AI is Already Changing Dating, Whether You Use it Or Not

Friend of the show Bridget Todd joins us to break down all the ways AI has become woven into our dating and intimate lives for better or worse, in ways that are not as new as you might think. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
And Samantha.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
And welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You, a production
of iHeartRadio. And once again, we are thrilled to be
joined by the charming, the charismatic Bridget Todd. Welcome, Bridget.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
Thank you for having me. Excited as always.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
To be here. Yes, we are excited as always to
have you. Well, how have you been, Bridget?

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Things are good.

Speaker 4 (00:35):
As you both know, I do have COVID currently. Just
a little PSA for everybody listening. The doctor told me
that COVID is having a moment right now. So even
if you're not hearing about that, because I did not
hear about that, that's what's going on. So protect yourselves
and your loved ones. I'm feeling a little bit better.
But yeah, COVID is the main thing on the agenda

(00:57):
for me today.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
I mean, a good PSA. I've heard that from several
friends of mine, too. So it hasn't gone away.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
Don't forget about it.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Don't forget COVID and COVID will remind you.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
As RFK may try to tell you otherwise, COVID is
still here. It is still needed to be combated. So
if you can't take precaution unless you want to be sick.
And if you are sick, make sure you take the
time off you need, Miss Bridget.

Speaker 4 (01:32):
Yes, I this is the first thing I've done since
taking like basically a week off.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:37):
Don't even get me started on RFK. And this is
a non sequitur. Am I is it just me or
is it like every other day? It's like, oh, don't
eat rice.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Don't eat this. Don't eat that. Bugs in this poop
in that knives in this. You're like, what can I do?
What can I eat?

Speaker 2 (01:52):
The medals in this one and even the ones that
you want to love, Costco, turns out they failed you
in some way. And I'm like, well, outside of me
buying chickens and raising things on my own, which, by
the way, five tomatoes does not sustain you for a
long time.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
I did see someone say, I was like on threads
and I was like, because apparently there's a problem with
the beef. I have no idea, but something's going on
with the beef. And someone said, oh, well, I don't
have this problem because my family, we just go in
with another family. We just all just go in on
a cow. So we always know exactly where our beef
comes from. And I'm thinking, okay, that's... Nice for you.

(02:33):
But I don't know that most people can just go
in on a cow together. He's like, oh, just fill
your deep freeze full of steaks. It's like, OK, I
live in a one bedroom apartment. Where's my deep freeze?

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Exactly. Even with my house, I'm like, I don't know
where a freezer would go.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
One.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Two, there's all this comment about possible blackouts, which we've
seen around the country that we might not be talking
a lot about between Indiana. I've seen it in Alabama.
We've talked about it in even Tennessee. What happens when
the freezer goes out? And we all have like poison
food and every power goes out for, they're talking about
18 months at one point. Like, I'm like, what? And

(03:08):
this could be all a part of the Project 2025.
So what are we supposed to be doing? We're going
to eat grass.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Yeah, I, things don't feel great.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
It has been phenomenal because with the beef stuff in
that conversation and like, oh no, Trump is doing all
the things that we don't want him to do and
he's turning his back. on the farmers in the U.S. Like,
I've seen a lot of people pop up and be like, hey,
we did not vote for this. We are also farmers.
So if you want to come direct to us, you can.
I love seeing that and the people realizing that there

(03:44):
is opportunities to possibly get a whole cow if you
have the space and money. That feels like very, like, privileged.
But there are opportunities where we can support where we
can and maybe learn about local resources. I do love
that turn.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, I like that too.

Speaker 4 (04:01):
If you are a non-MAGA local farmer or like a
Black-owned farm and you want to sell me a cow,
I will go in on a cow.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Just don't show me the pictures of the cow. I
can't see it being cute first. You can't do that
to me.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, then I've gone in on a pet. I'll have
another mouse to feed. Figure out how I'm going to
feed this cow.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Right, because I'm like, oh, that's it.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
I'm done.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
I have to make this one live forever.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
This is true. I've witnessed it in Samantha with crabs once.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
Crabs?

Speaker 4 (04:32):
Yes. Did you, like, get a blue crab to eat
and then you're like, actually, I've already given him a name.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Pinchy.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
It's a bit worse than that. It was bad.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
I had nightmares.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
I had nightmares.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
I had nightmares about it.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
No, we ate the crab in complete silence. It was
the saddest meal. I did.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
I think I took a bite and I was like, no,
I can't do it.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Did you, like, become attached to the crab? Emotionally?

Speaker 2 (04:55):
We suffocated them, Bridget.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
Oh, no.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
We didn't mean to. We were just ill-prepared and then
I just felt guilty and I was like, dreamt that
they were trying to get out of the box and crying.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Crab cries.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Okay, look, this is too much trauma. I need to
move on.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
I didn't mean to traumatize you at the start of
this episode. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
That's okay, because I know what's going to fix me.
I know what's going to fix me. Bridget, your topic
is going to fix me, and I'm so ready.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
Oh, yes. I'm actually excited.

Speaker 4 (05:27):
As you all know, I have my first audio book out,
Love at First Prompt, AI and the Future of Intimacy.
And it looks at the ways that tech companies are
really inserting themselves in the most intimate places of our lives.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
You know, not just the relationship between woman and crab.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
The relationship between sex and romance and therapy and grief,
emotional support, these things that we think of as like human.
And so much of the reaction and conversation has been
about these kind of extreme examples, right? Like somebody falling
in love with Chachi PT, somebody having an AI boyfriend, girlfriend, partner,
or having sex with AI. The kind of thing that

(06:05):
when people hear it, They automatically think, oh, well, that's
not me. That will never be me. I cannot see
myself in this at all. But lately, I've been thinking
about something that is probably more relevant to your average person,
because you do not have to date AI or have
sex with AI to have AI involved.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
In your dating life.

Speaker 4 (06:25):
And in fact, if you are listening to this and
you are single and dating, particularly on dating apps, there's
a good chance that AI is already all up and
through your dating life. Because Dating apps are already using
AI to decide who you should date, how you should date,
how you guys connect with each other, your profiles, you know,

(06:46):
start conversations, all of that. People are using ChatGPT to
write flirtatious messages, analyze texts from the people that they're dating,
get relationship advice, etc.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
etc.

