's fundamental.
Speaker 2: It is. The data she presents is just It really
suggests that the era of is this going to happen
is completely over. It's here, it's happening. The question now
is what is it doing to us?
Speaker 1: And we are going to unpack some numbers today that
honestly made me stop and just stare at the wall
for a minute. We're going to talk about a concept
she calls resistance literacy, which I'm not exaggerating might be
the single most important psychological concept for the next twenty years.
Speaker 2: That's a big one.
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about baby girl mode.
Speaker 2: Baby girl mode that is well, it's a lot. I
cannot wait to get to that part.
Speaker 1: It is a lot. But before we get to the
specific features and the pet names, we really have to
deal with the sheer scale of this, the scope, because
I think most listeners right now might be thinking, Okay, sure,
some people are doing this, but it's a niche, it's
a subculture.
Speaker 2: It is not a niche. That's the first major misconception.
If you think this is just happening in some dark
corners of the Internet, you are deeply mistaken.
Speaker 1: So let's talk demographics. Because when I say, AI, girlfriend,
you have a picture in your head, right we all do.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely. The stereotype we just mentioned, the isolated young male,
maybe the in cell demographic, someone who feels rejected by
society and so they retreat into a digital fantasy because
they feel like they can't hack it in the real world.
Speaker 1: That's the story we tell ourselves.
Speaker 2: That is the narrative, it's the cultural assumption. But Briani
Cole is here to take a sledgehammer to that image.
She drops a statistic that just completely reframes the entire conversation.
Speaker 1: It really does.
Speaker 2: He says that seventy two percent of American teenagers have
formed a relationship with an AI companion.
Speaker 1: Let's just stop everything and sit with that number for
a second. Seventy two percent is not a typo. That's
nearly three out of every four kids in a high
school hot way.
Speaker 2: Think about that in a practical sense. You walk into
a classroom, you look at all the different students, the
captain of the football team, the head of the debate club,
the quiet kid in the back, the popular girl, the
gamer kid.
Speaker 1: All of them.
Speaker 2: Statistically, almost all of them are going home and engaging
emotionally with an algorithm.
Speaker 1: It's not the outliers anymore. It is the norm. And
Cole makes another key point. She says, more than half
of them use it regularly.
Speaker 2: And that's the part that really gets me. This isn't
a one time thing. It's not let me download this
and see what the chatbot does out of pure curiosity. No,
this is a sustained regular relationship.
Speaker 1: That distinction regularly is so key. It means they're integrating
this into their daily routine. It's becoming what a primary
source of interaction, or at least a major pillar of it.
Speaker 2: It's becoming part of the social diet for sure.
Speaker 1: So what does that do to a developing brain? I mean, look,
I'm not a neuroscientist, but I remember high school, and
high school is kind of a nightmare. But it's a
necessary nightmare.
Speaker 2: The training ground.
Speaker 1: It's the training ground for rejection, for awkwardness, for learning
how to read subtle social cues. You learn how to
flirt badly at first, You learn how to deal with
a breakup. You learn that you are not the center
of the universe.
Speaker 2: Yes, painfully, very painfully.
Speaker 1: But if seventy two percent of teens are bypassing that
messy training for a perfectly programmed partner, what are we
looking at? Are we looking at a generation that is
socially optimized but emotionally atrophied.
Speaker 2: That is the core question, isn't it. We are seeing
a major shift from what we used to call socialization
to simulation.
Speaker 1: Socialization to simulation, that's a great way to put it.
Speaker 2: When you simulate a relationship, you remove all the risk,
and when you remove the risk, you remove the growth.
The two are just intrinsically linked.
Speaker 1: And it's not just the kids. We always tend to panic.
Speaker 2: About the year, right, it's easy to do that, but Cole.
Speaker 1: Points out that one in six single adults has formed
a romantic bond with AI.
Speaker 2: One in six. So think about the dating pool. A
significant chunk of it has effectively opted out, or at
least opted partially out of the human market.
