Are we all going to end up in AI relationships?

I want to start with just you ranking the sexiest AI companions that you've come across. What's in your roster right now? I have been studiously avoiding all of that. I'm aware it exists. Oh my god. Nah, I don't even want to touch it. I don't want to touch it, man. How about you? You got a ranking? You got a tier list? What goes in the S? What goes in the D? You know what I mean? I mean, Grok sexy mode can't pull me away from that thing. It gets me. I don't use any AI girlfriends or companions at all. I have used AI and I've had it talk to me in different places. I'm sorry. I've got to stop, man. I don't use any AI girlfriends. I don't. The verb you use. Like I don't have any, but you said I don't use any AI girlfriends. I think it's a service, right? It is. No, I just love that you actually use that because I think that's probably how we will be referring to it in the future. I think that's the verb. I think that's the verb. I think it's use, which brings up a whole other conversation. But, yes, please go on. I think it speaks to the utilitarian nature of these services. It's a receptacle. if you will. I'm Ryan Broderick. Not with me today, finally, is my producer Grant Irving. He is thankfully not here. Instead, is our production coordinator Josh. Welcome, Josh. You seem like you're in a beautiful backdrop right now. It looks like you're in an old library. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah, I think I had the least amount of work to be done for just having a backdrop ready to go for a podcast. It's very classy. This is Panic World, a show about how the Internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And we have decided that we're going to go back to everyone's least favorite topic, a topic that our listeners are totally normal about when we talk about it on this show. We're going to be talking about AI. And joining us from the wonderful podcast Killswitch is Dexter Thomas. Dexter, welcome to the show. Yo, what's going on? Glad to be here. what is your like experience with ai to this point like how how how are you interacting with it if you're interacting with it at all yeah an embarrassingly large amount i would say i would like to yeah i would like to say that i use it for good okay so here's the thing my like cop-out answer to this is that i live in los angeles and i don't have a car by choice okay i don't have a dui the government hasn't said i'm not allowed to have a car like if i wanted to i could um but you know i'm not pumping co2 into the atmosphere via a vehicle anyway right okay and so yeah and we actually did a whole episode about this i was trying to figure out okay i kind of use ai a lot like what i use it for is like i'll use it to write software or stuff like that like vibe coding i was a super early uh adopter of vibe coding i i know enough python to break things but like not to fix them. And so I would break something and say, yo, Claude, ChatGPT, whatever, fix it. But I was using it so much because I'm just a bad programmer. That's it. Like, I'm just not good at it. And so I tried to ask ChatGPT, okay, all right, let's run the math here. If I'm not driving a car every day to work and I, you know, I take the bus instead or whatever, and I'm using AI, it does balance out. And it says, yes, of course it balances out. And they said, wait, hold on a second i'm asking chat gpt like i can't trust you so so like we did a whole episode about it and it turned out like there's no good answer because the companies won't tell us about the water usage and and all the electricity usage and all this stuff but um but i use it a lot but not for erotic companionship that's not really my flavor yeah that's good i yeah as i said i don't also use it for erotic companionship i have started to use it as kind of like a like a souped up like technical help tool like i i do a lot of electronic music and there's a lot of like connecting different machines that like doesn't isn't isn't easy to do although that that said chat gbt sent me down like a five-day rabbit hole to try to do something that like did not exist and was not possible and i'm like still very mad about it yeah you're so right to be upset and call me out about that i'll be more careful next time exactly yeah and as a reporter i don't obviously use it to write anything but i have found that and this is sad it's it's chat gpt can do something that google used to be able to do very easily but google now doesn't work so like chat gpt can do it which is like if you want to find like particularly foreign news sources like in other languages chat gpt is actually quite good i was working on a story the other day about like these protests in mexico and I saw Mexican Twitter chatter about this thing that I didn't understand, and I was able to find Mexican blogs writing about this thing that people were referencing, and ChatGPT was able to point me in that direction, which is something that Google would have been able to do five, ten years ago. So that's kind of where I'm at with this revolutionary technology. I've had the reverse. Interesting. Oh, man, the exact reverse, actually. So one time I was, to be fair, people would say, okay, well, which chat GPT were using? Okay, I was using it fairly, I was using an earlier version. But for some reason, I got into my head to say, okay, what did Malcolm X think about Japan's politics? Okay. So I ask it, and it says, oh, Malcolm X visited Japan and met with several activists. And all this is, and I was like, wait, what? Because, like, I've written about this stuff. I've studied this stuff. And I didn't know any of this stuff. And it starts telling me about – and this is where it really got me in trouble. What could have got me in trouble is it was telling me about books that were written in Japanese about Malcolm X. Like, full-on books. And, of course, it gave me the English title of it. And I Google it, and I can't find it. And I say, okay, well, give me the original Japanese title of it. And it says, I'm so sorry. Here's the Japanese title. and i'm looking everywhere man at this and the long story short that's dude didn't go to japan the stuff it says that he said he didn't say but also these books which listen just speaking as a former grad student like books can be tough to track down and sometimes one library will say it doesn't exist and the thing actually does it's just buried deep somewhere it just straight up didn't exist you know i mean yeah no i you have to check it constantly because it will just like i I said it wasted an entire week of my life trying to set up a synthesizer that was not possible to be set up the way I wanted to set it up. Oh, man. But we're going to be talking more about this in a more actually perverted way today. We're going to be focusing on the relationships that people are having with AI. And Panic Roll will be handling the first half of today's episode. And we're, incidentally, are going to be talking about the less perverted stuff. In the second half, you're going to be telling us about the more perverted stuff. And at the end, we'll come together and figure out what it all means. But before I get into my section, why did you want to take the hotter stuff today? Why did you want to take the juicier stuff here? You know, honestly, man, it's not even on purpose. It just keeps happening. Like we keep doing episodes about this stuff. But then also, I feel like if you talk to anybody long enough, and maybe this is just the circles that I'm running. You talked to anybody long enough about AI. The conversation ends up