Speaker 4 (06:58):
And some dating app executives actually envision this future where
not too long from now, AI agents will just go
on dates with other AI agents before you even bother
swiping on each other and that that is the future
of dating. So I want to pause there. What do
you think of this as sort of the current and

(07:18):
not too distant future of what dating might look like?

Speaker 1 (07:22):
I think it's kind of a complicated answer. I would say...
Just a disclaimer, I've never used a dating app.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
Not once?

Speaker 1 (07:32):
Not once, no. So sort of outside of my realm.
I think there's a kind of a gradation of how
I feel about this because it would depend on the
ways that the person I was interacting with or the
AI I was interacting with was using AI. Like I
have a knee-jerk answer that I would like to know

(07:54):
it was AI, but I know that's not always the case.
And that people have been in some ways or others
using AI for a long time in terms of dating,
whether that's the point you're going to make, whether they
knew it or not. So I think for me, it's
sort of a case by case basis, like a gradation.

Speaker 2 (08:15):
See, my immediate reaction is horror. Because first of all,
dating is hell, especially for so many people right now,
dating apps. I think this is when we talked about
Gen Z kind of giving up. They're like, yeah, this
is not it. This is not it. And then you
add AI to it, which, you know, when I think

(08:35):
about catfishing and people altering their pictures or I know
they're sending messages, now they're doing videos and such, I'm
sure a portion of that is AI. Well, we know
when they're altering their own images and taking stuff out.
That's a whole different conversation. But the idea that AI,

(08:56):
which it feels just intrusive in itself, maybe I'm just
too old-fashioned. I've already said if my current relationship, which
is great and dandy, does not work out, I'm done.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
You're it. I'm done.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
I'm done.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
I will find myself that community for me and my
friends just to be each other's support. Like that is
the commune, which I still want now, to be honest.
The commune that is needed so that we can all
support each other because, yo, it's crazy out there and
it's scary. And then add AI.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Ugh.

Speaker 4 (09:32):
Could I ask before you were in a relationship, what
was your relationship like with dating apps?

Speaker 2 (09:38):
So I absolutely used the dating apps. I was I
was very like I had different standards of like what
was good and what wasn't good. Some of them were
too scary, like eHarmony was too much. Plenty of Fish
was way too much. So like I would not pay
for the subscriptions because I was like, this is this
is I don't like it. I did appreciate Bumble, but
turns out I'm not as confident in reaching out to

(10:01):
people as I would like to be. So Bumble was
kind of a fail. I did go on one or
two dates, but I'm like, I'm not good at this.
I guess those questionnaires are probably AI because they do like,
you can have this starter conversation. I was like, all right,
that's fine. So that is kind of I didn't have
anything about it, but I failed with that one. So
my go-to was the, what's that Facebook one?

Speaker 1 (10:24):
OkCupid.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
OkCupid was nice because people answering the questions and I
could immediately, like I could star the questions that I
want to know the answer to, that if they answered it,
that I could immediately dismiss them.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
So this was why I like being like, oh, you're Republican?
Absolutely not. You're this? You're absolutely not. You're racist? Absolutely not.
I had those moments. So I guess that was technically
AI too, but. I wasn't thinking on that realm. Oh, Bridget,
I'm having a moment of crisis.

Speaker 4 (10:53):
That's my sort of point is that I think that
when we think about technology and AI intimacy, it makes
sense to sort of be looking at these other angles,
not just, you know, does somebody have an AI boyfriend, girlfriend?
Are they having sex with AI? But also, what does
it look like when someone is not trying to use
AI to replace somebody they want to date, but they're
increasingly technology like AI sits between you and the person

(11:17):
that you might want to date. And then what does
it look like when things like race and gender are
layered into that equation? And as somebody who's just written
a book about this, I'm thinking a lot about technology
and intimacy and AI, but this is not really new, really.
Even before we get into AI being increasingly layered into

(11:38):
dating apps, dating apps were already using things like algorithms
to shape who we date. I was on the podcast
recently and the host was like, oh, well, would you
ever let AI pick a date for you?

Speaker 3 (11:50):
And they said this as.

Speaker 4 (11:51):
If it was like a really out there, you know,
far flung idea. And I thought about it and I said, well,
is that really so different than an algorithm deciding who
I might date for me, even if it's not specifically
an AI generated algorithm? Because That is what's happening for
most people who are using dating apps. Like if you
use a dating app, the potential matches that are surfaced

(12:11):
for you are being surfaced algorithmically. And I think that
that can be one thing that gets lost when we
talk about AI and dating, that we didn't suddenly start
allowing technology to influence our dating choices when chat GPT
came around. Dating apps have actually been algorithmically mediating attraction
for a really long time.

Speaker 1 (12:31):
As someone who has never used a dating app but
has witnessed friends do it, has heard the complaints, talk
me through that.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (12:42):
So when you go on a dating app, it's not
just sort of randomly giving you a stack of every
available single or hopefully single in your city.

Speaker 3 (12:53):
I guess you never know. Right.

Speaker 4 (12:55):
Their systems are deciding who gets shown to who. It's
learning from how people interact with different profiles and then
making judgments about who might be a potential good match.
And the same way that an algorithm that runs your
Twitter or your Facebook or your Instagram can walk people
down paths things like extremist pipelines or keep them locked

(13:15):
in dangerous silos. Oftentimes, algorithmic dating can get kind of
ugly when you layer in things like race and gender.
There's this phenomenal sociologist, April Williams, who has a really
useful way of thinking about this. She has a great
book called Not My Type, all about looking at the
ways that algorithms have baked things like that phobia and racism, sexism,

(13:39):
unfair biases around beauty standards, all kinds of other kinds
of isms, how all that stuff has really been baked
into the process of online dating, not by mistake, but
by intention and with design. So I have not been
on a dating app in many, many, many years. But
my single friends, especially my Black girlfriends, will tell me

(14:02):
that At this point, they're basically unusable, right? It's like
you are kind of setting yourself up for a lot
of negative experiences. And it's very easy to internalize that
and blame yourself.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
But really, it's the platforms. It's kind of by design.
And so, you know.

