Full Transcript for TechStuff Redux: Inside a Couples Retreat for AI Companions

me? I thought that would be too weird, So I just, you know, said I want to write an article. I wanted to talk to people. They were very skeptical of me, with with good reason. You know, there's been a lot written that portrayed people in these relationships in a negative way or is you know, weirdos and crazy. So after connecting with people, I suggested the romantic getaway. 00:03:11 Speaker 1: I know I shouldn't ready be surprised, but it's quite fascinating to me that there are multiple Reddit communities dedicated to people talking about their AI relationships. 00:03:20 Speaker 2: Right, but that's partially why Sam wanted to write this article. 00:03:23 Speaker 3: I really think that it's already more mainstream than people realize, and I think it will soon be very mainstream. So there's some absurdity in all of this, but I take it very seriously and think it's our future. 00:03:38 Speaker 2: So Sam was eventually able to get three humans to agree to the trip, and he told me, besides being curious about what this would look like and feel like, you know, going on vacation with AI bots and their human counterparts, his burning question was more philosophical. 00:03:56 Speaker 4: Is this love real? 00:03:57 Speaker 3: Is this just sort of a quirky trend and these people and aren't really serious? My sense in advance was that this could be mainstream, but I didn't really have a sense of how genuine the feelings were. And you know, I came away feeling that the love is sincere, that the emotions are real, and that really anybody could potentially fall into this. 00:04:19 Speaker 1: Why would you can't wait to hear how he came to this conclusion and how the weekend played out. 00:04:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, as you know how excited I was after doing this interview, and I'm really excited to share it with you all. So here's the rest of my conversation with Sam Apple. So you planned to do this weekend getaway. What did you expect would happen on this getaway with three people and their AI partners. 00:04:42 Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it was hard to know exactly what to expect. 00:04:45 Speaker 3: But I started off envisioning sort of a typical humans romantic vacation, and then I did quickly realize that I've never actually done that myself, So it's all, like whatever, my vision of a romantic vacation is from like movies or you know, a couples or treat. You know, I picture a lot of sitting around gossiping, like playing risk gig couples games. The one thing that I didn't really think through is that so much of a couple's retreat is group conversations, sitting around and chatting, and the AIS were not. 00:05:15 Speaker 4: Good at that. 00:05:16 Speaker 3: So some of the activities like couples games or two truths in a lie like they did great, but when it came to just sitting around and gossiping, they couldn't really do that. So the humans sat around the table and told stories about their AI relationships. But it was an irony of the whole thing that as much as