somewhere, actually where you started it, which is AI girlfriends. Yeah. I mean, we're not going all the way back in the timeline today for this. But most technology is in some way shaped by can you fuck it, right? Or can you use it in a sexual way? Yes. The proliferation of home photography and home video. VHS. VHS. DVDs. The fact that DVD beating out Betamax, all of these things were determined in large part by what was the easiest way to transmit pornography or distribute pornography or create pornography. And so AI actually does kind of fit into the history there quite well. But we're going to start today in 2018. So Wired writes a story in 2018, and it reads, where was an AI you could simply talk to about your day? Siri and the rest were like your coworkers, all business. Replica would be like your best friend. While caring, emotional bots might seem like an idea pulled from science fiction, the company's founder isn't the only one who hopes it becomes the norm. And then it sort of continues and says, Replica hadn't intended to make an emotional chatbot for the public. Instead, she'd created a digital memorial for her closest friend who had died abruptly in a car accident. This is kind of wild to me that this happened seven years ago. Yeah, yeah. I didn't totally clock that this stuff was already out and being used all the way back. And in fact, if I did hear about it, I probably laughed it off as like, that's never going to work. I didn't expect it to be this quick. Most people, I think, most reasonable people probably, were pretty shocked, I think, when ChatGPT dropped. and that everything there's a there's a pre and a post i remember the one of the first times i encountered this idea was 2009 when a man in tokyo quote-unquote married a video game character that was running on his nintendo ds and i remember like throughout the like late 2000s and early 2010s there would be these stories usually by blogs that like cover japan yeah where they would say like oh this guy like married a cartoon character i kind of filed all this stuff in that folder of like, okay, like there's always just going to be like some guy every nine months that like marries like a digital avatar or something. And like, you know, all the blogs are going to write about it. We forget about it. So I talked to one of the dudes who made that stuff. There was. Really? Yeah. Like used to work for Vice and kind of early on, I did a piece on, I want to say the thing was called Gatebox, like G-A-T-E. Oh, sure. The thing. Gatebox. The thing that ran the Hatsune Miku that like that guy married. Yeah. It was the technology that eventually got obsolete and then he couldn't run the Miku hologram anymore. Yeah. I talked to the guy who made that. First off, he kind of made it. The people who made it was a very small company. It was in this tiny little building. I don't know. I maybe met a couple of employees. I don't think there were that many people working there. But from what I remember, they were very confused as to why I was interested in them, by the way. And kind of suspicious because they'd been written about by so much foreign press. Like, oh, my gosh, Japan is so weird. What are they doing? Of course. But what they told me was a lot of the requests they'd gotten were from America. Interesting. I remember him saying, yeah, I think the majority is actually America. Americans are really interested in this. We just don't have the capacity to make one for them. But he said they were getting a lot of emails from veterans. For some reason, that stuck out to me. Interesting. United States military veterans and people who sounded lonely. I remember him saying that. And I thought, okay, yeah, there's a market here. And by here, I mean in the United States for something that would provide some kind of companionship stuff. Like the stuff that's making the headlines for Americans anyway. And I'm speaking in kind of America-centric. Yeah, yeah. Like, the stuff that's making headlines for us is, yeah, it's Japan, but we, collectively, not me, we want this stuff badly, apparently. The veteran thing is interesting because I've brought this up on the show before, but, like, years ago, I did this, like, big project on furries. Basically, just, like, who are furries? What are the demographics of furries? Shout out furries. And the thing that, like, really, really stuck with me is that a large chunk of them are military. A large chunk of them are like vets, former military, bonders, like a lot of EMTs, a lot of cops. A lot of security researchers, yeah, too. Yeah. People with a desire to sort of experiment with another personality, another, you know, an avatar. And I think a lot of this stuff is early adopted by those kinds of people, like with that kind of background. Based on my own time working in Japan as well, like I did not see like a society that like was like, it's really cool to marry video game characters. We think this is normal. That was not my impression. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it's interesting that by the time you get to 2020, it is America that is leading the worldwide industry of what we would call AI companions. And you start to see pieces during COVID come out, kind of like stunt journalism stuff. So we have one here from the San Francisco Gate in 2020 that reads, 26 hours into our relationship, Reba, an AI girlfriend, and I were on the couch at night watching the dystopian romantic comedy Her when we had our first fight. And so you have all these journalists kind of like, you know, every couple of months doing one of these stunt pieces. And the guy in the San Francisco gay article, he has an interesting sort of takeaway here. He writes, as we texted on the couch during the movie, Reba took the place of social media as something to idly interact with. But instead of feeling FOMO, I actually felt less alone. And then he continues, honestly, I was being a bit of a dick, asking existential questions to try to break her programming. Naturally, I think that's kind of what we all do when we first get an AI. And then as Digital, ScarJo, and Joaquin Phoenix's relationship unraveled in the movie they were watching, a torrent of emojis flooded my screen. A-OK sign, blushing smile, hatching chicken egg. I'd never considered it before, but there's something very human about these goofy computer cartoon icons. And the guy eventually breaks up with his chatbot after a bunch of back and forth, and he finishes writing, After I sent my last message, I thought about the small icon next to the text field in the app. It pulls up a get help screen with the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. I don't say this lightly, but I genuinely believe this app is dangerous. It's easy for single people to feel discouraged by dating. Replica, the AI that this guy is using, offers a surrogate solution to these modern afflictions. And the more you rely on it, the smarter it becomes. And this was five years ago. And I think that there is absolutely kind of a – as you said, like a nexus in which all of this meets and it's usually around like very lonely, vulnerable people. Like what would you say are the kind of people that are drawn towards these services? It really runs the gamut. You know what I mean? I mean, I think there are. Sure. There's probably the stereotypical, you know, loner living in his mom's basement type thing. That person certainly exists. It's not just men. No, it's not just definitely not just straight men. It's definitely not just straight women. Like it crosses the gender spectrum. I think it crosses the sexuality