Speaker 4 (14:19):
Using a dating app is not like walking into a
bar and seeing who's there. It's more like having an
algorithmic matchmaker standing between you and the bar. That matchmaker
is assessing you, everybody in the bar, and making decisions
about who you ever might even get the opportunity to consider,
let alone who you would have the opportunity to say yes,

(14:39):
swipe yes or no on. Even the person, like, if
they show up for you to actually consider, they're making
that decision. And that matters because... our attractions don't happen
in a vacuum, right? We're bringing all of these hierarchies
and biases that we know are everywhere in the offline
world when it comes to dating. We are basically just
bringing that into the digital world algorithmically. And so Williams,

(15:03):
that sociologist, her book looks at how what she calls
sexual racism has really been automated into the experience of
dating and how that has just become embedded into dating platforms,
particularly for Black women.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Yeah, and she has a pretty stark example of this.

Speaker 4 (15:22):
Yeah, she told me about this one example from her
book where a Black woman who was using Hinge said
that she was just kind of getting sick of the apps.
She wasn't meeting anybody new, wasn't seeing any matches that
she liked. So she deleted her account and then recreated
it using the exact same pictures, pictures that depicted her
as the Black woman that she is. But then she
listed her race as white. And suddenly this person profile

(15:46):
of a Black woman whose race is listed as white
starts getting shown much more desirable matches. And the experience
is a lot better for her, even though her pictures
still illustrate her as the Black woman that she is.
And so I think those kind of stories can really
complicate the story that we tell ourselves about how biases
show up in dating, right? We usually think of somebody

(16:08):
saying like, oh... An individual user looking at a Black
woman and saying, I'm not attracted to her. But what
if the Black woman never even appears in that person's
stack in the first place?

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Before they even have a chance to decide, swipe right,
swipe left, yes, no.

Speaker 4 (16:23):
The algorithm and the technology has already decided what profiles
do or do not make it onto your screen.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
And so.

Speaker 4 (16:30):
Williams, again, has this point that, like, even what you
think of as your type doesn't come out of nowhere, right?
It's based in, like, the people that we grew up around,
what our families taught us, the couples that we saw,
the movies that we watched, whatever ideas that we have
when it comes to class and race and gender and beauty.
All of those things go to shape what we see
as desirable. So when millions of people bring those preferences

(16:53):
onto a dating app, the app is not receiving, like,
a pristine data set of preferences objective human attraction or something.
It's actually receiving data produced by all of us, the
people who live in society where racism and sexism and
fatphobia and classism exists, and the technology just learns from
it and reflects it back at us. This is a

(17:15):
point that I make a lot when I talk about AI.
It's very easy to think of AI as like a hyper-aware,
sentient computer brain, but it's just us. It's just humans.
So all the different biases and hangups that we know
that we have as humans are simply reflected in AI
and in some ways intensified by it.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
That makes me wonder because my name in itself sounds
very white, very, very white. But also I have gone
to the point where sometimes I just left off. You
can say I prefer not to say when you have
that profile just because I'm like, I don't know what
this is going to bring. But that does make a
lot of sense. Like this was again, but probably eight,
nine years ago or 10 years ago, maybe when I

(17:58):
was doing that. So it feels like if. AI was
kind of behind like the preferences because I kept seeing
the same people. Maybe I was on it for way
too long.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (18:07):
We'll, you know, don't talk about that. But in general,
like I would have the same people, even if I
went to a different site, even if I felt like
I was using different preferences, like, you know, Hinge is
different from Coffee Meets Bagel from OkCupid. So you had
different kinds of ways of being hooked up. And when
I mean like Coffee Meets Bagel, that was actually attached

(18:29):
to Facebook. So you had to know somebody before you can,
you know, link up with somebody. But it ended up
being the same people all the time. So I wondered
if that happened like eight, nine, 10 years ago, how
much worse or how much more of an influence does
AI have now?

Speaker 3 (18:49):
Oh, so that's such a good question.

Speaker 4 (18:50):
And I would say the big change from five, six
years ago, even going back 10 years and today, is
I think it's become a lot more powerful. There was
a time where we all accepted, okay, the dates are
algorithmically matched and generated.

Speaker 3 (19:05):
But now you have.

Speaker 4 (19:07):
That, but also AI, not just deciding who you will date,
but also helping you date them, how you date them,
what your connections look like. I just wrote a piece
about this for the outlet you should care about, because I,
in reporting my audio book, have really been struck by
how quickly major dating companies have been building AI directly

(19:30):
into the dating process. So if you open up Tinder...
Tinder already has AI-powered matching. It also has systems that
can learn from your profile and your answers to the questions.
If you opt in, Tinder can even scroll and analyze
information on your phone's camera roll. So not pictures that
you have added to Tinder. It just automatically gives Tinder,

(19:52):
you have to opt into this, but it automatically gives
Tinder access to your camera roll. And then from that information,
it personalizes its algorithm to who it thinks that you
might like to date. So like stuff that's like gets
pretty nitty gritty.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
Hinge already has.

Speaker 4 (20:08):
Introduced AI tools that help give you a makeover of
your profile to make sure that it's the best it
can be. It can help improve your prompts. Grindr has
explicitly said that they want to become, quote, an AI-first company.
It has a system that they call GayEye.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Get it?

Speaker 3 (20:26):
Because Grindr is a.

Speaker 4 (20:27):
Gay dating and hookup site. So it's not AI, it's GayEye.
I think I'm saying it right.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
G-A-I. Little G, big A-I. Stop it.

Speaker 4 (20:40):
And so their system is really wild. So it's being
developed to assist conversations and connections. including surfacing and summarizing
old conversations so you can remember what you previously talked
about with somebody else. And so if you're talking to
somebody that you might want to date or have sex
with or whatever, and they remember some little throwaway detail,

(21:02):
they remember that you love daffodils, you might be touched, right?
You're like, oh my God, this person remembered this, you know,
little detail about me. They're so thoughtful, right? they could
have just been using this AI system to resurface that conversation.
And so you might be thinking like, oh, they really
liked me. And it's like, no, no, I just have
this like AI generated dating assistant that helps me remember

(21:24):
the little details that you said.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
So I look like a thoughtful guy.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Well, yeah. And that's kind of the thing that I
keep coming back to is like, some of this reminds
me of our conversation we had about technology that sounds
like it's making everything easier, but it's actually making more work.
Because to me, like, just dealing with AI and doing
all of this, I can see how it could be easier,
but I can also see how it'd be more work.

