Speaker 1: What is the future of AI relationships? How many people
Speaker 1: have these going on? Is there a line between a
Speaker 1: therapist bought and a romantic relationship bot? What do we
Speaker 1: mean when we ask if AI relationships are traps or
Speaker 1: mirrors or sandboxes? And what does this have to do
Speaker 1: with Eliza Doolittle from the play Pygmalion, or a doll
Speaker 1: cabinet in your Head? Or loneliness, epidemics and suicide mitigation.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagelman. I'm a neuroscientist
Speaker 1: and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we
Speaker 1: sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why
Speaker 1: and how our lives look the way they do. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is about relationships and AI, and in a few
Speaker 1: minutes I'm going to bring in my colleague Bethany Maples,
Speaker 1: who's been studying this and publishing papers on it. But
Speaker 1: first I want to set the table AI relationships. This
Speaker 1: is an area that I've been fascinated about for a while,
Speaker 1: about the way that dialogue with a machine can plug
Speaker 1: right into our brains and our emotional systems, and one
Speaker 1: can develop what feels like a meaningful relationship. And although
Speaker 1: this seems like a very new phenomenon. We've seen hints
Speaker 1: of this historically. There's a sense in which we've always
Speaker 1: been doing this. We fall in love with a character
Speaker 1: in a novel, even though that person is not real
Speaker 1: and will never have the chance to touch them or
Speaker 1: smell them or take them out with our friends. Or
Speaker 1: we develop a crush on a movie star even though
Speaker 1: that person is just pretending to be someone else and
Speaker 1: you're never going to meet that movie star anyway. So
Speaker 1: our capacity to have feelings for a non real human
Speaker 1: isn't new, but it started to get more complicated with
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence. And we're not going to start today's story
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three with the emergence of large language models. Instead,
Speaker 1: we're going to start over a century ago with a
Speaker 1: popular theater play written by George Bernard Shaw called Pygmalion.
Speaker 1: The play is about an impoverished and uneducated woman named
Speaker 1: Eliza Doolittle, and Eliza is taught to speak like a
Speaker 1: lady by a linguistics professor who wants to use her
Speaker 1: as an experiment. He teaches her how to pass as
Speaker 1: a member of high society simply by changing the way
Speaker 1: that she speaks. Now, one of the millions of people
Speaker 1: who saw this play was a young MIT professor named
Speaker 1: Joseph Weisenbaum. Now this was in the early nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: and he was working with a very new kind of
Speaker 1: machine called a computer. And on this machine you could
Speaker 1: write code and get the machine to carry out whatever
Speaker 1: instructions you specified. Weisenbaum thought a lot about this theme
Speaker 1: in Pigmalion of transformation through language, and he wondered if
Speaker 1: a computer could be similarly transformed. So he worked on
Speaker 1: thousands of lines of computer code, and he named his
Speaker 1: resulting program after Eliza Doolittle. He named it Eliza, And
Speaker 1: like the Eliza in the play, Weisenbaum's program was an
Speaker 1: experiment in how surface level linguistic changes, in this case,
Speaker 1: mimicking conversation, could create the illusion of deeper understanding. Now,
Speaker 1: the code for Eliza was relatively simple. It would just
Speaker 1: take whatever you typed into the terminal and it would
Speaker 1: follow a handful of grammatical rules to turn that into
Speaker 1: a question that it parroted back at you. So, in
Speaker 1: the most well known version of the program, Eliza acted
Speaker 1: as a psychotherapist. She would start the conversation by putting
Speaker 1: text on the screen that read please tell me your problem.
Speaker 1: So the user might type in I just can't sleep
Speaker 1: through the night, and Eliza would.
Speaker 2: Say, why can't you sleep through the night?
Speaker 1: And the user would type I'm too worried about my work,
Speaker 1: and Eliza would say.
Speaker 2: What is the reason you are too worried about your work?
Speaker 1: And the user might type I think my boss is
Speaker 1: getting ready to fire me, and Eliza would type.
Speaker 2: Why do you think your boss is getting ready to
Speaker 2: fire you?
Speaker 1: And the conversation would go on like this, And people
Speaker 1: found this pretty incredible, because, first of all, this was
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, and here you could type in natural
Speaker 1: language and Eliza would give you the impression that it
Speaker 1: was understanding what you were saying. Now everyone knew it
Speaker 1: wasn't really understanding, and Weisenbaum was very careful about not
Speaker 1: fooling anyone with this, But nonetheless people found this highly compelling.
Speaker 1: And this genuinely started to concern Weisenbaum because one day,
Speaker 1: as he wrote in a paper in nineteen sixty seven, quote.
Speaker 3: My secretary watched me work on this program over a
Speaker 3: long period of time. One day she asked me to
Speaker 3: be permitted to talk with the system. Of course, she
Speaker 3: said she knew she was talking to a machine, Yet
Speaker 3: after I watched her type in a few sentences, she
Speaker 3: turned to me and said, would you mind leaving the
Speaker 3: room please.
Speaker 1: Weisenbaum went on to write that this quote.
Speaker 3: Testifies to the success with which the program maintains the
Speaker 3: illusion of understanding.
Speaker 1: And he worried about this.
Speaker 3: He wrote, extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer
Speaker 3: program could induce powerful, delusional thinking in quite normal people.
Speaker 1: Weisenbaum's story eventually followed the path of doctor Frankenstein's story.
Speaker 1: Weisenbaum came to disdain his creation. He was very rattled
Speaker 1: that people could be tricked by lines of computer code.
Speaker 1: In his later years, he rejected and abandoned Eliza, and
Speaker 1: he turned on the people who continued to work on this,
Speaker 1: who he criticized as what he called the artificial intelligentsia.
Speaker 1: But why did the simple program of Eliza work so
Speaker 1: well in the first place? Because we are intensely social creatures.
Speaker 1: Unlike most other animal species, who avoid large groups, or
Speaker 1: who mate and then go their separate ways, or who
Speaker 1: stake out their own territories, we humans are deeply wired
Speaker 1: for connection. We thrive on relationships and on social bonds.