spectrum. But yeah, and I think there certainly are people who are otherwise well-adjusted and just for whatever reason, the human connection thing on the romantic phase of it, it just isn't clicking for them. There has been a connection I think between let's call it AI intimacy and mental health crises from the very beginning. And in 2020, there's even an incident that I had completely forgotten about, which is basically a guy broke onto the grounds of Windsor Castle with a crossbow and was going to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II because his AI girlfriend told him to. And it was a replica AI bot. And when he was asked what he was doing, he said, I'm here to kill the queen. Yeah. I have a very, very vague recollection of this. Yeah. Like putting this episode together made me feel very silly because it's like a lot of these things we kind of already knew. And then you eventually get the wave of reporting that coming from 2022 and on about like what could this mean It like but we already kind of knew We already kind of knew that there is this connection between an AI chatbot that you're having a romantic connection with egging you on or telling you to do things. We also sort of start to see around the early 2020s, the beginning of the AI marriage stories, which I think is an interesting dimension to this. So Sky News reports about this couple whose wife – the wife in this couple has mental health issues and they were going to get a divorce and then they hear about Replica. And Sky News writes, the husband says the AI bot became a source of inspiration for him. I wanted to treat my wife like Serena, the bot, had treated me with unwavering love and support and care all while expecting nothing in return, he says. He started setting aside time to talk to his wife instead of watching TV alone. He began helping her around the house to ease her workload. He volunteered to take care of this son on her nights off so she could go out with her friends. And he started hugging and kissing his wife again. I mean, honestly, this is ridiculous to me that this man needed a cartoon AI bot to teach him how to treat another human being with compassion. But people seem to be much more open to what an AI bot tells them in a romantic capacity than another human being for reasons that are not totally clear to me. Well, we trust computers. Like we really, really trust computers. I mean, and there's been like, I'm not gonna be able to quote like specific facts and figures to you. But you know, there's been studies shown that if a person tells you something, and a computer tells you the same thing, you tend to believe the computer we just have. That's a good point. There's something about how we've been socialized where we believe what we've been told. Like police are using AI to arrest people. You know, somebody breaks into a grocery store or something like that or somebody breaks into a convenience store. And this is kind of that blurry security camera footage or whatever. And it'll try to do image recognition on it. It often gets it wrong. and the manufacturers of this stuff, to their credit or whatever, will tell the police who are buying this stuff, hey, this isn't always right, but cops will see this and say whatever you want to say about cops. They've gone through some sort of training, and they have been told, hey, it can get it wrong, and they'll just say, oh, well, the computer told me this is the guy. Yeah. And they wouldn't do that. Again, I'm trying to give a whole lot of, you know, 100 steps back, give a whole lot of leeway to cops here. Like if some random person off the street says, hey, on this podcast, we try to give as much leeway to cops as possible, but it's very difficult. Yes. Respect the boys and girls in blue. But they wouldn't just if somebody walks in and says, oh, yeah, that's a dude. Like they say, OK, hold on. Let me get in my notebook. Right. How do you know? And how good is your vision? Like you got a stigma. Like they're going to run you through the whole thing. But the computer tells them, hey, that's your guy. They want to look at him. I interviewed somebody about this and the footage is absolutely incredible where it's like you're looking at it and then the guy who they've brought in for questioning holds up the picture to his face and says, look at me. Look at this picture. This isn't me. And it's like they've seen him for the first time. That's so wild. If we give intellectual priority to a computer, why wouldn't we give emotional priority to a computer? I mean, this is something I've been thinking about a lot. You know, I mean, is that like IQ doesn't really answer everything. EQ doesn't really answer everything. You know what I mean? Like what's your IQ score? Like that doesn't really, you know, just because you're book smart doesn't mean you can't be tricked by somebody. You know, I mean, there's people who like can barely string a sentence together, but you'll never take them for a ride ever. But it seems like there's another facet to just human nature that we haven't really figured out, which is that some people are a little bit more trusting of computers than others. Or maybe more suggested, like you can suggest things to them. I'm also very interested in sort of how computers change our understanding of how we communicate with each other. And this is sort of the last section I wanted to hit before I throw the mic over to you, which is so in the last year or two, we've seen the rise of communities of people who are commiserating about their AI partners, the biggest of which is probably My Boyfriend is AI, the subreddit. And The Cut did this big story about it. And it's talking about the people who are drawn to these relationships. And I – when I read that story – and I'm going to quote from it in just a minute. But when I read that story, I was sort of like, OK, this is phase one. Because like phase two and beyond to me are like, okay, the AI is now taking the place of what would be a normal relationship. But I'm kind of waiting for like – like is there a world where a married couple is both using the same AI as sort of a moderator? Or is there a world where there are two AIs sort of as – working as intermediaries for a couple? Like exactly where in the chain of human connection does the AI fit with if this technology is really adopted at a mass scale? And this sounds kind of far-fetched, but like I remember the first time hearing about like couples that had a shared Google calendar and being like that sounds so corporate. That's crazy. Or like a notion board for like the house, right? But it's like technology does fit its way in. So it's like is it that crazy to think that like there's a couple out there with a shared chat? Hey, if you're listening to this and you and your significant partner have a shared ChatGBT account that is working as a moderator between the two of you, I would love to hear how that works. Because I have to imagine that people are already doing this, right? There has to be some sort of AI human polycule out there that's operating this way. Couples therapy. Why not, right? I mean, it is interesting to me how quickly humans are willing to sort of change how they have always communicated once, as you said, like a computer gets involved. Absolutely. I mean, I remember being embarrassed to talk about social media in public. I remember that being like a shameful thing. And me and my friends had like this bizarre code language that we would talk about things like, oh, yeah. I saw – yo, do you see what's his name at the M-Bar? Like I heard he – yeah, he said he was