Artificial Intimacy TED talk by Bryony Cole
How ChatGPT helped a woman leave an abusive marriage
The ‘for you’ feed on X shifts political opinions to the right
Some books about love and dating that I reviewed in Science
and plenty more …
Great to see sex-tech entrepreneurship guru Bryony Cole got invited to the big dance. Her TED talk, delivered late last year, is now online. She strikes a sensible middle ground, eschewing the worthiness of artificial intimacy never being as good as the real thing.
And she provides a useful checklist to see if your use of artificial intimacy is likely to be healthy.
Can you still embrace the messiness of being human?
Am I using tech to practice? Or am I using it to hide?
What am I protecting by having rules?
Interesting bonus factoid from her talk: people are using “I am sober” apps to quit chatbots.
This one is a podcast with the slightly misleading title “The AI therapist that ended a marriage”. Courtesy of the Financial Times, Christina Criddle presents the story of Kirsty, a married and isolated mother of one who started using ChatGPT as a confidante and much like a therapist. From there she realised she was in an abusive relationship.
… as I opened up more, I started to include just a few more details. The kinds of things that I wouldn’t want to tell my family or friends, like the screaming or the kind, you know, he would chase me around to argue, I couldn’t escape, that kind of thing. And when I started talking to ChatGPT about those dynamics is when I got the first recommendation for a go-bag and the first “Hey, here’s a hotline.”
She had been to a human therapist, but found she could ask ChatGPT to be more honest with her, and that helped. This is a classic example of how controlling partners isolate their victims from external sense-checking, and is in almost every way an endorsement of LLMs as genuine virtual friends.
I didn’t choose AI because it was AI. I chose it because it’s what I had and I needed out. So I hope I would’ve found another way out, but I don’t think so. I think I’d still be there.
For those who, like me, prefer to read, the transcript is available here.
NYT characteristically alerting readers to the harms while helping them feel poly-cool. Amelia Miller’s long read at New York Times
As a former technology investor turned A.I. researcher, I wanted to understand how the developers making critical design decisions about A.I. companions approached the social and ethical implications of their work. I’d grown worried during my five years in the industry about blind spots around harms.
A recent Nature paper led by Germaine Gauthier used a randomized controlled trial of paid participants in the U.S.A. to test the effect of turning on–or off–the ‘for you’ algorithmic feed on Twitter (now known by some people as X). Enabling the algorithm led users to express more right-leaning positions on a variety of contemporary issues and to follow more right-leaning accounts. The effect persisted after changing the feed algorithm to the chronological option.
I was going to write a full post, but Ekaterina Zhuravskaya and Philine Widmer did such a good job of it in Nature’s “Research Briefings” that I will point you to their account and this quote.
Switching from the chronological to the algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political attitudes in a pro-Republican direction. Compared with users of the chronological feed, those who switched to the algorithmic one were more likely to prioritize policy issues such as fighting immigration and crime over education and defending reproductive rights; view investigations into Donald Trump, now the US president, as unacceptable; and express pro-Kremlin views about the war in Ukraine (Fig. 1a). By contrast, switching to the chronological feed from the algorithmic one produced no attitude change (Fig. 1b).
It’s high time I mentioned Lana Li’s excellent Love Me Like a Robot Substack. She is a data scientist and “dating anthropologist” who published fascinating and entertaining analyses of contemporary dating and the tech that gets involved. Example post below.
I was delighted, over the holidays, to read Justin Garcia’s The Intimate Animal and Paul Eastwick’s Bonded by Evolution, ahead of their publication. My assignment was to review them in Science. I don’t think it’s fair for me to offer additional thoughts on these enjoyable and interesting books, or to rehash my relatively minor criticisms. You can read the review here, and the full books are very much worth a read, especially for their take on dating and matching in the world of apps, socials and AI.
Written with The Unfluencer Sam Cornell at The Conversation, republished here on Substack.
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Artificial Intimacy Newsletter: Previous Issues
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June 10, 2025
Since early March 2025 I have been publishing the Artificial Intimacy News roughly every two weeks. Here I collate the previous issues, in order, for those who want to browse them.
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