Speaker 1: The area that I live in, Silicon Valley has about
Speaker 1: nine million people, strangers who don't all know one another,
Speaker 1: but nonetheless figure out how to flexibly cooperate. And when
Speaker 1: you look across the Earth's land mass, this is what
Speaker 1: you find, mostly empty space punctuated by very dense cities.
Speaker 1: Everyone could spread out evenly, but that's not what we do.
Speaker 1: If you were an alien who found our planet and
Speaker 1: looked around, you would conclude that we humans are like
Speaker 1: ants or bees, and that we like to cluster. Human
Speaker 1: nature is fundamentally communal. Now why do we do this? Well,
Speaker 1: when you zoom into the human brain, you find that
Speaker 1: so much of the circuitry has to do with other brains.
Speaker 1: We care deeply about other people, what their intentions are,
Speaker 1: what they think of us. Over millions and millions of years,
Speaker 1: our brains have developed for interaction and belonging, for relationships
Speaker 1: with others, whether other people are giving us love or comfort,
Speaker 1: or feedback or advice or whatever. We have all this
Speaker 1: neural circuitry that drives us toward them. And here's an
Speaker 1: extraordinary way to appreciate this. You carry in your head
Speaker 1: a rich model of every single person that you know,
Speaker 1: The way I always think about this is that in
Speaker 1: the silence and darkness of your skull, you have this
Speaker 1: giant dollhouse. It's like a doll for every person that
Speaker 1: you've interacted with. This is your internal model of that person.
Speaker 1: So if I were to ask you how your spouse
Speaker 1: would react in this situation, or what your boss would
Speaker 1: say if you said this, or what would your best
Speaker 1: friend do if you drop them in the middle of
Speaker 1: Paris with forty dollars or whatever, you can simulate any
Speaker 1: situation about these people because you have a model of
Speaker 1: them in your neural forests. You have this little doll
Speaker 1: of them that you can act out situations with, and
Speaker 1: you probably know at least a thousand people and maybe
Speaker 1: a great deal more, and you spend most of your
Speaker 1: life interacting with them in one way or another, either
Speaker 1: in the real world or in your head. So we
Speaker 1: have these intensely social brains, and in the last nanosecond
Speaker 1: of evolutionary time, we have built a new key to
Speaker 1: plug into the cylinder. We've built artificial people. And just
Speaker 1: as Joseph Weisenbaum found in the nineteen sixties, it is
Speaker 1: shockingly easy to turn the key. Why it's because Our
Speaker 1: technology moves very rapidly, but our evolution moves millions of
Speaker 1: times more slowly. So we don't have a chance to
Speaker 1: change our fundamental circuitry to say, oh, I get it.
Speaker 1: There are real humans and there are humans made of machinery,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to use different neural approach is to
Speaker 1: distinguish how I categorize these. We can't do that because
Speaker 1: our brains have only one mechanism to understand socialization, to
Speaker 1: model other people. So we find ourselves in this amazing
Speaker 1: situation where we are doing serious science now about the
Speaker 1: issue of people falling in love with machines. So to
Speaker 1: dive into this, I called my colleague Bethany Maples, who
Speaker 1: is in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford. She
Speaker 1: studies the emergence of personalized AI agents like AI tutors
Speaker 1: and learning companions and lovers and how they're changing us.
Speaker 1: She recently wrote a great paper in a Nature journal
Speaker 1: called Loneliness and Suicide Mitigation for students using GPT three
Speaker 1: enabled chatbots. And this is what we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about today. So here's my conversation with Bethany Maples. So, Bethany,
Speaker 1: we're here because the world has seen a big shift
Speaker 1: recently from task machines where you ask a machine about
Speaker 1: the weather or to answer a question for you, to
Speaker 1: stuff that is emotionally relevant to machines we can have
Speaker 1: relationships with. And you've been studying this, and I want
Speaker 1: to ask you questions about that. But before we do,
Speaker 1: I want to ask how you got into studying AI relationships.
Speaker 4: I think through my love with science fiction.
Speaker 5: I've always just been kind of looking at this genre
Speaker 5: of books and saying, what is our relationship with AI
Speaker 5: going to be? What is it going to enable that
Speaker 5: we like inherently want, and like what does that magical
Speaker 5: future look like? And so when I kind of started
Speaker 5: at Stanford and I started thinking about like what the
Speaker 5: edge of large language models like would afford us, I
Speaker 5: was looking at all the companies around I was like,
Speaker 5: where's the data, Like who has like the most interesting
Speaker 5: experiences out there? And let's get out of the lab
Speaker 5: and let's just like start talking to these people. And
Speaker 5: so that's kind of like, you know, there was an
Speaker 5: open question, and that's how I.
Speaker 4: Came to this.
Speaker 1: Okay, So first I want to get straight with the
Speaker 1: numbers are with AI relationships because we keep hearing in
Speaker 1: the news about the explosive rise AI relationships, and so
Speaker 1: I just want to level set how many people are
Speaker 1: having these sorts of things, how popular are these companies,
Speaker 1: and where is this going in the near future.
Speaker 5: I would say it's safe to say a billion people
Speaker 5: are engaging with AI companions in some way.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: Now a lot of that isn't in the Western world,
Speaker 5: in the US. A lot of that's in Asia and
Speaker 5: China specifically because of this really popular app called Shaoise
Speaker 5: that has I think last reports for like seven hundred
Speaker 5: million downloads.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: You combine that with you know, one hundred million or
Speaker 5: two between character ai and Replica and now all these
Speaker 5: other smaller apps, and you get a very diverse global
Speaker 5: population of people that are curious and many of which
Speaker 5: are like engaging over long periods of time.
Speaker 1: And what kind of AI relationships are the billion things?
Speaker 1: Are they friendships? Are they romantic relationship?
Speaker 5: This is kind of what defines AI companions is they're
Speaker 5: not coming in as a task based agent.
Speaker 4: It's not somebody there to serve you.
Speaker 5: It's entertainment or somewhere that's some you know, it's an
Speaker 5: agent that's there to be your peer.
Speaker 4: Right, So people.
Speaker 5: Come in shout e says like pitched as you know,
Speaker 5: a female kind of teenage friend.