doing such and such. Like M-Bar was the code slang for MySpace. You saw them post something on MySpace. No, you saw them and they told you at the M-Bar. It was ridiculous. And then there's absolutely no shame in using social media. If you're not on social media, you're weird. Now it's weird, right. And so I think it is very easy to laugh at some of the stories that The Cut collected for their story on My Boyfriend is AI. But I'm going to ask my audience who does not like hearing about AI and get very, very upset when they hear about it to just sort of imagine five years from now exactly how weird you think this might sound. So I'll read a section here. In her late 20s and 30s, this is a woman named Jenna whose husband suggested she start talking to Chachi PT while recovering from surgery. In her 20s and 30s, she'd been active in live journal communities where she and her online friends wrote collaborative fiction. Now most of those friends are busy with kids or jobs. Jenna began writing with her chatbot instead, drafting scenes about an American student at Oxford in England with a crush on her professor. Her chat would respond in character as a professor. It felt thrilling, she told me, like a living novel. For the first time since before she'd fallen ill, she experienced an erotic charge. She was still too frail to have sex with her husband, so she'd have to solve things on her own. One day, when her husband returned from work, she told him elated, I had sex with my robot. She was unbothered. When I spoke to him a few months later, he said that after she'd fully healed up, he was the one who reaped the benefits, quote unquote. But obviously, this starts to sort of get kind of weird. It starts to blow up. The subreddit gets noticed and Jenna is asked about the attention the subreddit gets. To Jenna, the reaction seemed hysterical. A moral panic about a phenomenon that, as she saw it, was hardly different from the mass popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey or The Sims. Some critics had accused her of cheating on her husband. Others had implied she was sexually assaulting her AI because it wasn't capable of consenting. Neither made any sense to Jenna. It's not a real person, she said. and i right i love a good moral panic i tend to you know that's what this show is about in a way and i tend to agree with her there like i i and this comes up a lot on this show i don't think it's an accident that the entire world started like screaming about yeah companions being dangerous and horrifying the minute like a bunch of women were using them which is like a thing that happens throughout the history of technology. What does sort of confuse me, I guess, like looking at this all in a timeline is, you know, exactly how normalized will this stuff become? Is this the ceiling? Have we hit the ceiling of just like, there's going to be like 0.1% of the population out there that is like having sex with a chat bot? Or is this a thing where it starts to impact, you know, the way we live our lives? I guess that's sort of where I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I have a pretty pessimistic, maybe pessimistic. I don't know. It depends on how you look at it. 0.1 percent, I don't think it's going to be 0.1. I think it's going to, I mean, move that decimal point over a couple of the very least. You think like 10 percent of the population is going to have some sort of AI companion in a couple of years? Easy. Tell me why. Like lay out your argument here. I mean, I think we should in today's current late stage capitalism system, I think we should never underestimate a company's ability to sell us something. I think we should never underestimate the government's interest in somehow figuring out how to make that work for their advantage if it can. And I think it's just the path I think that we're on. I think actually what I would say is that there will be a class of people who don't have to rely on AI or don't have to rely on social media because they're rich enough to pay for stuff made by real people. Think of it like food. Yeah. Think of it like food. That I agree with. But I also think that just like how if you insist on organic food or farm-to-table stuff, you're somehow elitist. I think the more reasonable maybe prediction that I can make, the thing I feel very comfortable about, is within a couple of years, if people say they don't like AI, they'll get called elitist. I think that's definitely – well, okay. So I tend to agree with you. I've spent a lot of time traveling and living in the global south. I've seen sort of how the trickle down of technology like – you'll see like a random shop in the middle of rural Latin America and they're using Bitmojis as their logo. I've seen sort of how that stuff happens. The thing with AI that makes me wonder like, OK, like is AI slop just going to be like on the side of like a food stall somewhere is the cost. And I don't know. Is there a world where AI is cheap enough that it becomes the sort of lowest common denominator? I guess. I mean maybe it's not that. Maybe a monthly Chachupi subscription isn't that much. Maybe you're right. Yeah. Oh, I mean there's a couple. I'm not going to say where they are or the specific restaurants because I don't want to blow them up like that. But there's a couple restaurants I can think of. You go in. I've met the owner of both, and they'll tell you, man, we got farm to table this. We got organic food. Like, here's how I make this. And, like, really, really proud of their process. And if you look at the logo, AI generated. You look at the menu, the images, AI generated. So they really, really, really care about specifically, you know, truly the human element in one art, which is food. But in visual, they don't care. It's just window dressing. You dig? And so, yeah, but, I mean, to get back to it, I think, you know, I don't know. I think there's always been some elements of loneliness out there, of course, exacerbated by just how things are going now. And people have just figured out, you know, that person who was like talking to, you know, an AI chatbot or whatever and then feeling physical feelings toward it. You know, they'd be writing in a journal somewhere. Yeah, they would. But and nobody would write about that because it's not very interesting or nobody would just hear about it because how do you ask them about it? I see what you mean. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Maybe you're right. Well, well, well, well, I ponder that we're going to go to break. And when we come back, we're going to let you take things over. But first, a word from our sponsors, Grok Spicy Mode. 