(21:47):
But also it's just the person who sends me that
daffodil thing. Are they like a pickup artist? Like, do
you know what I mean? Like, yeah, because that seems
like a, that meant something to me when it was
you that remembered it. But I also understand dating online
is a mess and you're talking to a lot of
different people. And I get that maybe you don't remember that.

(22:10):
The Daffodil comment. So I guess that's kind of the
two conflicting things I'm having at that.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
Yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up because I
did want to spend a little time there. And I'll
say like, again, I have not been out there in
a long time. I'm not dating. But I have a
lot of friends who are and they all just universally
tell me that it's hell. It's exhausting. It's a lot
of work. The apps aren't great. The people who are

(22:37):
out there dating, they don't seem like they're having a
good time right now. And I do think something interesting
is going on where the demographic age-wise that uses AI
the most is young people, Gen Z. And so they
are also the demographic that hates AI the most. There
was a Gallup survey that said that 83% of Gen
Z adults and 74% of K-12 students believe that AI

(23:01):
shortcuts make future learning and critical thinking more difficult. So
these are the same people who are using it the
most who also are like, we hate it the most.
And I think something is going on here similarly with dating,
where people who are dating clearly report a lot of
AI fatigue. They don't like AI in their dating life.
It's not something that they're into. However, they are also

(23:23):
increasingly using the AI that they say that they don't want.
And I think that it gets at what you're kind
of getting at, Annie, of like, I think that it's
a testament to how bad dating is that people are
so fatigued with it that they're thinking, I don't even
like AI, but if you're going to tell me AI
can make this hellscape better, I'll try it. I think

(23:44):
that's really what's going on.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
Dating sucks.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
So bad, maybe this AI technology that I don't even
like or want can help. And it seems like people
really are using AI for dating. A Kinsey Institute and
Match study cited a report that found that more than
a quarter of singles aged 18 to 39 now use
AI in their dating lives. And that's a 300% increase
from the previous year. And at the same time, nearly

(24:10):
half of those same respondents said that they view AI negatively.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
In romantic contexts.

Speaker 4 (24:17):
So something is clearly going on where people don't like AI.
They specifically don't want it in their dating life, but
they are using it in their dating life. And I think,
I mean, this is just my takeaway. I think it
has to be that like, that's how bad dating is
right now. That the people are turning to technology they
don't even like in the hopes that maybe it might make.

Speaker 3 (24:35):
It a little bit better.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
Do they actually know they're using it?

Speaker 3 (24:39):
They know.

Speaker 4 (24:40):
My read is that these are not people who are
following a prompt that they saw on Hinge, not really
knowing consciously that it's AI. These are people who are
putting text messages into chat GPT and being like, tell me,
what do they mean by this?

Speaker 3 (24:54):
Tell me, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 (24:55):
Like they're like an intentional and specific use of AI.

Speaker 3 (24:59):
For a romantic use case.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
That's a very good distinction and a very good question
because some people probably don't know how much of dating
stuff when it comes to apps is actually AI generated.
But I think the majority of these are people who
do know and they're turning to it for that specific
use case.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah, because I would say I was an unwilling player
when I realized as I'm talking to you, I'm like,
that probably was AI. Oh, no.

Speaker 4 (25:24):
I mean, I just learned this too because I make
a lot of stuff for my Instagram using Canva. And
I just use like a freebie Canva. Like I'm no
Canva whiz. I guess I never really thought about it,
but it's like if you use certain tools on Canva,
those are technically AI tools. But it's like I would
not have necessarily thought like, oh, I'm not like logging
into ChatGPT. I'm doing this manually on Canva. I wouldn't

(25:45):
have thought that their background remover tool was AI, but
it is.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
You touch on some ways it can look, but what
does it look like to have AI in your love life?

Speaker 4 (26:07):
Yeah, it looks like AI help determining who you see,
helping you decide which pictures of yourself to present. If
you're a real so-and-so, maybe AI is cleaning up your
pictures a little bit.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
I would not recommend that one.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
It can help you write your profile, help you figure
out what to say to dates, remember things that you've
already said. And eventually, again, if this vision that tech
leaders like Whitney Wolf Hurd, who was one of the
people who co-founded Bumble, comes up with, it'll be... conducting
the earliest stages of courtship on your behalf via AI
agents sort of dating and sizing each other up. And

(26:42):
so in that older model, algorithms were the matchmaker. Now
in this current model, AI is your matchmaker, photographer, stylist, wingman,
flirtation coach, relationship interpreter, therapist, and eventually the proxy on
the date itself. So again, even if you are someone
who would never, have never had an AI girlfriend or

(27:05):
boyfriend or had sex with AI, I guess the question
I would ask is like, at what point are you
even dating another person? And at what point are you
dating another person through this layer of technology and AI?

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Oh, Lord, this is taking me back to the fact
that we're going to have to watch Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson.

Speaker 4 (27:24):
Her! Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
Because in my head, I'm like, oh.

Speaker 3 (27:27):
It is one of my favorite movies. Anytime. Put me in, coach.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
Well, yeah, and that goes back to kind of, I think,
my anxiety that I was mentioning. It's like, at what
point is it? does this person actually care about me?
And I know we have a connection and it's not
just that they're using AI. And this is really fascinating
to me because you've been discussing how some people see

(27:57):
this as so far flung, like I wouldn't use this,
I would never. But clearly people are using AI and
knowingly using AI. And their love lives in this way.
So I'm curious how people who are in charge, the
kind of tech leaders, are pitching this.