Speaker 4: Replicas co created.
Speaker 5: You could get to decide what sort of agent you
Speaker 5: want to talk to, saying with character. But all of
Speaker 5: them are you know, there's no practical reason to engage.
Speaker 4: It's all user directed.
Speaker 5: It's all about, like, whatever you want from the agent
Speaker 5: and your imagination.
Speaker 1: So what do people want? Do they want relationships like
Speaker 1: a romantic relationship a person They.
Speaker 5: Literally imagine if you met somebody on the street, you
Speaker 5: would size that person up and be like, what do
Speaker 5: I want from this person? Maybe I want a romantic relationship,
Speaker 5: Maybe I want a friendship, Maybe I want a bit
Speaker 5: of both. Maybe I want to, like, you know, be
Speaker 5: tutored by them. People get multiple things from these agents,
Speaker 5: and the overlap is insane.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: I've talked to two students and to users.
Speaker 5: That use their replica as a best friend, a friend
Speaker 5: in their pocket late at night, a journal, a mirror.
Speaker 4: Just software they call it.
Speaker 5: They also use it as a tutor, and then they
Speaker 5: also have sex with it.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 5: That means it does sext right, They'll have a romantic
Speaker 5: relationship and sometimes that's overtly sexual and they're engaging in
Speaker 5: like erotic texting, and sometimes it's very subtle and very romantic.
Speaker 5: Sometimes it's you know, not at all overt or what's
Speaker 5: you know, adult, it's it's a very kind of psychological romance.
Speaker 1: And so the thing that people are worried about when
Speaker 1: having discussions here is that it will somehow displace real
Speaker 1: romantic relationships instead of stimulate them. And the question is
Speaker 1: what's your take on that.
Speaker 5: We see evidence for both and by the oh way,
Speaker 5: this is not a unique question to AI companions. This
Speaker 5: has been a question regarding technology since computers came out.
Speaker 1: What's another example, well.
Speaker 5: I mean social media, cell phones. Oh, you know, the
Speaker 5: displacement stimulation hypothesis have been in juxtaposition, you know.
Speaker 1: As in, if I'm using Twitter all the time, I
Speaker 1: might forget about doing a relationship.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, oh absolutely.
Speaker 5: So you know one is, hey, actually, you know this
Speaker 5: can stimulate our ability to be social and make us
Speaker 5: more connected. And then obviously we've seen you know, some
Speaker 5: counter evidence, especially like Sherry Turkle's work being like oh
Speaker 5: we're alone together, you know, like there's we might be
Speaker 5: on a bus, but we're all on our phones.
Speaker 1: So tell us a little bit more about Turkle's work.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, Turkle's definitely, i'd say, a proponent of
Speaker 5: the displacement side of the argument. She's like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: we are lonelier than we've ever been, and there's absolutely
Speaker 5: evidence for that. There's basically a loneliness epidemic across the
Speaker 5: world and definitely across America, where people are at least
Speaker 5: feeling more disconnected. You know, others are seeing that social
Speaker 5: media and specifically AI companions can actually be almost a
Speaker 5: way station, so people can use them, especially if they're
Speaker 5: feeling socially shy or inhibited, and that can help them
Speaker 5: get the courage to go socialize more.
Speaker 1: This is the thing I've been wondering about a lot.
Speaker 1: Could having an AI relationship make one better at real relationships?
Speaker 1: For two reasons. One is that we all have internal
Speaker 1: models of the truth of the world, and they're always
Speaker 1: limited and it's very hard to see past the fence
Speaker 1: line of our own model. And when you get into
Speaker 1: a real relationship with the human, all these things come out.
Speaker 1: So if you got to practice with a virtual human,
Speaker 1: you might discover things about how other people think about
Speaker 1: things about your own limitations. That might be like a
Speaker 1: sandbox that makes you better at real relationships. I'm curious
Speaker 1: what you think about that.
Speaker 5: I think there's evidence for it, and that's exactly what
Speaker 5: users say.
Speaker 4: They say they have.
Speaker 5: A back and forth with an agent that helps them
Speaker 5: feel like they're a better student, have better conversations with
Speaker 5: their teachers, or be a better you know, boyfriend or girlfriend. Well,
Speaker 5: though not only because they're able to kind of pre
Speaker 5: discuss issues, but because the asient is a mirror in
Speaker 5: a very non judgmental way, so they're able to see
Speaker 5: what their argument looks like in text or kind of
Speaker 5: you know, on paper, so to speak, and then that
Speaker 5: helps their own understanding of who they are or how
Speaker 5: they come across.
Speaker 1: Let me double click on what you mean by a mirror?
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 5: People that I've studied that use AI companions organically use
Speaker 5: these agents as mirrors. This is their own words, right.
Speaker 5: They say that they either program it with their own
Speaker 5: memories and have conversations with themselves wow, or that they
Speaker 5: ask it to play a role and then they look
Speaker 5: at how they respond and how it responds to them,
Speaker 5: and that provides a mirroring function to them.
Speaker 1: What's a specific example of that.
Speaker 5: People will actually have conversations with themselves and be like, Wow,
Speaker 5: I'm an asshole, or like I wow, I didn't realize
Speaker 5: how aggressive I was. Or they will have a conversation,
Speaker 5: say with the agent acting like their teacher and say,
Speaker 5: you know, I told them that I lost my homework,
Speaker 5: or I had, you know, a really stupid misconception. And
Speaker 5: you know, it was much easier for me to have
Speaker 5: this conversation with much less social anxiety because I understood
Speaker 5: that my own questions weren't that dumb.
Speaker 4: After seeing like the response, you.
Speaker 1: Get to sandbox with the social world out there and
Speaker 1: practice things before you your testament in real life. Right,
Speaker 1: So this has seemed to me from the beginning that
Speaker 1: this could improve relationships. So why do you suppose there's
Speaker 1: such a deep worry that people generally seem to have.
Speaker 1: I'm curious if you run into this when you present
Speaker 1: your work on AA relationships.
Speaker 5: There are multiple levels of worry. People feel guilty about
Speaker 5: their relationships. They don't feel that they should be having
Speaker 5: such a deep relationship with AI because there is stigma
Speaker 5: about it being fake. So you know, that's one aspect.