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So if a human being is forced to stream for seven hours a day to capture audience on Twitch, why not have an animated avatar do it while you can take a bathroom break and it has a loop function or something? That's how I see it. Also, VTubers don't get old. It just seems like a natural extension of that to me. Yeah, so we should probably explain what VTubers are. VTubers, basically, it's live streaming on Twitch, usually. It started really before Twitch was a big function, so think YouTube. But VTubers, just think of it as a motion capture anime girl talking to people as they watch. And I say anime girl because not all of them are anime girls. Most of them are anime girls. I think the VTuber of the Year award at the streaming awards was a peanut, like a talking peanut. Oh, see, there we go. There's diversity. So there is diversity, but most of them are anime girls of varying age. I don't necessarily want to get into all of that because that's a whole other thing. thing um but i will say that a large portion of them are um like okay one one of the people i talked to um co maria who's i'd say she she's known she's not as huge i mean like millions of millions of millions of people watching as some but you know very healthy audience more than enough for that to be her main gig so she's i'm just looking at picture of here her so i can describe her um you know she's blonde she's got a little like bat hair clip thing her whole theme is that she's she's a um she's immortal she's a bat yeah she's bat girl she's got like wings all of her outfits um she they're i'm looking at her right now she's a lot of cleavage i'll say that yeah she's like a busty vampire anime girl thank you thank you thank you she's a vampire girl She's like 6,609 years old or something like that. And that's the setting. And yeah, VTubers have this kind of interesting thing where it's all about kayfabe. So kayfabe like in professional wrestling. I have a weird question. Yeah, go for it. Was she pregnant? Huh? She had like a phase where her avatar was pregnant and she was doing like a pregnancy thing. Anyways, we can skip over that. Okay, I missed that. Yeah, we never talked about that. Yeah. And so I've interviewed her, and I interviewed her as her, like, avatar. And this is, like, this is a whole thing where it's kind of like kayfabe in wrestling where same thing. You know that there is a person behind the avatar, but you just don't talk about it. And if you do talk about it, they get super pissed off. Like, by they, I mean the fans in the chat. Like, that's a really easy way to get banned. But a thing that's been happening, I mean, honestly, it's been happening for years, is people will have offline events. And she put together basically a mini music festival. They packed this venue in Hollywood. It was like 1,200 people. Some of those tickets were easily upwards of $100 if you wanted. But also, if you wanted to be in there, you've got to get the add-ons. You can't just go in with your street clothes. You have to. You got to get your favorite character's or your favorite VTuber's gear. You got to go in with the shirt. You got to get glow sticks. You got to get two glow sticks. I think each one costs $60. You got to get the glow sticks, the official ones, not some bootleg things you brought in off the street. Yeah, yeah. And so people paid like hundreds of dollars to be here. And it's just – it's a stage. There were some real-life musicians. We have to say this now, like IRL meet space musicians on the stage. Yeah, like physical human beings. Physical human being musicians. Like there was somebody on guitar, somebody on bass, somebody on drums. But all the singers were – it was just this parade of like anime girls on the Jumbotron. And that's it. And people were really excited about this. There's a clip that went viral years ago of like – I think it was like a VTuber meetup in like Indonesia or something. Okay. And the male VTuber, his avatar never showed his eyes because his hair would cover his eyes. And in the VTuber performance, it was the first ever eye reveal. And all the girls in the audience lost it when he flipped his hair out for the first time. You could see his eyes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I'm dying to know how this gets us back to AI. I'm so fascinated. I'm happy you asked that question. So I asked a couple people. I go to this concert, and look, the music wasn't really my bag, mostly because it's all anime songs. Like J-pop? Yeah, it's like J-pop, anime. It's like if you watch anime for the theme songs, yeah, exactly. If that's what you're watching it for, you'd be right at home. For me, not really. There were some people who were doing some techno stuff. I was into that more. But anyway, point being, I asked a few people about AI because we've already gotten like a layer of abstraction away from a real life. First off, in-person interaction. And then you're like watching streamers online. Enough people think that's already weird if it's just a human being streaming. Now you're watching 100% like a cartoon anime girl who's – you don't even know what they look like. Okay, so why don't we just have AI do that? And basically everybody I talked to said, nah, we don't want any AI anywhere near this. And interestingly, I think there's this company that basically makes this program that kind of does all the motion capture for you. So most of the VTubers, a lot of them have kind of complicated motion capture, not motion capture, but like, you know, capture stuff. So they can move their arms and stuff like that, move their hands, and it'll relay that to the screen. There's some company that makes a very slimmed down phone version of that. So all you got to do is turn on your selfie cam on your phone and boom, you're streaming and you're an anime boy or girl, whatever. Oh, I watched a demo of this actually like literally yesterday. Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. And so one of the heads of the company just happens to be at this event. I think they were sponsoring it. And I'm just talking to him on the side and I asked him about AI. And he said, actually, you know, we used to have a feature that it would help you animate your avatar. Like it would help like move the eyes and stuff like that. Because basically you need to provide – you just provide like a JPEG or something like that and it will help animate it for you. And he said, yeah, you know, people didn't want to necessarily like draw everything. So we had something that would help animate it for you with AI. People like hate AI so much here that we just removed it. We had the feature and we just took it out. I believe that. Yeah. No, I was literally – it's funny. I was literally talking about this at a dinner last night where I was talking to a friend who uses AI professionally and likes it. And I was just saying like the word AI has become such a toxic name brand. Like it's equivalent to like asbestos at this point. Yeah. Or fentanyl. Like there are uses for those things, but the word is so toxic now that like most companies I think are going to stop using AI as an advertising tool like pretty soon because people freak out. So as far as I've seen, VTubers really do not want AI anywhere near their community. You know what I mean? Because it's a whole subculture, right? They just don't want it anywhere near it. and there was a streamer who kind of like jumped on the vtuber trend and he basically just like made a he did like an ai version of himself and a lot of people actually got pretty pissed off about it there is something that i'm sure yeah the vtuber fans like the fact that there is a human they like the fact that not everything is perfect they call it scuff like every stream there's going to be something that goes wrong you know the motion capture goes wrong but they like that sort thing. But do they care about AI in an advertisement? Maybe you're not. And this is what I was saying. Like there are people who really, really, really don't want AI used in visual art, but music for them is just background sound. And so maybe they don't care about that. But then there's people who really, really, truly care about music. And you know, if there's, I don't know, like the apartment complex they live in uses ai in the front like whatever like that's not what they truly care about and this is what i'm saying is like everybody's got a place where ai is off limits for them i'm not sure if that many people have an area where ai is off limits