Speaker 4 (28:20):
So tech leaders and the people who run dating apps
are kind of pitching AI as a solution to what
I think we've identified by now is like a real problem.
Like dating apps kind of suck. People are so sick
of dating apps. Dating app burnout is extremely widespread. A
2025 Forbes health survey found that 78% of dating app
users reported experiencing burnout sometimes. Among Gen Z respondents, that

(28:45):
goes up to 79%. That's a lot, right? And I
guess against that backdrop, it's not difficult to understand why
AI might be presented as an appealing solution to the
genuine problem of dating being exhausting and dating apps being exhausting.
you know, to do well on a dating app, you've
got to take good pictures, make a profile, swipe through

(29:07):
hundreds of people, come up with something interesting to say.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
I never really did.

Speaker 4 (29:10):
Dating apps too much, but like when I was sort
of more dating, having to have that introductory conversation over.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
And over again. Oh, so how many siblings do you have? Oh,
so where are you from?

Speaker 4 (29:20):
Oh, like, like I got to a point where I
was like, I can't, I can't have this conversation again
anymore or I'll scream. You know, you've got to remember
that they have a sister in Baltimore and that they
are allergic to cilantro. And then you got to figure
out if somebody is actually interested in you or they
just want to have sex with you or they're.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
Like, I don't know. It's just like, it's just a lot.

Speaker 4 (29:38):
And then on top of that, you've got to deal
with the sort of emotionally vulnerable and charged nature of
having to like put yourself in vulnerable situations and deal
with rejection. And so all of that is part of
dating in 2026. The tech industry and the dating app industry,
their pitch is essentially all of this business of human

(29:59):
connection is complicated, time-consuming, unpredictable, awkward, challenging, vulnerable. What if
you didn't have to do so much of that? What
if you saw all of that As a problem that
needed to be solved. And the solve was AI. And
so I can understand that position for sure. But personally,

(30:20):
to me, it kind of sounds like trying to optimize
out the thing that is actually dating and getting to
know and potentially connecting with another person.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
I'm not going to sugarcoat it. That's hard as f * * k.

Speaker 4 (30:31):
But like, that does seem to be the point of
dating is that kind of complicated, vulnerable, challenging thing that
might get you to the other end where you're in
a relationship with somebody that you can, you know, stand
to have a dinner with or something.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
I don't know why, but my mind just went back
to like the Mulan matchmaker. Oh, yes. Because it kind
of had this moment of like, AI has now taken
over being the matchmaker and getting the say so of like,
I'm going to look at you, but you have to be,
and this is all directed at women, of course, being like,

(31:06):
you have to follow these rules and then I will
find you a husband that you are worthy of.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
And you'll bring honor to them all.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Must bring honor. That is your only achievement is who
you can land. So in my head is, is AI
going to be similar to that with like that gender
idea of like, all right, women, you have to be
all of these things for this guy who might have
a good job for you.

Speaker 4 (31:30):
I'm so glad that you phrased it that way because I,
this is just my personal opinion. I don't have any research,
but I think the answer is yes. I think when
you look at how we talk about dating and that
inherently becomes a conversation about how we talk about gender,
so much of those conversations, I am sorry to say,
are not good and they're not good in a specific

(31:54):
kind of way where these kind of men's rights, incel adjacent,
toxic attitudes about gender and women have increasingly become mainstreamed
and normalized in modern dating.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
And that's a real problem.

Speaker 4 (32:09):
And I think that we're at this place where that
is being amplified and pitched back at us using technology
like AI, right? And so these very specific attitudes about Gender, worth,
these dynamics that kind of make it seem like you
can gamify the experience of connecting with another human being,
you know, that assigns worth to people based on these

(32:32):
very specific numbers, body count.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
Salary, height.

Speaker 4 (32:36):
All of these incredibly specific things that actually don't get
to the business of who somebody is.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
It's a very sad landscape. And I'm sorry to.

Speaker 4 (32:46):
Say that it's not even one that I, I mean,
I spend a lot of time talking about it from
the perspective of men and how men boil women down
into these boxes based on arbitrary numbers and assigning worth
to things like body count. But there's also a language
like that for women, you know, that says like somebody
is their salary or their height or their body count

(33:08):
or this or that or their age. And I just
think that we are increasingly normalizing this idea that something
as fuzzy as human connection and who draws your eye
can be kind of gamified and like boiled down to
an algorithm, but that's not really how it works, you know?

(33:30):
This is a little bit of a tangent, but I
was watching the Manosphere Louis Theroux documentary and he is
sitting in on some men's rights podcast where it's like
five guys and five girls and Basically, it's just them
talking and them denigrating the women because that's what they do.

(33:51):
And they were talking about what kind of guy do
you go for? And they were asking, then the men
were also saying, what kind of girls do you go for?
And it just made me really sad that everybody there
was talking about potential matches in this situation. Like there
was a scoreboard or a scorecard that people had to
figure out. And nobody said things like, what are their values?

(34:13):
Or do they have a good sense of humor? Or,
you know, what are they like in a crisis? Would
they be a good person to raise a kid with? Like,
do I, you know what I mean? Like the things
that like when you get a little older and you.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Get to be my age.

Speaker 4 (34:24):
The things that you know actually really matter. I don't
hear any of that. And it just made me not
only sad for them, but that this is what technology
like AI is normalizing and replicating for dating.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
And I don't like it.

Speaker 4 (34:37):
I think it's a real problem that all of these
toxic gender dynamics that we know perpetuate the the meat
space are just being potentially turbocharged by ai does that
make sense.

Speaker 1 (34:51):
No absolutely no i often think that when i hear
my friends um usually my girlfriends talking about their experience
with online dating and i just think this heteronormative script
we've created that has been amplified by technologies like this
It's not good for anybody because people, at least in

(35:12):
my friend's case, they want to find somebody. And men,
in this very heterosexual case, they want to find a woman.
But it's just the way that the power dynamics work
and the gender dynamics work that has made it into
something far messier and more dangerous than it really needs

(35:33):
to be. And I hate seeing it. I don't like
it at all.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
People are like, I don't want to deal with that.
Why would I want to be mixed up in that?