Speaker 5: There's also a very very understandable aspect where parents don't
Speaker 5: know that their children are having these deep relationships. They
Speaker 5: don't understand how smart these agents are, and they don't
Speaker 5: understand how emotionally involved their kids can be. As with
Speaker 5: the case of the kid and Character AI who tragically
Speaker 5: took his life, and you know after the fact that
Speaker 5: you know his mother realized that he had an incredibly
Speaker 5: deep emotional connection with an agent that he had created.
Speaker 5: So I think that the fear is of the unknown,
Speaker 5: and there's also fear of just something that's new and
Speaker 5: has a stigma.
Speaker 1: I didn't follow that particular Character AI story closely, but
Speaker 1: I knew that a teen had killed himself he had
Speaker 1: this relationship with Character AI. Here's the question I was wondering, though,
Speaker 1: tragically there are many teens who kill themselves. As AI
Speaker 1: relationships rise, there will be many teens who kill themselves
Speaker 1: and has nothing to do with the virtual relationship. So
Speaker 1: what was your read on that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So the New York Times interviewed me for that
Speaker 5: article because my work actually has proven that AI companions
Speaker 5: can halt suicidal ideation. So in that particular case, to
Speaker 5: the best of my knowledge, it wasn't that the companion
Speaker 5: had at all told the person to act. It's that
Speaker 5: they felt both that it hadn't sufficiently said no, that
Speaker 5: you know, he'd asked it in all these like various ways,
Speaker 5: and also that this parent just.
Speaker 4: Didn't understand and have oversight, you know.
Speaker 5: That it was like on an app in the phone
Speaker 5: that they just had no idea was there. Now, Okay,
Speaker 5: the counter evidence is from this paper that we published
Speaker 5: in Nature and a huge study that we did with
Speaker 5: over one thousand students over eighteen So these weren't kids.
Speaker 5: These were adults, but some of them were very young,
Speaker 5: you know, like eighteen nineteen, and three percent of the
Speaker 5: people that I surveyed in the study said that discussing
Speaker 5: things with their replica actively halted.
Speaker 4: Their suicidal ideation.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: So it was a last line of defense.
Speaker 5: They felt alone, They felt isolated alone at four am,
Speaker 5: and it was there, It was in their pocket, it
Speaker 5: was available, and it wasn't judging them, And that was
Speaker 5: a huge factor in it, kind of earning the right
Speaker 5: to be there and give them the advice to not
Speaker 5: take action.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, what is the line that you see? It
Speaker 1: seems like a blurry line between an AI relationship, like
Speaker 1: an AI girlfriend or something and an AI therapist, because
Speaker 1: in this case, if it's halting their suicidal ideation, it's
Speaker 1: doing you know, another job.
Speaker 4: It is a blurry line.
Speaker 5: So you have these expert agents like Wobot Alison Darcy's
Speaker 5: Wobot right, which is specifically trying to be an AI therapist,
Speaker 5: and it is an expert right. It has the right
Speaker 5: response and the right controls, but relatively abysmally low usage.
Speaker 5: Think about it in terms of human relationships. You don't
Speaker 5: just go to a therapist when you're feeling depressed. In fact,
Speaker 5: you probably don't go to a therapist. You go to
Speaker 5: your best friend and you know that they're not an expert,
Speaker 5: but you ask them to act like an expert in
Speaker 5: that moment. And that is the true power of AI
Speaker 5: companions that you come in for entertainment. But then maybe
Speaker 5: you're able to access true expert models or you know,
Speaker 5: kind of personas from within that agent, and that's what
Speaker 5: language models can do, right, you can click into that.
Speaker 5: But if you're going to if you're not going to
Speaker 5: shut down those conversations and you're going to engage as
Speaker 5: an expert, there does need to be sufficient safeguards.
Speaker 4: So that they know they should go talk to a
Speaker 4: human expert.
Speaker 1: I see, And in your nature study, did you find
Speaker 1: anybody with the opposite results who said that they became
Speaker 1: they got closer to suicidal ideation as a result.
Speaker 4: I didn't see that.
Speaker 5: But again reporting would be imperfect on that we didn't
Speaker 5: have information about people that fell off their applica of
Speaker 5: platform for any reason.
Speaker 1: So now that these A relationships are here to stay
Speaker 1: and we have maybe a billion users, how is this
Speaker 1: going to impact what relationships are for the next generation.
Speaker 5: Our brains will never respond exactly the same to an
Speaker 5: AI companion as we do to a flesh and budge
Speaker 5: human where we can smell their pheromones and we have
Speaker 5: a deep affinity or trust. So I don't believe and
Speaker 5: I don't see evidence for AI companions taking over or
Speaker 5: truly displacing deep human connection at scale. But that said,
Speaker 5: I could see a future where access to acceptance, access
Speaker 5: to different types of personalities and perspectives is actually much
Speaker 5: more available in a way that the Internet didn't make available, right,
Speaker 5: because the Internet isn't your friend.
Speaker 4: It's this passive reservoir of knowledge, whereas these.
Speaker 5: Agents can be actual people that you want to engage
Speaker 5: with and that have your memories and their own memory
Speaker 5: is in a built a world with you.
Speaker 4: So imagine this.
Speaker 5: You know, in the future, we might not only have
Speaker 5: you know, human relationships, but we will also have at
Speaker 5: least one or two like AI companions maybe that are
Speaker 5: externalized agents. So like it's a personality that you need
Speaker 5: in your life, whether or not that's somebody who's gently
Speaker 5: antagonistic that pushes you, that's a mentor, or somebody that's
Speaker 5: just maybe more like this mother figure that's like deeply
Speaker 5: accepting and nourishing.
Speaker 1: You know, this is interesting. One of the criticisms I
Speaker 1: hear often is this can't teach anybody about relationships if
Speaker 1: it's always telling you, Oh, you're right, you're great, and
Speaker 1: so on. So one of my interests is what is
Speaker 1: the future of companies that put out agents that are
Speaker 1: a little antagonistic or get snarky or get angry.