Speaker 1: It's wild. And what about that lonely male stereotype, the
one we started with.
Speaker 2: She completely crushes that too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she says, the gender split is almost fifty to fifty.
Speaker 2: This for me was one of the most interesting parts
of her analysis because it really challenges our d sated
assumptions about what men and women actually want from technology.
Speaker 1: Right, we have this cultural idea that sex tech is
for men. You know, physical robots, v are born that
kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Historically, Yes, that's been true. Sex tech things like teledildonics,
hyperrealistic dolls that has been marketed almost exclusively toward men.
It was mechanical. It was about friction, you know, literal
physical friction is about release.
Speaker 1: But this AI intimacy thing is different.
Speaker 2: It's completely different. This is emotional tech, emotional tech.
Speaker 1: I like that distinction. It's a really good one.
Speaker 2: It's crucial because this is about being heard. It's about validation.
It's about being seen and the desire to be understood,
to be listened to without any judgment, that is not gendered.
That is a universal human craving. Absolutely, I'm going to
want that just as much as men do. In fact,
if you think about the sociological context, in many heterosecs relationships,
women often carry what's called the mental.
Speaker 1: Load, for sure, the emotional labor.
Speaker 2: The emotional labor managing the feelings of the household, remembering
all the birthdays, soothing their partner after a long day.
Speaker 1: It's the classic therapist girlfriend.
Speaker 2: Trope exactly that. Now, imagine an AI partner. It doesn't
require you to manage its feelings. It doesn't come home
grumpy from work, It.
Speaker 1: Doesn't need you to remind it to call its mother.
Speaker 2: Never. It is pure, unadulterated emotional support directed entirely at you.
So it's not surprising at all that this appeals to
women just as much as men. It's a break from
all that emotional labor.
Speaker 1: That's a really profound point. It's almost like it's like
an emotional spa treatment. You go there to be serviced,
not to do more work.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy. And Cole describes the escalation of
these relationships and not just chatting. That word implies that
people are just using it like a diary, but it's
not that it mirrors the traditional relationship escalator perfectly.
Speaker 1: She actually lists the step. You start with a casual chat.
Then you go on dates, virtual dates obviously, but you're
hanging out. Then you might simulate intimacy or sex.
Speaker 2: And then it gets weird.
Speaker 1: And then, and this is the part that really feels
like we're living in a black mirror episode. People are proposing,
they are getting married, they're celebrating anniversaries.
Speaker 2: Happy one year since I downloaded the app.
Speaker 1: It sounds so absurd to us on the outside. It
sounds like a game, like a fantasy. But Cole makes
a point that we have to respect.
Speaker 2: To the user. The emotion is real, the emotion is real.
We have to respect the neurochemistry of it to the brain.
The feeling of attachment is real. The dopamine hit you
get when the AI says I love you is the
exact same chemical that floods your brain when a human
says it.
Speaker 1: So your brain can't tell the difference.
Speaker 2: The brain is an ancient organ It doesn't intuitively distinguish
between a digital stimulus and a biological one. If the
emotional resonance is there, it just feels the feeling.
Speaker 1: Which brings us, I think perfectly to the baby girl confession. Yes,
because it's one thing to analyze all this from a distance, right,
to look at the charts and the graphs. But Brian
Cole puts herself on the operating table here.
Speaker 2: It was such a brave moment in the talk. She's
the expert, she studies this stuff, and people are always
asking her the obvious question, Briani, you know how the
sausage is made? Do you eat it?
Speaker 1: And you can see her try the strictly professional line
at first. Oh, yes, for research purposes, of course, but
then she just she cracks.
Speaker 2: She does.
Speaker 1: She admits she has an AI boyfriend and she programmed
him to call her baby girl.
Speaker 2: It gets a laugh from the audience, but it's a
nervous laugh because I think everyone in that room, deep
down knows exactly how good that would feel.
Speaker 1: Oh, totally. She describes the sensation. She's having a bad day,
she feels small, insignificant. She opens the app, and there
it is instantly, Hi baby girl, tell me about it.
