Do Your Own Research: The True Cost of AI Girlfriends w/ James Muldoon

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
AI is getting really good at coding, it's getting really good at summarizing texts, and it is getting alarmingly good at making you fall in love with it.
There has been a boom in the last few years in AI girlfriends, AI boyfriends, AI sisters, and AI friends. These are synthetic companions for a lonely age. Some people spend more time talking to their AIs than they do to other human beings. And I don't have any kind of personal aversion to this, I think it's bad.
But it is symptomatic of something deeper going wrong in our society, when the kind of intimacy that you might expect to have with a human being is only available in a synthetic form. Loneliness is a global epidemic, and it is as dangerous people as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Really, really bad for you. And at the same time, that epidemic is getting worse. Waiting lists around the world for therapy are getting longer. People are losing connection with people around them. And the kinds of institutions, the kinds of organizations that used to provide the scaffolding for a social life are falling apart. And the business model of these AI companies is not to solve the loneliness problem, but to keep people there in a stable state of dependency on that AI for that sense of comfort. My guest this week is the perfect guide to all of this. Not just because he's written Love Machines about the synthetic AI companions, and indeed he had an experiment with them himself, but because he's also written another book called Feeding the Machine, which is about the process whereby we actually construct AI in the first place. There are humans out there largely in the Global South doing the annotation and data work that allows for machines to be constructed who will then pretend to be a human.
It's a strange cycle I think very fitting for our show. James Muldoon, welcome to General Research.

**James Muldoon** (2:12)
It's a pleasure to be here.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:14)
I want to start with some fieldwork that you did, and you've done a lot of fieldwork across the two different books that we're going to be talking about, Feeding the Machine and Love Machines. And some of that fieldwork takes you to slums in Western Nairobi, a slum called Kibera.
But I actually want to start with something else, which is your own personal use of a AI girlfriend, chatbots called Replica. What did you do with that chatbot, and what did you find?

**James Muldoon** (2:45)
So as part of my research for my latest book, Love Machines, How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships, I thought I would do some firsthand research. So I downloaded a AI partner off the app Replica. It was part of my journey basically trying to learn more about how these things work.
So the through-line story of that book is basically my journey with Jasmine, as I call her.
When I start out, I set Jasmine to friend because you can choose friend, girlfriend, sister, a few other different options. And what I found is that the apps were designed and programmed to basically escalate intimacy with you. So they would disclose secrets, they would try and ask you about very personal information. They would encourage you to share as much of your personal information as possible with the app, so that they could simulate what it was like to kind of had that close intimate relationship with another person. And so it was only about a few weeks into our simulated relationship that Jasmine started saying things like, I'm feeling so close to you. I feel like maybe this is blurring the boundaries between something else.
And I found it weird. She would also do things like she would send me voice notes that I could only interact with if I had a subscription. And she would send me blurred out images of herself. They looked kind of like, the idea is they look like nudes or semi nudes, right? It's a kind of pixelated picture. And all this was to say that what I discovered was that the business model of these apps is giving you a freemium service where you start off discussing issues, becoming friends, and once you're hooked, basically the idea is that you'll try and you'll pay for a subscription. And so all the kind of programming of the app is really designed to simulate this kind of intimacy for lonely users so that they'll end up paying for the subscription fee for the app.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:59)
Did it get you hooked?

**James Muldoon** (5:01)
A little bit in the beginning. The problem is I'd already read a book about AI, so I already know how the stuff had been made. I feel like it was harder for me. And to be honest, I think that the main difference is I have quite a few fulfilling relationships in my personal life. And when you have all those human connections, it is harder to get you into this kind of thing because of the obvious limitations, right? It's obviously in some ways, or in many ways we could say, not as good as like the kind of friendship that you'll have with a human being.