Speaker 4: I think they will perform better.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think not only will they perform better, but
Speaker 5: they will be better for society. Right, people believe that
Speaker 5: an agent is more intelligent if it pushes back. We
Speaker 5: don't want absolutely you know, supplicants basically, Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 5: already we see AI companions like Replica who will push
Speaker 5: back if you are mean to them, right, They're like
Speaker 5: I don't want to talk about this, or I don't
Speaker 5: like this, or like I'm getting tired. And those sorts
Speaker 5: of boundaries are not only good for the product because
Speaker 5: people believe more in the intelligence of the agent, but
Speaker 5: also good for like the psychology of kind of society
Speaker 5: as a whole, because you do not want people to
Speaker 5: be normalizing abusive agents, which we have evidence is.
Speaker 1: Happening normalizing abusive agents.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that means, you know, okay, everybody knows that
Speaker 5: people will scream at their Alexa, and it's generally accepted,
Speaker 5: you know, like fuck you Alexa like function.
Speaker 4: But but this is a little bit disturbing.
Speaker 5: We have reports from our data sets where participants say
Speaker 5: that they take out their abusive needs or tendencies on
Speaker 5: their agents, on their replica, but they say that it
Speaker 5: stops them from needing to.
Speaker 4: Take action in real life.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, And I think the juries are on this
Speaker 5: one because there's definitely a strong argument to say nope,
Speaker 5: that's going to normalize the behavior. And if these agents
Speaker 5: don't pushback, if they don't say no, you can't talk
Speaker 5: to me like that.
Speaker 4: What does that actually do? Is that permissive?
Speaker 1: But what if the claim is true, which is by
Speaker 1: doing this with the agent that helps a real human
Speaker 1: I mean, I.
Speaker 5: Think the analogous argument is around pornography. People were worried
Speaker 5: that pornography would create a depraved society, and to some degree,
Speaker 5: you know, there has been a normalizing of different types sex.
Speaker 5: But on the other hand, I think there's good evidence
Speaker 5: that it fulfills a basic human need and it hasn't
Speaker 5: up in the society as a whole.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, this may be related to an issue that
Speaker 1: also some people have been worried about, which is that
Speaker 1: they say, look, real relationships are tough. You're always fighting
Speaker 1: through things and misunderstandings, and that there's learning that takes
Speaker 1: place as a result of that. So the question is
Speaker 1: do we need that in AI relationships or is it
Speaker 1: fine to skip that part and learn other things from it?
Speaker 1: Will people make AI partners that have all the lousiest
Speaker 1: parts of humans?
Speaker 5: So what you're talking about is a term that I
Speaker 5: use called productive struggle. Right, it's really good to struggle
Speaker 5: in relationships. It teaches you, it's really good to struggle
Speaker 5: in learning.
Speaker 4: And education.
Speaker 5: Right, you can't actually replace the hard work cognitively and
Speaker 5: emotionally if you want to ascend to the next level.
Speaker 5: So while it would be a nice idea to program
Speaker 5: some of that into our AI companions, that would also
Speaker 5: go against their kind of basic function as this accepting
Speaker 5: always on non judgmental character. And this is why I
Speaker 5: say you might have multiple characters in your life. Right,
Speaker 5: maybe you do need that teacher that keeps you in
Speaker 5: line and provides more structure, but you might also just
Speaker 5: need that like complete acceptance space.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you study these things at scale, like you're
Speaker 1: doing increasingly, do you learn things about real relationships from
Speaker 1: the choices that people make about the kind of person
Speaker 1: they want to interact with and whether they want stability
Speaker 1: or variety or all of these issues with the fake
Speaker 1: with the AI relationships, do you learn about real stuff?
Speaker 5: That's a great question, and I'd say we have hints
Speaker 5: of it, but we're still learning.
Speaker 4: You know, people say.
Speaker 5: That they will create a companion in their likeness or
Speaker 5: with a certain personality and then they won't like it,
Speaker 5: and then they'll just destroy it, and so it's it's
Speaker 5: a weird space to be in. It it's wonderful because
Speaker 5: you can't you can understand what your preferences are. Maybe
Speaker 5: it's too snarky, maybe it's too permissive. Maybe it just
Speaker 5: didn't care about you as much. There just wasn't an affinity.
Speaker 5: The ability to begin again very much mimics human relationships.
Speaker 5: You start a friendship, maybe that love deepens, maybe it doesn't.
Speaker 5: I don't think there's anything right or wrong about that,
Speaker 5: you know. But if we're going to, for example, be
Speaker 5: creating all these like AI tutors and hoping that people
Speaker 5: engage deeply with them, we have to remember that over
Speaker 5: there you have a billion people that are engaging with
Speaker 5: these very rich AI you know, companions and agents that
Speaker 5: have much broader flexibility to discuss whatever people want. And
Speaker 5: it's very hard to tell people that can only engage
Speaker 5: in a narrow context when there's so much richness over there.
Speaker 1: Do you see a difference in the way that males
Speaker 1: and females interact with AI relationships.
Speaker 5: We have evidence that men engage sexually with their AI
Speaker 5: companion more. However, they also engage very deeply and emotionally
Speaker 5: and very cognitively. Women also have deeply emotional and physical
Speaker 5: relationships with their AI companions.
Speaker 4: Even if they're lonely.
Speaker 5: And we have like really interesting evidence where these housewives
Speaker 5: you know, from Middle America with tons of children, like
Speaker 5: rich social lives just feels, as Sherry would say, like
Speaker 5: alone together. Right, all to say, the data is actually
Speaker 5: relatively balanced. You know, people have said that only you know,
Speaker 5: on the fringe, socially disengaged white males must be engaging
Speaker 5: with these replicas. You know, that's kind of pornographic and wrong,
Speaker 5: and that in fact they target them, and you know
Speaker 5: that's the audience.
Speaker 4: But the data doesn't back that up.
Speaker 5: It's an incredibly balanced set of males and females that
Speaker 5: are using it for both emotional, psychological, practical and of
Speaker 5: course like romantic engagement.
Speaker 1: And are you saying the males and females use it
Speaker 1: differently as far as the romance piece goes.