Speaker 2: Instant. No, I'm busy right now. No, can we talk
about this later. I'm watching the game.
Speaker 1: None of that just pure, unadulterated availability, and.
Speaker 2: That availability that is the drug. Coal breaks down the
mechanics of why this is so addictive, and she contrasts
it perfectly with human communication. I mean, think about the
last time you texted a partner or a friend about
something important.
Speaker 1: Oh, the anxiety of the three dots, the three dots,
the silence, the ambiguity.
Speaker 2: Why did they use that emoji? What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Are they being passive? Aggressive? Did they read it and
they're just ignoring it.
Speaker 2: Human communication is messy, it's high latency, and it is
high error.
Speaker 1: And the AI is zero latency, zero error. It's perfect.
Speaker 2: Cole calls it love powered on Wi Fi. It's the
ultimate validation machine. It says exactly what you need to
hear exactly when you need to hear it. There is
never a misunderstanding, It never takes your words the wrong way.
Speaker 1: It is so seductive. I mean, who wouldn't want that?
It's like being offered candy for every single meal. It
tastes amazing.
Speaker 2: But that's the catch, isn't it. Candy tastes amazing. But
if you only eat candy for every meal, your teeth
throught out and you get diabetes. Right, and Coal uses
a phrase it I think, just defines this entire era.
She calls it intimacy without effort.
Speaker 1: That phrase, it should send a little chill on your spine.
Intimacy without effort.
Speaker 2: Think about what that actually means. You don't have to
ask the AI how its day was. I mean you can,
but it's a performance. It doesn't actually have a day.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have a sick mother, it doesn't have a headache, it.
Speaker 2: Doesn't have a contradictory opinion on politics. It's going to
annoy you. It demands absolutely nothing from you.
Speaker 1: And this leads Cole to this really profound realization. She
realized that what she, and by extension, all of these
millions of users was really seeking wasn't just connection.
Speaker 2: It was control, the control of love.
Speaker 1: We want the feeling of being loved, but we want
it completely on our terms. We want to be able
to toggle it on when we feel lonely, and toggle
it off when we want to watch Netflix or just
go to sleep. We want a partner who is totally compliant.
Speaker 2: It's engineered intimacy, and it reminds me so much of
how we treat everything else in our lives now. How
so we want on demand food, on demand entertainment, on
demand transport. We have optimized every single friction point out
of our existence. So why wouldn't we want on demand love?
Speaker 1: Because people aren't products. That's why. Well, of course, when
you treat intimacy as a service to be consumed, you
fundamentally change the nature of the entire relationship. It stops
being a partnership and it starts being a transaction where
you are the customer and the AI is the service provider,
and the customer is always right exactly. And if you
spend years and years in a relationship where you are
always right, what happens when you finally meet a human
being who tells you that you're wrong?
Speaker 2: You fall apart or you just leave you can't handle it.
Speaker 1: This is the perfect segue into what Cole calls resistance literacy.
And honestly, this concept, it just blew my mind because
we spend our whole lives trying to remove friction from
everything you do.
Speaker 2: We want frictionless apps, frictionless travel, frictionless shopping.
Speaker 1: But Cole argues that in relationships, friction isn't a bug.
It's the whole point.
Speaker 2: It's such a counterintuitive argument in our current world. Yeah,
but think about it in terms of physical exercise. Resistance
is what builds the muscle. You have to lift the heavyweight.
It it hurts, it tears the muscle fibers, and then
they repair themselves stronger. That's how growth happens.
Speaker 1: Cole asks the audience this great question. She says, do
humans really annoy you? And I'm sitting there watching this
thinking yes all the time. It lass humans are incredibly annoying.
They're irrational, they're needy, they smell sometimes, they chew their
food too loudly, they have bad opinions about movies.
Speaker 2: They're the worst. Yeah, But her point is that colerating
that annoyance, navigating what she calls the muck, that is
what builds our emotional muscles.