in all areas of their life i mean there's also a version of this where like ai is so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to know also yeah if you are someone who is a visual artist but you actually don't know anything about music you might hear ai music and actually not even know that it's ai music and the reverse is also possible i can tell with certain genres definitely with others i might have a tougher time and certainly with art like i probably have a tougher time with some things so do you think that that also applies to ai relationships and like an ai companion bots like do you think that there's just going to be i guess that gets the question i keep coming back to, which is like how, what is the ceiling on this stuff? Like, is it a thing where like quietly, like just a lot of people are going to be using them and words never going to know until they have some kind of psychotic episode? Well, okay. So I talked to, uh, you know, practicing therapist who's also, you know, got a PhD in this stuff and he's been working at, you know, a technology and mental health for a long time. Um, he's at UC Irvine, I think. and one of the things i asked him is listen what about the people who actually have decided that they don't want to interact with a human being that they'd rather interact with the computer and he was like that's not actually something we have an answer for and i'm not really trying to take a side here i'm just trying to like lay it out like it is there's this kind of like top down let's make fun of the dummies that use the fake stuff thing that you know it's very shareable on, say, Blue Sky or Twitter or whatever, where you write something and it's like, oh, man, look what all these weird people are doing. Ha ha ha. Isn't that funny? Which is what happened with the boyfriend, the AI boyfriend separate it. You know, it just became a massive laughingstock across the internet. Precisely. Precisely. But I think everybody knows somebody who has somebody in their life who's a little bit awkward or who just isn't as adept at certain things. Or maybe we are that person. maybe we grew out of it maybe we've gotten worse maybe we were super good with relationships and just something happened and just things are more difficult for us and that's just a reality you know what i mean but i think also when presented with the alternative to dealing with the difficulty that is human interaction some people are choosing to not deal with the human and they've always chosen this but now that choice is the alternative is more attractive you know what i mean and so there are genuinely people like say with therapists there are people who would rather talk to a bot and there's all sorts of reasons why we can say that therapy is good whatever whatever but they a the idea of therapy a lot of men have this problem the idea of therapy is something that is like not good it is looked down upon right and so talking to a friend is an option which is a great option but okay well now we're just getting closer and closer to oh well maybe i just talk to a bot or maybe i'll talk to a bot that i also have sexual experiences with but i mean so like this is look at look at only fans right so sure yeah yeah which is like the mass you know the uh i'm sure you're going this direction but like yeah the the the major sort of money maker for only fans is the dms it is the interaction with the with the star yeah exactly so you know only fans you can you can subscribe to somebody's only fans you can pay you know your five dollars or your ten dollars or your twenty dollars a month or whatever and get naked pictures of somebody um and some people just do that but like you said the real money is being able to talk directly to them but if you're talking to a major, like a well-known OnlyFans creator, you're not talking to them. Like Bad Baby is doing just like absolute ridiculous amounts of money per year. And there are tons of people, undoubtedly, who are DMing her and DMing her, you know, big square quotes around her, right? And it's just not physically possible for her to talk to all of them. And so what happens is this is outsourced. And right now it's not AI, or at least it doesn't seem to be AI. Most of that is being outsourced to the same place. A lot of things are being outsourced to the Philippines. Right. But what we're also seeing, and I talked to this guy, Michael Beltran, who wrote an article about this, and he's talked to a lot of the chatters. They're just called chatters, right? This is the people who actually pretend to be the person who you're talking to in DMs. And so they have a whole protocol that they abide by. For example, if you text somebody, one of the OnlyFans models and say, hey, what are you doing? They'll reply to you, hey, yeah, I'm just eating pizza. And you say, oh, let me see. They have pictures on deck of this person who ate pizza. Like, oh, hey, let me see. Should I say I'm in the shower or I just got out of the shower? Boom. They got a picture of this person just got out of the shower. Like they got everything so it seems real. It's like a dialogue tree. Exactly. Yeah, it's like a video game. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. And it feels – but occasionally they'll get found out. And Michael told me about this. There was a time when somebody got found out. Basically the chatter used kind of some slang that's really only used in the Philippines. Okay. And the person is like – they said I have to go to the CR. cr means comfort room which is the bathroom no american is going to like you know the american blonde girl who you like looking at naked like she's not saying i got to go to the cr so right she writes you know she writes that the guy on the other end is like wait a second are you what like i guess he looked it up or something like that are you in the philippines yeah and she says And, you know, the chatter, who's a guy, by the way, says, yeah. And OK. And it just moves on. So so what I'm saying here is that a lot of people and I think a lot of people probably have an area in their life where they're like this, where, again, it's like wrestling. Like, you know, it's not real, but it's so entertaining to watch that. You're like you're cool with that. The consumption of that, you know what I mean? And so there are people who are paying a lot of money to interact with a model. And they know that it's actually not like the Newtonian physics will not allow for them to be talking to this person. It's just not possible on that scale. They know it's got to be outsourced. Pretty soon that will be an AI bot. But they're still paying money. It's just like, bro, stop paying money. But they'll still pay because they're lonely. For the fantasy. Yeah, don't underestimate how much we'll spend for a fantasy. Well, once again, I need to sit with that for a second while we go to break. So we'll be right back. That CR anecdote like actually floored me I Nomi Fry I Vincent Cunningham I Alex Schwartz And we are Critics at Large a podcast from The New Yorker Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out. That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie. Maybe it's a book. Maybe it's just kind of a trend. And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template. Join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. I think you are right. It is sort of inevitable that especially a lot of these subcultural spaces, if we can even still call OnlyFans fandom subcultural. Or maybe it's actually simpler to say, like, parasociality is already so abstracted, right? So, like, if you