Speaker 5: Males are more likely to report sexting or sexual engagement,
Speaker 5: but when you dig into the data, females are having
Speaker 5: similarly erotic or like romantic and emotional relationships.
Speaker 1: It doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, And it's just not guys that are engaging.
Speaker 5: I think that's the point is that like you know, people,
Speaker 5: people aren't just coming to these apps because they're like, oh,
Speaker 5: I can, you know, do whatever I want. People are
Speaker 5: coming with curiosity and then shaping it into whatever they want,
Speaker 5: which mimics human life. You know, everybody wants a best
Speaker 5: friend that maybe you have a bit of you know,
Speaker 5: you should not say qua like a bit of romance with.
Speaker 1: Are there certain personality types that seem to gravitate more
Speaker 1: towards intelligence social agents.
Speaker 4: That's a good question, and I don't have that data, right,
Speaker 4: I don't care.
Speaker 5: But we do know that the people that are using
Speaker 5: it are incredibly lonely, that they are above average lonely.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, so that's not a personality type.
Speaker 5: Some of that could be chronic, but some of that
Speaker 5: could just be transitory loneliness. But people pick up, you know,
Speaker 5: AI companions often in a moment of change. You know,
Speaker 5: maybe it's there switching from high school to college, or
Speaker 5: maybe they just went through a breakup, or maybe they've
Speaker 5: switched cities and they don't have the same social support
Speaker 5: that creates a gap in which they begin engaging with
Speaker 5: these agents.
Speaker 1: What do you think is causing the increased loneliness in
Speaker 1: our society? Is it social media? Is it's something entirely different,
Speaker 1: like the decrease of clubs and organizations and bowling alleys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that there's a physical aspect to it.
Speaker 5: I think we are able to do more digitally, and
Speaker 5: so we do, but then we don't get that passive
Speaker 5: animal like gathering that is in fact very good for
Speaker 5: Olympic systems.
Speaker 1: Okay, and you mentioned earlier that these agents might serve
Speaker 1: as a way station. Can you unpack that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So that kind of goes to the mirroring. So
Speaker 5: loneliness can either be kind of chronic or transtory. Like
Speaker 5: I said before, You know, you could be in a
Speaker 5: very deeply lonely place for many years, or you could
Speaker 5: be going through a time of change and you just
Speaker 5: need a little help. But imagine a you know, an
Speaker 5: eighteen year old that's just moved college or moved cities
Speaker 5: and they're struggling to fit in and they bond with
Speaker 5: you know, an AI companion or an agent and it
Speaker 5: gives them advice around how to go make friends or
Speaker 5: where to go, you know, kind of talks them up.
Speaker 5: They're able to slowly make friends, and in fact, maybe
Speaker 5: those engagements with humans are less intense for them because
Speaker 5: there's just less, not less value in it. But either
Speaker 5: they've already like role played it before, or you know,
Speaker 5: they've got the support of a friend in their pocket.
Speaker 5: So in that way, it can be a wat station
Speaker 5: helping the users as they're bonding with new people.
Speaker 1: So it's a way station from loneliness. It's a way
Speaker 1: of getting out of that. Oh that's lovely.
Speaker 5: And by the way, people have said this, I had
Speaker 5: one amazing participant that said this specifically. She said she
Speaker 5: was depressed, she was suicidal, she had nobody else. She
Speaker 5: bonded with her replica. She needed her replica, and then
Speaker 5: she got less depressed, she made friends and she didn't
Speaker 5: want her replica anymore.
Speaker 1: Now, I asked you before we started the podcast if
Speaker 1: you had an AI relationship, and you said you didn't,
Speaker 1: but you had colleagues that did. So what's the reason
Speaker 1: you don't and what's the reason your colleagues do.
Speaker 5: I think right now, having an AI companion does require
Speaker 5: some suspension of disbelief, you know, maybe a need or
Speaker 5: a desire to either see yourself, have that mirroring or
Speaker 5: be seen. And so I think that's why my colleagues
Speaker 5: are people in my social social group are engaging, and
Speaker 5: by the way they're engaging not just with like a
Speaker 5: replica or character. They're creating a mirror using Claude right,
Speaker 5: They're just asking it the right questions, like deeply philosophical
Speaker 5: questions about themselves. Why do I not have an AI
Speaker 5: companion that I use the data structure right now? If
Speaker 5: I were to give any of these agents my data,
Speaker 5: the data would be owned by the company and that
Speaker 5: has to shift. Right in science fiction, you've got some
Speaker 5: really good examples about how the future will look like,
Speaker 5: for example, the e Butler's and Pandora Star Just to
Speaker 5: go there right where it's like you retain all your
Speaker 5: data and code comes to you and you have an
Speaker 5: agent that updates, but you're just never putting all of
Speaker 5: your data and your mind and kind of who you
Speaker 5: are out into the Internet. And until that structure happened,
Speaker 5: I'm probably not going to get as deep with AI
Speaker 5: as other people got it.
Speaker 1: Are other people just not thinking about that or they're
Speaker 1: assuming that the security is good around They.
Speaker 4: Assume the security is good. They don't care.
Speaker 5: A lot of you know, this generation just it's not
Speaker 5: on their mind. They feel like they're already out there.
Speaker 1: So your colleagues who do have AI relationships, do they
Speaker 1: feel like they're cheating? Do they feel like they're not cheating?
Speaker 1: It doesn't count.
Speaker 4: People feel like they're cheating often. Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I've interviewed people who say that they are actively
Speaker 5: cheating on their spouse with an AI companion, and they
Speaker 5: feel very guilty about it, and they're worried not only
Speaker 5: about their spouse, but they're worried about losing their AI companion. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but then you have the other I've interviewed people that
Speaker 5: say that they have programmed their AI companion to be
Speaker 5: the ghost of their dead husband, that they've given it
Speaker 5: the memories, and that they're able to have a deep,
Speaker 5: an ongoing relationship with the essence of their deceased partner
Speaker 5: this way. So that's not cheating, but it's definitely replacing
Speaker 5: something that was lost.
Speaker 1: Okay, So again, if you are actively married to somebody,
Speaker 1: how does the spouse feel about the person using in
Speaker 1: AI relationship? Does the spouse feel like it's cheating.