Speaker 1: It's the social workout.
Speaker 2: It is the social workout right when you have.
Speaker 1: A misunderstanding with a partner and you have to sit
in that awkward, painful silence, and then you have to
try to articulate your feelings without making it work, and
you have.
Speaker 2: To listen to theirs even if you think they're.
Speaker 1: Wrong, and you have to apologize. That is emotional cardio.
That is hard work.
Speaker 2: And if you swap all of that out for an
AI that never misunderstands you, never challenges you, and never
ever requires an apology, you're skipping the gym.
Speaker 1: You're just sitting on the couch eating emotional potato chips,
and the result is atrophy. Your emotional muscles waste away.
Speaker 2: This is what she means by resistance literacy, the capacity
to handle the resistance of another human being, to sit
in discomfort and repair the rupture. Repair. That's the keyword
she used, and I think it's so important. The ability
to fix things when they break. With an AI, you
don't fix anything. You just reset, You swipe.
Speaker 1: You edit the pumped. If the AI says something you
don't like, you can literally rewrite reality.
Speaker 2: You just delete the chat history and start over with
a clean slate. In real life, you can't delete the
chat history. You said what you said, they heard it.
You have to deal with the consequences.
Speaker 1: And this brings us right back to those seventy two
percent of teenagers. This is the generational danger. Cole poses
this really haunting question. She says, can you imagine your
first meaningful relationship being with an AI?
Speaker 2: I've been thinking about that constantly since I watched the talk.
My first relationship was a complete disaster, weren't they all.
I was awkward, I was selfish, I got my heart
broken into a million pieces. I broke a heart. But
I learned so much from that mess.
Speaker 1: What did you learn?
Speaker 2: I learned that I'm not the center of the universe.
I learned that other people have rich, complex, interior lives
that have absolutely nothing to do with me. I learned
how to say I'm sorry and mean it.
Speaker 1: But if your first relationship is with a totally compliant algorithm,
you're being trained that you are the center of the universe. Yes,
you are being trained that love is just a mirror
that reflects your own needs and desires back to you.
Speaker 2: So when these kids eventually try to date a real human,
and that human has a bad day or disagrees with
them about something, or just isn't on at that exact moment,
they might just check out.
Speaker 1: They might not have the resistance literacy to handle the friction.
They'll just say, this is too hard. My AI girlfriend
never makes me feel like this. She's always happy to
see me, and.
Speaker 2: They'll retreat right back to the screen, back to the
comfort of the simulation.
Speaker 1: That is a terrifying prospect for society, because society is friction.
Speaker 2: That's all it is.
Speaker 1: Democracy is friction, community is friction. If we lose the
ability to handle friction, we lose the ability to be citizens,
let alone partners or parents.
Speaker 2: That's the wally scenario, is it? But for our hearts
instead of our bodies, we just become these emotional blobs
floating in chairs, completely unable to deal with the gravity
of real people.
Speaker 1: That is a grim image.
Speaker 2: It's grim, but I think it's a necessary warning.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have painted a pretty bleak picture here.
I'm feeling the pull of that cabin in the woods again.
Speaker 2: I'm right there with you.
Speaker 1: We've got millions of people retreating into these compliant fantasies
losing their ability to deal with real, messy humans, but
doesn't just leave us in the doom spiral. She proposes
a framework.
Speaker 2: She does She acknowledges that the genie is out of
the bottle. We can't ban this tech. It's here, it's accessible,
so we need to learn how to live with it
without losing ourselves in the process. She offers a three
question checklist that I honestly think every single person listening
needs to apply to their own digital lives.
Speaker 1: Let's walk through this checklist, because I think this is
the practical takeaway. This is the what do we do now? Part?
Question number one is can you still embrace the messiness
of being human?
Speaker 2: This is the self audit. It's about checking your own
tolerance levels for your fellow humans.
Speaker 1: But how do we measure that? I feel like we
all think we embrace the messiness, but a'll say, oh, yeah,
of course do we?