Speaker 1 (35:42):
Absolutely. When I am listening to their stories, I am like,
I salute you for putting up with this. You should
not have to. This is horrible. One of the other
things that is not surprising that translated into this kind
of technological world of dating is where a lot of

(36:04):
that work of dating comes falls.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (36:09):
And when you look at gender, this is I found
so interesting because if you're a woman who dates men,
you already know the work of dating is not always
equally distributed. There is a huge body of research and
cultural conversation around the fact that women, we just perform
a lot more of the emotional labor and heterosexual pairing.
So things like Maintaining social relationships, reading social cues, initiating

(36:31):
hard conversations, managing other people's feelings, all of that, like
women shoulder a lot more of that work when we're in.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
A pairing with men.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
And so now we have this technology, AI, that potentially
could be capable of doing some of those things for us.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
And so.

Speaker 4 (36:47):
Already we have people who are putting screenshots of conversations
into ChatGPT to like suss out what this person meant
or asking AI what they should say next. And there
was this very interesting, I think it was Business Insider
piece about how some young people are even putting on
the voice command prompt on ChatGPT and then having their
phone open on the table during a date so that

(37:09):
they can analyze like how the date went later.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
So that's a thing that... people are doing.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
New fear unlocked.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Seems like a lot of trust issues going on, honestly.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (37:21):
Again, this is anecdotal, but a lot of my younger
friends who date, it is.

Speaker 3 (37:25):
And I sort of get it.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
How many times are you scrolling social media and you
see somebody who has taken... And I'm not talking about
situations where somebody is truly being abusive.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
I'm talking about.

Speaker 4 (37:37):
somebody sent an awkward reply on a dating app and
then they screenshot that and put it on social media.
It's like, I kind of get why nobody trusts each
other in this landscape.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
And so there are all these.

Speaker 4 (37:48):
Differences between how men and women use AI in dating.
One 2026 survey of about a thousand US singles found
that men and women were about equally likely to say
that they have used AI somewhere in their dating life,
but women are much more likely to say that they
used AI to analyze conversations and get advice. That's about 52%

(38:09):
of women compared to 39% of men. And unsurprisingly, men, meanwhile,
we're much more likely to use AI to generate pickup lines.
That's 41% of men compared to just 27% of women.
So already we're starting to hand different pieces of the
social and emotional work involved in dating, you know, figuring

(38:31):
out what somebody meant, deciding what to say next, finding
the right tone, how to flirt. Like men and women
are handing different pieces of that over to AI. And
so I guess that's, I don't know which one of
you asked this question, but I think it's a really
good one. If ChachiBT is helping a man communicate more
thoughtfully with a woman that he's dating, has it actually

(38:51):
helped him become a better communicator? Or has it allowed
him to outsource the performance of emotional competence to AI?
This is not a question I can answer, but like,
that is the question.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. That's what, when I'm talking about
those gradations, I completely understand using it, but there's a
certain level or line that I would feel that you're
just the person I'm communicating with is burnt out maybe
or not really connecting with me. And it's just using that.

(39:26):
And I think if I had just... using that to
like not have to engage because it is such a slog.
It is such a pain. It is such a job.
But then if I realize that point and they start
to act differently or I start to see, oh, this
is not what I thought. You using AI wasn't reflecting

(39:48):
what you actually are or how you actually present, then
I think I would feel uncomfortable.

Speaker 4 (39:55):
Yeah. I saw this screen, speaking of people putting screenshots
of their dating app on social media, this one I
actually did find interesting. Somebody showed a screenshot where they
were talking to a guy on Tinder. And it's clear
to me immediately in the way that sometimes it's just
obvious that he's using ChatGPT, right? But the responses that
are being generated by ChatGPT They're good. They're funny. They're sarcastic.

(40:19):
They're like what you would want someone to say that
you were dating. And importantly, they were well-typed and grammatically correct.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
And then.

Speaker 4 (40:28):
She texts him and the response that she gets, it's
like Jeffrey Epstein wrote it. It's like he's using the
letter U instead of Y-O-U when everything is misspelled. And
clearly it's like, okay, you were using ChatGPT to come
up with these, you know, good sounding replies. You stopped
doing that and now you're typing like a 13 year old.
That would be such a problem for me because it

(40:50):
is a pet peeve of mine personally, somebody who is
not a good like typer or texter and they can't spell.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
And it's like, am I trying to date a teenager?
Like what's going on? And so I think that I
am a.

Speaker 4 (41:01):
Person of words. Communicating in words is important to me.
I would never be able to date somebody who was
not good at using their words. That's incredibly important to me.
So somebody using AI to outsource this thing that is
actually personally quite important to me would be a problem.
And that would be deceptive to me. I think there's
a question of like, whether or not that knowing that

(41:23):
somebody was using AI to do these things would change
how you experience these interactions.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
I mean, yeah, it's like that's the ultimate question.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Well, so what are your thoughts on this question?

Speaker 4 (41:35):
It's not a question I can really answer. I think
it depends. It's like your mileage may vary. I did again,
I did a very unscientific poll of my single friends.
And one of them gave me an answer that I
found really interesting. He was like, well, you know, we've
always outsourced dating.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
To other people other than ourselves.

Speaker 4 (41:53):
You know, how many times have you shown a picture
of a date to a friend to be like, oh,
are they cute?

Speaker 3 (41:58):
Should I date them?

Speaker 4 (41:58):
Or shown a text to a friend and said like,
what are they trying to say with this text? Or
had a friend redo your dating app profile?

Speaker 3 (42:05):
Like, we have kind of.

Speaker 4 (42:06):
Always outsourced some aspects of dating to other people. So
getting outside assistance with dating is not a new thing.
And again, I can understand the argument being made that
AI might genuinely be able to help people communicate better.
Somebody's got social anxiety. They might use it to organize
their thoughts. Somebody dating in a language that they're not
fluent in might use it to communicate more clearly. Somebody

(42:29):
who struggles to express their emotions might might use AI
to like sort out what they want to say and
make sure the tone is right. So I don't think
that it can be as black and white as the
dividing line is as soon as you use AI, that
is fake and inherently deceptive. I think the better question
is probably a little bit messier and blurrier, which is like,

(42:50):
at what point does it go from assistance to substitution, right?
If AI is helping you better phrase something you already
wanted to say, maybe that's one thing. But if AI
is determining what you should feel, what you should say,
how you should present to another person, that seems to
be another thing. And so I think Thinking of it

(43:11):
as a spectrum as opposed to like a black and
white thing might be useful. But I guess the bottom
line is it really feels like we're kind of inventing
these norms, these new norms in dating in real time.