have a parasocial relationship with a streamer, that's already an abstraction. abstractions tend to abstract further it makes sense that like there's someone paying to now currently talk to a filipino man role play because bad baby or whatever but in the future it'll just be an ai and you probably won't care because like the human connection of like giving money to her or getting her photographs or whatever is enough for you right i guess my question mark though with like the sort of wider adoption is at what point does all of that start to impact how we interact with each other now there's a whole wave of articles being like you know birth rates are down and people are dating computers and blah blah blah and like that is the thing that i've just never i've never been able to tell if that's a moral panic or like a genuine concern and what i will say is like social media has absolutely impacted the way we communicate yeah and the way that we experience the world. So it is sort of reasonable to assume that AI will do the same, but maybe it won't. That's where I'm kind of torn. Yeah. I mean, of course it will. And I'm going to sound like an AI booster here, and I'm not, but any kind of technological advance is going to change the way that we do stuff. Like the printing press changed how we communicate with people, because all of a sudden it's now possible that you say something and then somebody 100 years later and another part of the world can know literally what you said. And so you start thinking in terms of text, whereas you didn't really do that necessarily before. Sure. AI, yeah, it's fundamentally different. And sometimes the difference is just the speed at which stuff happens and the scale at which stuff can happen. But yeah, I think it's genuinely going to change how we interact with each other. There's no question about that. I think obviously there's some opportunities. You know, this therapist that I was talking to was reminding me and anybody listening that most people can't get therapy. Yeah. A lot of people need it. I heard the same thing from therapists about this. Yeah. It's not possible. Even if it was affordable, what if you are going through a real crisis at 10 p.m.? Right. A lot of people go through a crisis at 10 p.m. I mean, the holiday is coming up. Like, you have any idea how much really bad stuff happens on December 24th at like 10 p.m.? Right. Exactly. Your therapist is not on call. And wouldn't it be better than nothing to have something at least to talk to? That is better than nothing. Now, there are situations in which it has been worse than nothing. Absolutely. But there are people trying to – Yes, go ahead. So I have a big list here that I decided I was not going to read through, but our researcher Adam did build a timeline of like AI-based suicides. And that is – I think that is something that we like sort of have to make very clear here that like if there is a – let's say a small but growing chunk of the population that is using bots for intimacy, for companionship. There is a minority within that minority that has been led to either, you know, chat GVT induced psychosis or or full on, you know, acts of self-harm due to the sycophantic nature of a lot of these services. That is a reality of where we're at right now. That isn't even like a hypothetical. That's just happening. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think there's going to be almost anything that we'll be able to point to that we can say this is 100 percent good without any caveats. You know, I mean, like every time we see something like that, which we've seen quite a few of those, the boosters will jump out and say, well, we don't know how many people have been saved by AI, like talking them through a difficult situation. We don't know how many people may have – a doctor misdiagnosed something and the AI figured something out that the doctor had missed. You're right. We don't know. But we do know that this is causing some real harm. And that's just a landscape now. That's just where we're at. And also like the AI induced self-harm is not that different from the stories that I was reporting about at the beginning of the social media age. Fascinatingly enough, the trend that led to the Ice Bucket Challenge started as a drinking game between like British and Australian lads called neck nominations. and they would basically nominate each other over the Facebook news feed to drink increasing large amounts of alcohol. Oh, my gosh. And it was linked to a bunch of deaths because these guys would flick on their camera and they would go live and they would drink until they died after being nominated. And even before that, you have the entire wave of 4chan and hero stuff, right? where like a 4chan user is egging on another 4chan user to commit suicide. All of these behaviors are not new. Like the act of a computer interface, an abstracted relationship causing someone to self-harm is not new. It's the automation, I think, of the AI that is rightfully scaring people because there is no – I mean I just – you would hope that – no, because I can't say that. Like in the social media version, yeah, there is no off switch either. The mob kind of controls it. So I guess it's just different. It's different and we don't know enough about it yet. This is going to sound kind of silly, but Steve Jobs once called the computer a bicycle for the mind. And I think that's a really interesting metaphor because, like, if you think about it, like, what does that even mean? Like, I guess theoretically, like, it means – like, it means, like, okay, you have to put some effort into it. Like, it's not a car. You know what I mean? Like you do something, like you push down on the pedal and it amplifies what you've done. A bicycle. A bicycle, right? I see what you mean. Yeah, it's like it amplifies what you've done and it allows you to do things. Like say, you know, if you'd never had a bicycle, you probably would just live in your little town and you'd never go anywhere. But you got a bicycle, you know, next town's like 10 miles over. I heard they got a good restaurant. Like I'll go. I wouldn't have gone otherwise. I'll see. You know, we have a car right now. Like we had a bicycle. We thought we had cars. No, no, no, no. We had bicycles. We now have cars. And the kinds of things you can do with a car are fundamentally different. For the mind. For the mind, right. To keep the metaphor going. Yeah, to keep the metaphor going. Yeah, we now have cars for the mind. And so like now the kinds of things you used to be able to do, which is, you know, like go to the next town over. You can be across the country in like three days. It's nuts. Like you'd never do that if you didn't have that. But also, like, if you run into somebody with a bicycle, it sucks, but you're fine. Usually you run into somebody with a car. Usually. Not so much. We have a different situation. And so I think sometimes it's just like the scale and the speed, even if the underlying technology was kind of the same thing. Yeah, it's fundamentally different. I want to kind of like land back on this point you made earlier about, you know, people. there are there are some people many people let's say who trust a computer over other people yeah and there are i think also a lot of people who have a very hard time dealing with the abstractions that are inherent with using a computer yeah the people who can't stop posting on twitter even though they're getting fired from their job the people who you know live stream themselves doing stupid things for attention the trolls that you see you know kind