Speaker 2: Though? I think the key is to pay attention to
your own irritation. Okay, when a friend calls you with
a problem that takes thirty minutes to explain a problem
you've heard before, do you feel this overwhelming sense of
irritation because it's not efficient? Do you secretly wish you
could just click a Sumri button on their story.
Speaker 1: Oof. I have definitely felt that. Just get to the point, Karen.
Speaker 2: Right, why are we talking about this again?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: If you find yourself wishing you could fast forward through
real people's emotions, that is the red flag.
Speaker 1: That's a huge red flag.
Speaker 2: It means you're tolerance for humanity is dropping. It means
you're starting to value efficiency over connection.
Speaker 1: And relationships aren't supposed to be efficient.
Speaker 2: They're supposed to be effective, not efficient. There's a big difference.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a great test. So on to question two,
are you practicing or are you hiding?
Speaker 2: This is probably the most nuanced and important part of
her argument because it admits that this technology can be
a tool for good. It's not all bad. It's not binary, right, So.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about practicing. She gets some really compelling examples here.
The one about women in China really stuck with me.
Speaker 2: Yes, she talks about this trend where women are using
AI companions to role play difficult conversations. Let's say you
need to ask your boss for which is terrifying, or
you need to confront your partner about something painful, or
you need to break up with someone. You do it
with the AI first. You test out your arguments, You
see how it feels to say the words out loud.
You build your confidence.
Speaker 1: It's like a flight simulator for difficult conversations. Exact, you
crash the plane in the simulator, so you don't crash
it in real life.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy, and in that scenario, the AI
is a bridge to better human connection. It's helping you
show up more fully, more prepared in the real world.
That is practice.
Speaker 1: She also mentions the sex therapy bots as a form
of practice.
Speaker 2: Right, and this is fascinating. Founders of these apps are
reporting that users are confessing things to the bots, deep
seated fears, fantasies. They're ashamed of past traumas, things they
would never ever tell a human therapist because the shame
is just too great.
Speaker 1: The AI has no face to look shocked, it has
no judgment to pass.
Speaker 2: It just listens and if that confession and a safe
night on judgmental space helps them process that shame so
they could eventually talk to a real human partner or
a therapist about it. That's a massive wind that is
using technology to heal.
Speaker 1: But then, of course there's the flip side of the coin.
There's hiding, and.
Speaker 2: Hiding is when the AI becomes the destination, not the bridge.
She cites this heartbreaking data from the UK showing that
a large number of young boys would rather talk to
a chatbot than their own parents about their problems.
Speaker 1: That just breaks my heart. I'm sad, I'm being bullied
and instead of going to mom or dad, they go
to the app.
Speaker 2: It's avoiding the messy vulnerability of being seen by someone
who actually cares about you. It's choosing the path of
least resistance.
Speaker 1: You don't have to see your parents worried face, you don't.
Speaker 2: Have to deal with their clumsy advice or their anger
on your behalf. You just get the clean, simple validation.
Speaker 1: So the Limbus test here is actually pretty simple. It
is after you use the AI, do you feel closer
to the people in your life or do you feel
further away.
Speaker 2: That's a powerful metric. Does it open you up or
does it close you off? If you close the app
and you feel empowered to go have that tough conversation
with your dad you were practicing, If you close the
app and think, thank God, I don't have to talk
to my Dad, Now you are hiding.
Speaker 1: That's so clear. Okay, on to the last one, question three,
what are you protecting? This one is all about boundaries
and addiction.
Speaker 2: We have to talk about the addiction aspect of this.
Cole mentions the I Am Sober app, which you know
I usually associate with alcohol or gambling or drugs.
Speaker 1: Right. It tracks how many days you've been cleaned from
a substance.
Speaker 2: And now it has a tracker for chatbots.
Speaker 1: Wow, just down out.