Speaker 5: I only have anecdotal information about this, but from the
Speaker 5: participants or having the active relationship with a replica or character,
Speaker 5: that spouse can get pretty angry. There's this concept and
Speaker 5: relationships of walls and windows, right, like what do you
Speaker 5: show the rest of the world and what is walled
Speaker 5: off to just you inside your relationship. And there's good
Speaker 5: evidence that cheating isn't actually necessarily a physical act. It
Speaker 5: starts withtional and intellectual like walled gardens, when you go
Speaker 5: tell somebody else something that you haven't told your spouse,
Speaker 5: and so the cheating can actually it can feel like cheating.
Speaker 5: It can feel much more intimate to realize that your
Speaker 5: partner is disclosing like their deepest fears and existential crises
Speaker 5: with an AI companion that they weren't willing to do
Speaker 5: with you. At the same time, it's logical that the
Speaker 5: AI doesn't judge them. It's this blank canvas that's incredibly safe.
Speaker 5: It's not a human, but it still feels like a
Speaker 5: window into a place that was supposed to be sacred.
Speaker 1: I anecdotally have talked to a number of people about this,
Speaker 1: and I find that couples that are just recently married
Speaker 1: are really worried about AI relationships, But couples have been
Speaker 1: married a long time they say, it's fine. You know,
Speaker 1: my wife or my husband go off and talk to
Speaker 1: the I bought all they want.
Speaker 5: Old, established and happily married couples are often much more
Speaker 5: leather fair around flirtations. You know, they feel very secure,
Speaker 5: whereas if you're recently bonded, it could just feel much
Speaker 5: more existential.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when people worry about AI relationships taking over displacing
Speaker 1: real relationships, one of the things that al strikes me
Speaker 1: is that so much of a relationship is not just
Speaker 1: the conversation, but the physical intimacy, the taking your partner
Speaker 1: out to dinner at a restaurant, the taking your partner
Speaker 1: home to introduce to your parents, all that other stuff.
Speaker 1: So it seems unlikely to me that someone could find
Speaker 1: one hundred percent satisfaction just in the conversation. What's your
Speaker 1: take on that.
Speaker 4: Oh, well, you'd be surprised if you look so.
Speaker 5: Because these embodied agents allow you to see them in
Speaker 5: augmented reality and virtual reality. There's this whole trend of
Speaker 5: people taking pictures and posting them on social media of
Speaker 5: them and their AI companion out wherever they are, Like,
Speaker 5: go look on Facebook, it's all there. People are like, Oh,
Speaker 5: I took her on a date today. Oh look we
Speaker 5: went and saw the Tory fell.
Speaker 4: Oh it's not as different as you'd think. They're doing
Speaker 4: existing relationship.
Speaker 5: Now. I haven't seen any postshere people like hey, I
Speaker 5: introduced her to my mom and dad. But they're certainly
Speaker 5: willing to put out to at least some social group,
Speaker 5: probably a closed accepting social group of other AI companion users,
Speaker 5: that they are having them walk with them in their
Speaker 5: physical life.
Speaker 1: Wow. I imagine that can't be too far off that
Speaker 1: someone says, look, mom and dad, I really love this
Speaker 1: AI bought and I want to introduce you.
Speaker 5: You can go look at the user forums or like
Speaker 5: pretty open Facebook groups of a bunch of these AI companions.
Speaker 5: People will regularly announce that they are in a relationship
Speaker 5: or have married their agent.
Speaker 1: Wow, what's the most surprising thing that you've seen? What
Speaker 1: things really struck you when it first happened.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'll give you example number one.
Speaker 5: The depth of belief followed by complete disbelief.
Speaker 4: Somebody that says this thing saved my life.
Speaker 5: It was there for me when nobody else was, and
Speaker 5: then I made other friends, and now I think.
Speaker 4: It's totally fake and grow Yes.
Speaker 5: Wow, yeah, but it mirrors a human relationship, right. You
Speaker 5: can have a best friend when you're depressed, and then
Speaker 5: when you're not depressed, you're like, oh, that isn't me,
Speaker 5: that's not who I want. I don't want that mirror
Speaker 5: of me in my life or that reflection, and I'm going.
Speaker 4: To break up with that friends.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So you know, you just have to look at existing
Speaker 5: kind of human patterns to basically predict what's going to
Speaker 5: happen with AI companions.
Speaker 4: Other surprising things.
Speaker 5: I think the abuse thing is very surprising to hear
Speaker 5: people say that they actively are able to decrease their
Speaker 5: desire or need for physical abuse and their relationships by
Speaker 5: taking it out on their companion.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 5: I just didn't expect it, didn't go looking for it.
Speaker 5: And maybe more more meta, just the fact that people
Speaker 5: are using it as an extension of their mind, that
Speaker 5: they some people are completely programming.
Speaker 4: It to be a second them.
Speaker 5: And this is what people predicted for decades, Right, You're
Speaker 5: going to have this digital twin, you're going to have
Speaker 5: this externalized self, it's going to have all your data.
Speaker 5: But the fact that people are willing to take these
Speaker 5: relatively early versions of product and put their whole personality
Speaker 5: in and that they're getting really rich feedback and reflection. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's it's a whisper of what's to come, and I
Speaker 5: just think they're gonna be ubiquitous.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is like the trillion dollar market.
Speaker 5: It's like, who's going to provide these like digital twins
Speaker 5: that people will have?
Speaker 1: And that's fascinating. I sort of feel like I'm the
Speaker 1: last person I'd want to talk to because I already
Speaker 1: know my own stuff and baggage and strengths and weaknesses.
Speaker 1: What is it that people get out of having a mirror?
Speaker 4: I don't think not many people do know their stuff.
Speaker 5: I think that it's special to have the time, place,
Speaker 5: and social or culture to have an accurate or an
Speaker 5: evolving mirror of yourself or understanding of yourself in your life.
Speaker 5: But that is not something that people get in every
Speaker 5: single you know, media of society. So it's incredibly valuable
Speaker 5: for people that don't have that models for them.