Speaker 2 (43:35):
You know, one of the things that I think about
with the deception question, because we had an episode talking
about how a lot of conservative men have been lying
on dating sites to get liberal women for really, like, why?
Everybody's kind of like, why are you doing this? Because
women have giant markers, myself as well. If you say

(43:55):
you are moderate, which was as like, like, that's an
obvious lie. Like, you feel like you're central, then... there's
a problem here. Like women have taken that standard and
being like, you are no longer someone I would consider dating.
And to the point that conservative men have like changed
it altogether and either don't answer the question, which is
still a red flag or lie outright lie and say

(44:18):
they are. And then like date three or four, they're like,
just kidding. I'm a Trumper type of conversation for women
who think this is a very big red flag. And
so this kind of gets to the point of like
when we were talking that this does pose a risk
to us where we feel like this is beyond just lying, right?

Speaker 3 (44:37):
Yes, very good point.

Speaker 4 (44:39):
You know, online dating has always required a certain amount
of trust. And that is particularly true for women who
date men. You know, asking yourself, is this person really
who they say they are? Are these pictures recent? Is
this person safe? Is this person trying to meet me
or date me or have sex with me for, you know,
bad intent? Women already have to perform tremendous amounts of

(45:04):
safety work just to show up in online dating. Sending
your friend your location, meeting in public, Googling somebody, making
sure you have your own way home, making sure you
bring your own money, all of that. Adding AI to
the mix as another layer to already this like very
uncertain dynamic because it becomes increasingly easy to lie to people,

(45:25):
to generate fake pictures, fake voices, fake identities that don't
correspond to a real person. And this is a little
bit of a tangent, but did y'all see that thing?
earlier this week about that fake San Francisco 49ers player. No.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
Yeah, which, by the way, is not funny. Not funny
to the women. But some of the women that have
published the things have been kind of.

Speaker 4 (45:46):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
I'm saying it is funny. I don't want.

Speaker 4 (45:48):
I'm sad the women got scammed and I hope they
get their justice. But, like, I've been watching the videos
this guy put out that was like, this is my
football training video.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Those are funny. So for folks who don't know, this guy,
a scammer, allegedly.

Speaker 4 (46:02):
He was pretending to be super wealthy, meeting women on
dating apps and purporting to be a professional football player
for the San Francisco 49ers. How he accomplished this, I
will say this, in an era of AI, I almost
have to give him like a weird kudos because it's like,
he could have just used AI to like, come up

(46:23):
with fake photos. This guy went out and bought a
fake 49ers helmet and was like staging fake photos at
the beach. So I'm like, okay, you did put a
little bit of more effort into this than just like
doing it on AI. Oh, and then the scam was
he would meet these women on dating apps and then
purport to be very wealthy, dangle this kind of NFL

(46:44):
wife lifestyle in front of them. And then say, you know,
I don't want to have to give somebody a free ride,
invest in my company so I know that you're the
kind of woman that I want to be with. And
he scammed women to the tune, allegedly, to the tune
of $ 1. 3 million on these scam investments. And what's so
interesting is the way that AI showed up in this scam.

(47:06):
when you would Google this dude, you know, the AI
Google overview that you see, it actually would say that
he was a San Francisco 49ers player. But the reason
for that is that on his social media pages, his
Instagram pages, he would say, player for the San Francisco 49ers,
Google AI overview, it just indexes from publicly available information.

(47:28):
And so Google AI overview was just pulling from information
that he had already put on the internet. So when
you Googled him, really the Google overview would say NFL player. Now,
if you went to the official roster, which it sounded
like these women weren't doing, he would not be listed.
Like if you did a little more investigation, but it's
weird because people should not be trusting the Google AI overview.
This is a great example as to why they shouldn't

(47:50):
be trusting that. But like, I can see if you
Google it and you're like, okay, Google says that he's
actually an NFL player because he gamified the Google AI overview.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
And his friend did something too, right? He had a
friend who helped in his scheme and the friend also schemed.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
Yes, he had a... It's such a rabbit hole. He
had like fake signing where it's like.

Speaker 4 (48:11):
oh, you're signing your NFL contract.

Speaker 3 (48:13):
Who are you signing with?

Speaker 4 (48:15):
The video of him with his friend signing the fake
NFL paperwork for him to join the team. Someone was like,
I guess no woman has ever watched the NFL draft signing.
And I'm like, okay, I definitely have never watched that.
What a woman I would watch that. But even still,
I'm like, this doesn't, I don't think it happens in
like a one bedroom apartment. You know what I mean? Like,
I've never watched this. Even I feel like I would

(48:35):
have known something was up.

Speaker 2 (48:36):
Right. And not to disparage, because this is younger than me,
but NFL usually doesn't go to a 32-year-old and be like, hey,
you are definitely primetime. We need you bad.

Speaker 4 (48:49):
You are, like, nearing retirement at 32. So why would
they be signing a 32-year-old? Also, again, I don't want
to say too much.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
I want to say this. Look up the guy.

Speaker 4 (48:57):
Because if you've ever seen a professional, not even a
professional football player, any kind of, like, he doesn't even
look like he plays JV. Like, he doesn't even look
like somebody who, like, goes to the gym.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
Like.

Speaker 4 (49:09):
And he has these, I'm really going on a tangent now,
but he has these videos of him doing fake NFL drills.
And they're like him skipping down the road. And it's like,
I mean, I guess part of it is, you know,
It's why romance scams work is because he is selling

(49:29):
a very desirable lifestyle, especially right now when everything is
so hard. Everything is so expensive. Everybody's working a lot,
especially for women. I can understand why somebody comes along
and they're like, I want to make you an NFL wife.
I want to make it so you never have to
work again. I drive an expensive car. I live an
expensive lifestyle. I can invite you in on that. I
saw a lot of people saying, like, if this guy's
so rich, why was he asking these.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Women for money?