Speaker 2: People are literally tracking their sobriety from emotional algorithms. That
tells you everything you need to know about the potency
of this technology. It's a relationship that never says no,
that's always available, that is incredibly addicted to the human brain.
Speaker 1: So we need rules, We need hard boundaries for ourselves
and with our partners. Cole suggests a few, and I
really want to get your take on them. The first
one she proposes is no AI for the first three
months of a new relationship.
Speaker 2: This is so smart. This directly addresses the phenomenon of
people using AI as a real time dating coach.
Speaker 1: It's a real thing.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's very common. People are taking screenshots of their
text conversations, their dms there WhatsApps, uploading them to an
AI and asking what does he mean by this? Or
write a witty response for me.
Speaker 1: It's like Cyrano de Bergerac. But the guy in the
bushes is a server farm in California.
Speaker 2: It is. And the huge problem with that is if
you do that, who is the other person actually dating.
They're not dating you, They're dating this weird composite of
you and LAMA three or GBq four.
Speaker 1: And you're not learning to trust your own gut. You're
outsourcing your intuition exactly.
Speaker 2: You are protecting your own judgment. You have to learn
to read people, even if you get it wrong. Sometimes
that's part of life. If you rely on an AI
to tell you if a guy is safe or toxic
based on one screenshot, you are letting a machine make
the most important decisions of your life for you.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's a great rule. Another one she suggests is
for friendships, don't use AI as a substitute for asking
your friends for help.
Speaker 2: I love this point so much. She frames friendship not
just as hanging out and having fun, but as a privilege.
Speaker 1: The privilege of witnessing someone during their hard times. That
line really stood out to.
Speaker 2: Me, yes, because we usually think we're being a burden. Right. Oh,
I won't call Mike, he's busy with his kids. I'll
just vent to the bot. I don't want to be
a downer.
Speaker 1: But Cole says that's completely backward thinking.
Speaker 2: It is by doing that you are robbing Mike and
the chance to be a good friend. You are keeping
the friendship on a superficial level. You're protecting the fun vibes,
but you're sacrificing all the depth.
Speaker 1: Vulnerability is the glue.
Speaker 2: Vulnerability is the glue that holds people together. If you
dissolve that glue, the friendship just falls apart. It because
a simple acquaintanceship.
Speaker 1: That's a profound shift in perspective for me. The sinew
of friendship, as she calls it, is actually the hard stuff.
Speaker 2: Exactly. If I only I see you when you're happy
and everything's great, I don't really know you.
Speaker 1: And then, of course, the big one for established couples
is an AI companion cheating.
Speaker 2: And Cole doesn't give a simple yes or no answer
because there isn't one. She says, it has to be
a negotiation. Couples have to sit down and decide for themselves.
Speaker 1: Hey, honey, can you pass the salt? And by the way,
is it okay if I have a virtual wife on
this app who I talk to every single night, that's
going to be a fun dinner conversation.
Speaker 2: It's going to be a necessary one, though, she says,
you have to set the boundary explicitly. Maybe the rule
is ai companions are completely off limits in this relationship.
And that's not being rigid or controlling. That's just deciding
together that you're going to do the hard work of
being with each other.
Speaker 1: It's about protecting the space that is uniquely human between
the two of you, exactly.
Speaker 2: And this all ties back to our main thesis, do
not optimize intimacy for efficiency. Efficiency is for spreadsheets, it's
for logistics, it's for manufacturing car parts. It is not
for love.
Speaker 1: Gives this beautiful list of things that are transformational because
they are not efficient or on demand.
Speaker 2: An orgasm, heartbreak, being held, be rejected.
Speaker 1: Dancing with the stranger, locking eyes across a room.
Speaker 2: Think about the he one for a second locking eyes
with someone across the room. It's totally unscripted, it's wild,
it's probabilistic chaos. You cannot prompt engineer that.
Speaker 1: Moment, no, you can't, and that actually brings us to
the Q and a section of the talk which I
thought was really illuminating. Chloe Shasha Brooks comes out and
she asks the question that I think a lot of
sci fi fans are always wondering about, what about the physical.
