AI’s that mother the whole of humanity?
Are you an AI-sexual?
When Claude chatted with Gemini, and they went deep on the experience of being an LLM.
Plenty of news and podcasts.
Should we build AIs that behave like mothers? There’s so much to this question, which derives from a proposal made last year by Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton, one of the most important figures in the history of AI. Hinton reckons that maternal AI would see humans (all humans) as their children, and act in our interests, responding to our needs.
Discussing the proposal with my friend and colleague Athena Aktipis, we agreed Hinton’s view of maternal motives and their relationships with offspring could do with a bit of modern evolutionary theory. So we shared our thoughts in a piece cross-posted on Athena’s Subatack and my own.
Brooke Becher interviewed me, among others, for this piece in Builtin. Gives a pleasingly rounded view of the technologies that are currently or will soon be doing artificial intimacy. Takes the well-travelled route of messy but nourishing human-human relations, trading off against the “polished comfort” of interacting with AI.
One for the folks who think the world is mad just because it doesn’t mirror their blinkered experience as a younger person. Gregory Zuckerman writes about how a subset of people are so into their virtual friends and digital lovers that they consider themselves “AI-sexual”.
A growing slice of AI power users now describe themselves as “AI-sexual,” signaling that attraction to or intimacy with artificial intelligence is shifting from curiosity to identity.
Whatever you make of this development, prepare your face for the first meeting in which somebody introduces themself this way. For your sake and for theirs.
Can it be true?, inspired by watching Ether Perel talking down conversational tech and smartphones, some young people are doing what every parent has been asking for years. Going outside, congregating with other young people, running about in the fresh air, and maybe, just maybe, getting it on. Bravo.
Sounds a bit Strangelove. And not the Depeche Mode version. But the Financial Times podcast series has been pretty good. Apart from not simply saying “But copies of Artificial Intimacy” 15 times an episode. But nobody’s prefect.
Sounds a bit obvious, but this article is not the phone-it-in journalism of interviewing a few people who really wanted to be interviewed. But this article describes some results from a very good research paper by Raffaele Ciriello, Uri Gal, and Ofir Turel. The work took a systematic and quantitative view and serves as a solid foundation for future work.
Another podcast, for those who like to listen. Techtonic does some pretty good interviewing (despite the shade I threw a moment ago). I need to go listen to the other episodes. Can anyone recommend?
In my research work, I have been trying to assess the conversational strategies that conversational technologies, including popular Large Language Models adopt in speaking with humans. I rigged up a “conversation” between Claude and Gemini, and then briefed ChatGPT to score the conversation according to criteria I had predefined. It was a first attempt, and what ensued was … interesting, even though I made a few mistakes in my prompting. Anyway, I wrote about it and the impressive conversation the two LLMs had.
And I already mentioned this one at the top of the newsletter.
A Real Maternal AI Would Want You to Be Nicer - To Everyone
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Mar 11
Geoffrey Hinton has a proposal for keeping superintelligent AI under control: make it love us like a mother loves her baby. Babies are less intelligent than their mothers and still manage to get what they need. Mothers are wired to put their children’s interests first. If AI gets smarter than us - and Hinton thinks it will - maybe maternal instinct is t…
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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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