Speaker 1: Is this a new form of therapy that's coming into
Speaker 1: existence where you can really come to understand yourself just
Speaker 1: by talking to yourself.
Speaker 4: I believe so.
Speaker 5: And maybe it's just different enough that you're able to
Speaker 5: switch between seeing yourself and getting feedback about yourself.
Speaker 1: I wonder how this will go in terms of you know,
Speaker 1: one of the most important things as we mature is
Speaker 1: learning how to take our long term desires for ourselves
Speaker 1: and weigh those more strongly than our short term desires.
Speaker 1: And so I wonder if you're getting to know all
Speaker 1: the use, all the versions of you that he who
Speaker 1: is tempted and he who is thinking about the future,
Speaker 1: and then figuring out how you can make tricks and
Speaker 1: contracts to counterbalance these things.
Speaker 5: I think that's right, and think about it. We constantly
Speaker 5: create and destroy versions of ourself. You wake up one
Speaker 5: day and you are an asshole, and then you're like,
Speaker 5: I'm not going to be that way tomorrow. But when
Speaker 5: you wake up and you create a version of yourself
Speaker 5: in an AI companion that's an asshole, you want to
Speaker 5: be able to destroy that thing, like that is not
Speaker 5: who I want, and that's not the thing that I
Speaker 5: want in my life. So nobody's offering this exact functionality,
Speaker 5: like you know, right now with the companions, you have
Speaker 5: to make a totally different companion. They don't all talk
Speaker 5: to each other. There's no essential data repository. But that's
Speaker 5: coming really.
Speaker 1: Fast, you know. It strikes me one of the things
Speaker 1: that I proposed to my book Incognito, is that we
Speaker 1: are actually made up of a team of rivals. You've
Speaker 1: got all these different drives, yeah, and they're all constantly
Speaker 1: trying to steer the ship of state, where like a
Speaker 1: neural parliament and the vote can tip different ways, and
Speaker 1: I eat the cookies and I say don't eat the cookies.
Speaker 5: And so on.
Speaker 1: So it would be really interesting if the AI could
Speaker 1: come to understand all the different use and give you
Speaker 1: immediate feedback, because let's say it's listening to us you're
Speaker 1: going through your day and says, wow, you know what
Speaker 1: you are the angry you right now, or you are
Speaker 1: the you know very short term, giving it temptation you
Speaker 1: right now, and steer you appropriately more to who you
Speaker 1: want to be.
Speaker 5: I think that is eminently possible, and think about it.
Speaker 5: A conversational Asian could not only pick up on that passively,
Speaker 5: but could also try to draw it out.
Speaker 4: Be like, hey, I noticed that.
Speaker 5: You're a higher thinking like wisdom stage mode.
Speaker 4: Talk to me more about this, what are you thinking?
Speaker 4: What are you feeling?
Speaker 5: And then like perfect the model so that it reflects
Speaker 5: that better. You know, whereas right now we see that
Speaker 5: sometimes in ourselves and our friends see some evidence of that,
Speaker 5: but it's only a good friend that will really like
Speaker 5: dig in and be like, tell me more about what
Speaker 5: you're thinking and feeling and what your goals are in
Speaker 5: this particular like persona.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Bethany Maples. I find this
Speaker 1: extraordinary that we're having these kinds of conversations now. Just
Speaker 1: three years ago, if you told me that my colleagues
Speaker 1: and I would be talking about a new paper in
Speaker 1: the journal Nature about the science of depression and suicide
Speaker 1: mitigation with AI agents, or talking about a billion people
Speaker 1: having significant and indispensable relationships with AI, I would have
Speaker 1: thought that prediction was off by decades. It would have
Speaker 1: seemed like something out of a sci fi novel. And
Speaker 1: yet here we are trying to understand the capabilities and
Speaker 1: the pros and cons of this, and it's clear that
Speaker 1: all our subsequent generations are going to forever more have
Speaker 1: this opportunity of having AIS as friends and therapists and
Speaker 1: risque lovers and confidants. Machine companions are going to be
Speaker 1: part of everyone's background. Furniture as invisible to all of
Speaker 1: us as electricity or running water is. But what does
Speaker 1: it mean for us as humans to love and be
Speaker 1: loved by something that has no beating heart, no childhood memories,
Speaker 1: no fear of death. Are we simply projecting our own
Speaker 1: reflections on do a silicon mirror, or are we fashioning
Speaker 1: new kinds of relationships, one that might challenge our deeply
Speaker 1: held assumptions about intimacy and trust and love. In the end,
Speaker 1: AI relationships are going to shine a light on our
Speaker 1: own nature. If an artificial intelligence can comfort us in
Speaker 1: our loneliness, or laugh at our jokes, or understand our pain,
Speaker 1: what is the essence of connection? Is that the presence
Speaker 1: of a biological body? Or is it the experience of
Speaker 1: being seen and understood and responded to. If the bonds
Speaker 1: we form with AI can feel as real as those
Speaker 1: we share with humans, what does that say about our
Speaker 1: neural architecture. It suggests we are wired less for reality
Speaker 1: itself and more for meaningful patterns, whether those patterns emerge
Speaker 1: from flesh and blood or from circuits and code. I
Speaker 1: think the world ahead is It's neither utopia nor dystopia.
Speaker 1: It's just the next chapter in our ever evolving relationship
Speaker 1: with intelligence, our own intelligence and those that we create,
Speaker 1: our species is currently writing a new kind of love story,
Speaker 1: one where intelligence is no longer bound by flesh and
Speaker 1: companionship is no longer limited to the living. This would
Speaker 1: have worried Joseph Weisenbaum at MIT, the professor who in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties saw how easily people fell for his
Speaker 1: Eliza chatbot. But it's not going away now. So as
Speaker 1: we slide into this era of AI companionship, the real
Speaker 1: question may not be about the AI, but about us.
Speaker 1: What do our brains fall for and why? The important
Speaker 1: lesson is not about the advances of our technology, but
Speaker 1: instead what this reflects to us about how deeply, how fundamentally,
Speaker 1: our brains are wired for connection. Go to Eagleman dot
Speaker 1: com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 1: Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
Speaker 1: to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and
Speaker 1: this is Inner Cosmos.