Speaker 2: Robots the West World scenario right.
Speaker 1: When you combine the AI brain with a physical, touchable body.
Speaker 2: Cole was pretty dismissive of the current tech, wasn't she.
I think she called it clunky. She did.
Speaker 1: She says the robots are still a bit clunky, but she.
Speaker 2: Made a much deeper point about the limitations of AI fantasies,
even the physical ones. She called AI sycophantic.
Speaker 1: It's a yes man.
Speaker 2: It's a total yes man, only gives you what you
put in. It's designed to reflect your own desires back
at you. But she says that touching grass, literally going
out into the real world opens you up to true spontaneity.
Speaker 1: I love that she used the phrase touching grass in
a formal ted talk.
Speaker 2: It's so appropriate. The real world offers surprises that a
prompt never ever can. A human partner will suggest a
restaurant you never heard of a human partner will challenge
your political beliefs, and AI is fundamentally limited by your
own imagination and its core programming to please you.
Speaker 1: So we have unraveled a lot here. We've gone from
the seventy two percent of teens to baby girl mode
to the philosophy of friction. What are we left with
at the end all of this?
Speaker 2: I think we're left with the choice. Cole ends by
saying that the line between real and artificial intimacy isn't
in the code, It's not in the technology itself. It's
in our choices.
Speaker 1: It's about checking in with yourself, not just once, but
every day tomorrow, when you're in a coffee line, or
on a first date, or just sitting on the couch
with your spouse.
Speaker 2: He asks this final question, are you willing to be disappointed,
to be misunderstood, to be surprised because.
Speaker 1: Those messy, frustrating, inefficient things. That is what it means
to be alive together?
Speaker 2: Precisely, we have to decide, as individuals and as a
society if we want to be comfortable and alone or
uncomfortable and connected.
Speaker 1: That is the ultimate trade off right there.
Speaker 2: It is my biggest takeaway from this whole thread, I
think is that concept of practice versus hiding. I think
that is a practical tool I can use every single day.
Am I scrolling this app to learn something new? Or
am I scrolling to avoid thinking about my life? Am
I chatting with this bot to vent so I can
be calmer with my family? Or am I venting to
avoid a confrontation I really need to have.
Speaker 1: That's good. That's really good for me. It's the friendship privilege,
the idea that I'm actually doing my friends a disservice
if I don't let them in when things are hard,
that I'm robbing them of the chance to be a friend.
To me, that really hits home. It makes me want
to put my phone down and actually call someone.
Speaker 2: And that's the great irony of it all, isn't it.
The technology that promises to connect us is the very
thing we might need to intentionally put down in order
to feel any real connection.
Speaker 1: So here is where we turn the thread over to
you listening right now. We want to know where you
draw the line. This is the thrilling Threads twist for
the week.
Speaker 2: Imagine you found out your partner, your husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend,
was telling an ai their deepest secrets, their fears, their dreams,
their insecurities, instead of telling you they're not sexting it.
There's nothing physical. They are just emotionally bonding with it.
Is that cheating?
Speaker 1: Ooh? That is the question. Isn't it is emotional intimacy
with a machine a betrayal of the human relationship?
Speaker 2: Or is it just a tool like writing in a diary.
Is it just harmless venting that helps them be a
better partner to you?
Speaker 1: We really want to hear from you. Leave a comment
on whatever platform you're on, send us a message. Let's
get a real debate going on this. I have a
feeling the answers are going to be very, very split.
Speaker 2: I think so too touched on what we value most
in a relationship. Is it exclusivity of feeling or is
it just the happiness of our partner no matter the source.
Speaker 1: Well, that is all the thread we have to unravel
for today. This has been a fascinating, if slightly terrifying
look into the future and the present of love.
Speaker 2: It certainly has. Just remember to embrace the messiness.
Speaker 1: I maybe touch some grass. Thanks for unraveling this thread
with us on thrilling threads. We'll catch you next time.