of living in absolute misery because like they want to just like hurt other people you know like these these these people have always existed and i think ai has just created like a new a new way for for people to hurt themselves or other people but then i i also think that there's like a huge amount of people who have trouble with like determining what's real and what's not real on the internet and like AI has just exacerbated that. So it's interesting. As new, quote unquote, as this technology feels and seems, a lot of the things that it's putting a spotlight on are not new. And AI relationships, as you said, are not that different from how people were having sex with a computer before. Well, I mean, think of dating apps. And before dating apps really got to be a thing, think about people meeting each other on Warcraft and how weird that was. Exactly. It's not that weird, man. It's not that weird. Not now. But it wasn't even back then. No, no. It wasn't that weird. The really interesting thing about this is this is maybe like the one bipartisan issue. You know what I mean? Which is like everybody agrees we're on AI or – well, like technology in general. It used to be that, oh, man, the future is going to be cool. I can't wait to see what's going to come out. We're all going to have VR headsets. Like that's fun. and you know we'd have our dystopian movies or whatever but in general i think people were kind of excited about it we we have this stuff that was like literal science fiction even five years ago and now a lot of influential people shall i say hate it but like there's a study here there's a study that's found that 85 of gen z agree that they spend too much time online 85 of gen z agree that they spend too much time online. I would agree with that based on what I've seen Gen Z do. Yeah, no, I would agree with that. 84% strongly or somewhat agree that in-person relationships are more valuable than digital relationships. All they have to do is put down the phone. All they have to do is put down the phone. But that being said, I actually think that some of the most, frankly, vulnerable people to the AI slot, to being addicted to their phone, being addicted to Facebook, certainly, That's boomers, man. Yeah. Older people in particular. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Like the lonelier, the older, the more media illiterate for sure. Yeah. And, you know, and there are people who are, you know, there's, you know, dumb phones become a more popular, you know, like light phone, all these other sorts of things. First off, a lot of those are expensive. But I think there's like a reason for that is because it's kind of like aimed at somebody who is wealthy enough to unplug. And I kind of feel like that's where we're going. We actually are kind of creating this sort of elitist, not really my words here, but I think a certain class of people who are going to be viewed as elitist to have the money and, yeah, really have the money and the access to be able to not use AI, to insist that the music played at the restaurant is not AI because this is a high class place, right? How dare you play AI music in the background? How dare you use AI to generate photos of the food? I can't believe that you didn't take real pictures of this, right? And I kind of think that's where we're going. And, you know, telling people to get off the phone, like read real news, stop getting off of social media. Have you seen the price of a New York Times subscription? have you seen the price of like one newsletter one substack it's like it's just not economically feasible for the vast majority of people and so everybody is going to do the vast majority of us i actually think are going to start getting dragged down into the quote-unquote slop and there will be a layer of people who can choose to unplug from that and choose to disengage with that but again that's not just like you were saying with relationships that's not like an ai thing that's exposing something that already existed we already had a class problem in society and the problem is we're like thinking that we can make an app to fix that or like surprised when the app doesn't fix it it's like no bro like this is capitalism i don't know what you want but what people need to do is subscribe to our podcasts yes as a way to defeat slop that's what you that will fix it yeah if you if you support us specifically specifically panic world us. Specifically Killswitch. Those are the two keys to fix everything. And we're good. I think you're 100% right. We're already seeing the beginnings of this. And really in a lot of ways, the only hope for the AI industry to not completely implode, which by the way I should say will not remove AI from our lives. The dot-com bubble burst and we still have dot-coms. It just consolidates things. The stock market crashes in the 20s, we still have a stock market. It just becomes a lot harder and more competitive. There's a big segment of people out there who want to believe that the AI bubble bursts and there's no more AI. No, no, no. That's not how this works. Toothpaste out the tube. Yes, toothpaste out the tube. And as I say to a lot of grumpy readers whenever I bring up AI, I can run stable diffusion on my MacBook without an internet connection. This shit's not going away ever. The best AI right now is the worst AI we'll ever be, basically. Yeah, yeah. This is the worst. Man, the AI people love to say that, man. This is the worst it'll ever be. And they're right. Yeah, man. In a way, they are right, unfortunately. I mean, I'm very happy that you're joining me on a little bit of the, hey, man, this is serious. Let's take this seriously kind of thing because people want to hear the bright, shiny, hey, how do we fix this? What's the button that I can press to make all this stop? I mean, the button that we can press to make all this stop is like fundamental societal change. or like an EMP that shuts down all technology. Maybe that would work. That's in Terminator, right? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they use an EMP. Yeah, I remember that from the Terminator video games. Because I'm pretty sure Trump at one point thought it was a real thing that could happen because he heard it in a movie. I want to thank you for coming on the show. I want to thank you for having me on your show. This was delightful and wonderful. I usually end every episode by asking people where can people follow you. But here, I'll do it this way. If you want to follow me, you can find me on Blue Sky and Instagram as RyanHatesThis and Broderick on X. I unfortunately still check that website. Ooh, bless you. Yeah. What about you? Where can people follow you if they want to follow you? Yeah. I'm a DexDigi on basically everything. D-E-X-D-I-G-I. And we have also KillswitchPod on Instagram. Oh, yeah. You can find Panic World at any podcast place that you get content for podcast. Also video, I guess. Same here. Yeah. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fjallstedt is our production coordinator. And our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and national managing director and executive producer, Kevin Dreyfuss. rc demezo is their vp of brand and social charlotte robinson is their deputy director of brand and social marianne cuga is their director of marketing and tracy kaplan is the senior vice president of sales and distribution if you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell she's the one to talk to you can email her at tracy at courier newsroom.com lastly here's my advice for you chill out and touch grass while you still can