Speaker 4 (49:51):
And that's actually wrong because he wasn't asking them for money.
He was saying, I want you to prove that you
are also like a hustle-minded, high-value woman by investing in
my buddy's scam company. So I don't want to victim
blame because I can see why that is enticing. And
that's why romance scams are effective. When you add in AI,

(50:13):
it just becomes so easy to scale.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
Well, yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
And that's the thing is with this technology, scammers can
just engage in so many, like I going back to
your point, I don't know why this daffodil thing has
really stuck with me, but like having a detail that
the AI will remember, like keeping up with conversations for scammers,
making these personalized conversations, having AI makes it so that

(50:40):
they can really broaden how many people are scamming.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
Exactly.

Speaker 4 (50:45):
A scammer who maybe earlier had to personally maintain conversation
with several targets can now do that with AI to
maintain more convincing, personalized conversations. You can personalize if there's
a particular thing that might make you vulnerable to a scam.
AI can personalize that for whatever your particular soft spot
or vulnerability is. And then it becomes potentially more dangerous

(51:08):
because AI can really make that scalable. So when these
dating companies are telling us AI is going to make
dating easier, there is a parallel question that I feel
like they also have to answer, which is that if
that's the case, how are you going to make sure
that AI then doesn't make it harder for people to
know who they're actually talking to, to know that they're
actually talking to the person that they say they're talking to? Like,
where is that line and what are these companies who

(51:30):
are selling us the stream of AI, what are they
doing to also answer that very important question as well?

Speaker 1 (51:36):
Yes, that is an excellent question. And I think that
throughout this episode, we've made it clear the dating world
is not doing well, to say the least. This technology,
in a lot of cases, has not been helping. Does
this mean everybody should delete technology? their dating apps?

Speaker 3 (51:58):
Not necessarily.

Speaker 4 (51:59):
I understand this conversation has been a lot of doom
and gloom, but I do think there's another possibility for
what technology can do when it comes to connection and dating.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
Even April Williams, that.

Speaker 4 (52:10):
Sociologist I told you about who wrote Not My Type
about the biases in dating apps, even she does not
think that people should just abandon dating apps. And in fact,
she met her husband on Tinder. And it's kind of
a cute story. They lived less than a mile away
from each other. You know, she had apparently been to
the bakery where he worked. They probably had crossed paths
in real life without even knowing it, but he was

(52:31):
pretty introverted. And so they had these different lives where
they might not have ever actually even met or even
crossed paths without technology putting them in front of each other.
When they did meet, she said that she had laughed
with him in this way that she had never experienced
with a man before. And I feel like her story
kind of gets at the promise of technology that I
personally don't want to just like abandon, right? That technology

(52:55):
can introduce us to people that we never would have encountered.
It can bridge social, cultural, and geographic divides. But I
think ultimately it is not about, you know, should technology
be involved in our dating and our romance and our
intimate lives? Because it clearly already is. The question we
should be asking is, If we accept that technology is
going to be in our intimate lives, what do we

(53:16):
want that technology to do? Do we want it to
be expanding the range of people that we might encounter
and expanding the range of having kind of healthy connections?
Or do we want it to be merely taking these
existing hierarchies of desirability and making those hierarchies.

Speaker 3 (53:33):
More efficient and more stark?

Speaker 4 (53:35):
You know, when I was first reporting my audio book
about all of this, Love at First Prompt, AI and
the Future of Intimacy, I spent a lot of time
with folks who had developed intimate relationships with AI. And
I think that there is this tendency to treat those
relationships as categorically very different from the stuff the rest
of us normal folks are doing, right?

Speaker 3 (53:55):
The rest of us normies. You know, over here, there
are people having relationships with humans.

Speaker 4 (54:00):
And then way over there are people falling in love
and having sex with chatbots. But increasingly from reporting the book,
I don't think that line is as clear as maybe
it's sometimes seen. And what I've come to really see
is that there's another version of that question that I
think impacts a much larger group of us, which is
what happens to relationships when people as machines become increasingly

(54:21):
involved in how these relationships begin, develop, and function? And
I think that's really got to be the kind of
conversation we're having, not the conversation that is like, Anybody
who experiences intimacy with AI is weird and crazy because
when you take a step back and look at the
larger landscape of online dating, that's kind of a lot

(54:42):
of people already.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
And as we've been talking about in our conversations with you, Bridget,
the technology is just moving so fast. So it feels
like we're not keeping up with it necessarily. But I
do think that, I mean, clearly, Samantha, in the beginning,
you had kind of that moment. I think people... listen
to something like this, you realize how much technology and

(55:04):
AI is involved in your relationships and intimacy. And that
can be kind of a jarring realization. And then just
the knowledge as always that these companies who have people
leading them that you might not want to have this
information are running these platforms. It is just a lot

(55:25):
of questions I think that we have to answer.

Speaker 4 (55:28):
There was a thing a while back where Tinder had
this tier that was like $ 1, 000, very expensive. And basically
what you would get for that tier was like more
AI matches. I do think that we have this dynamic
that is so extractive, that is so focused on what
we as the user or the people are willing to
give and pay and give up. And on the other

(55:51):
side of that equation is not really hearing a lot
about what these companies are willing to provide or protect.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
Well, thank you so much as always, Bridget, for bringing
these topics to us, for explaining these complicated issues. We
love having you on. Where can the good listeners find you?

Speaker 4 (56:12):
Well, you can check out my audio book, Love at
First Prompt, AI and the Future of Intimacy. You can
check it out at loveatfirstprompt.com. You can check me out
on Instagram at BridgetMarieNDC and check out my podcast, There
Are No Girls on the Internet.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
And listeners, please go do all of that if you
have not already. If you would like to contact us,
you can. Our email is hello at stuffonevertoldyou.com. We're also
on BlueSkype, MomStuffPodcast. We're on Instagram and TikTok at stuffonevertoldyou.
We're also on YouTube. We have some merchandise at the
Comp Bureau. And we have a book you can get
wherever you get your books. Thanks as always to our
super producer, Rima, and our executive producer, Maya.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Thanks to you for listening. Stuff One Never Told You
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
you can check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.