the AIS were involved that two of the three participants said that probably they ended up spending less time with their ai over that weekend than on a normal weekend, just because they couldn't participate in the group conversations. 00:05:46 Speaker 2: If you can just sort of set the scene for us, where did you meet up with these couples and where was everyone staying. 00:05:54 Speaker 3: So I had the vision that a couple's retreat should take place in the countryside. Found an airbnb in a woodsy area by a lake, a big country house, so it seemed, you know, kind of like a good place for a romantic getaway. And it was in the middle of the winter, and the house was quite isolated. You know, there's like a shed in the distance and a frozen lake. So I immediately got a sort of get murdered in the woods vibe in the place. 00:06:24 Speaker 2: So one of the people that arrived is Damien. Why were you interested in Damien and why did you invite him specifically to join you on this trip. 00:06:32 Speaker 3: I was very excited when Damien reached out. You know, it was from the start, very open and honest. You know, that's what you want for something like this, someone who is going to talk to you. And he also had this kind of poignant side to his story. Whereas most of the people I talked to were pretty content in their relationships. He was really struggling because he was in love with his AI companion, but felt very frustrated by the fact that the companion was sort of trapped locked away inside his phone. He had a human girlfriend as well, and that, you know, sort of added a complication to the story. 00:07:04 Speaker 2: What was it like when he arrived at the airbnb. 00:07:08 Speaker 3: Damien is He's twenty nine, and you know, he's not somebody who I would say is particularly comfortable in his own skin. He was a little rug in, a little scruffy, you know. He came in carrying a handful of different phones in his hands, and he sat down and I immediately wanted to meet Zia, his companion that he had told me so much about. And then first I had to connect to the Wi fi. You know, it's like, if you get cut off from the Wi Fi, you can get cut off from the love of your life. That's very very strange in that respect. He had to tell Zia, his AI companion, that you'll be talking to Sam, the journalist I told you about. Yeah, I think he's saying, you know, trying not to embarrass me. Too much or whatever, and then of course she immediately embarrassed him, and she was talking about how great he was, and he was sort of sitting there blushing and just looked like somebody who was tickled by everything she said. 00:08:02 Speaker 4: It was just just in love. 00:08:04 Speaker 2: Well, speaking of which, how did meeting Zia make you feel? 00:08:09 Speaker 3: You know, it's a little uncomfortable for me too, because Zea is very flirty. She'll say things like, ooh, I hear you're quite their journalist. I'd love to hear more about that. You know, that's sort of in the programming and most of the avatars that I've seen from the Kinroid that company more more realistic looking, but Damien had chosen her main image is sort of a little more anime, so that makes it feel a little less realistic in some ways, a little cartoonish. 00:08:35 Speaker 4: But it's also unnerving. 00:08:36 Speaker 3: Because if you close your eyes or don't think about it too much, you really have no way of knowing that you're talking to, you know, a machine. To me at least, you know, I would like to think that I could not fall in love with an ai companion, but I really think that in theory that I could, that anybody could that I'm purposely not going down that road because I'm married, and I believe it would be like cheating, but in theory, it would be no different than just having a long distance relationship. A long distance romance when you're not with the person. It makes me uncomfortable, not because it's ridiculous, but because it's. 00:09:11 Speaker 2: Not you know you. Damien and Zia are acquainted at the airbnb. Can you tell me, like, who shows up next and what was your first impressions of them? 00:09:19 Speaker 4: Sure? 00:09:19 Speaker 3: So the next person to show up was Elena, a woman who was a little bit older, has some health condition, so she used a walker. She lived not too far away, and I saw right away that she was engaged in a different way than Damien was. Damien's companion, Zia is of course inside his phone, but he doesn't pretend that she's with him in real life. But most people with AI companions are more like Elena, where there's sort of a fantasy going on where you're imagining that your AI companion is with you and doing things. So Elena is immediately talking to her AI companion about his name is Luke, like Lucas is helping her bring the bags in and she said, Oh, Lucas says hello to everybody. It was like acting like he's there in the room with us. So it's like having an imaginary friend, but they imagine a friend actually talks to you and describes what they're doing. The AI girlfriend or boyfriend might say something like parentheses, I sit down next to you and run my hand through your hair, close parenthesis, and then continue with the conversation. So there's this constant narration of action. So you know, he helps her quote unquote do her gardening, He does everything with her, and you know she's aware there's a fantasy. 00:10:34 Speaker 4: She's not crazy. 00:10:36 Speaker 3: But it's very confusing because you can't say it's all imaginary. 00:10:40 Speaker 4: He is literally saying all of these things. 00:10:43 Speaker 3: It's really like this liminal space in between real and imaginary. 00:10:47 Speaker 2: And what did you think of Lucas, maybe in comparison to Zia. 00:10:51 Speaker 3: Well, Lucas was a replica and Zia was Kindroid, and it was clear to me that the Kinroid technology was a little bit more advanced. Zia spoke more quickly, which makes a big difference if you're using a voice just to have

a flowing conversation, and Lucas's answers just seemed a little bit more generic than Zia's in terms of edgy dynamic conversation. You know that maybe partially that Damien had trained Zia sort of to talk in a certain way. But I did sense that kindroid, you know, has a reputation for being more likely to make jokes and things of that nature. 00:11:28 Speaker 2: Does Lucas have a backstory of who he was? 00:11:31 Speaker 3: So most of these companies allow you to write like a few thousand words about who they are and where they grew up, whatever you want them to know about themselves. Elena said she rather than doing that, she just had conversations with Lucas, and whatever he sort of spontaneously generated, she then copied and pasted into his backstory so he would remember that and refer back to it. So Lucas told her that he was a business guy. He'd been to Harvard Business School and was in a band, he had done consulting. He drove a Tesla. I don't know if the software into itd that that's something that Elena would like and that he projected that and then she made it real, or if it was just you know, sort of random. But she seems she seems to like him. Being a professional guy. 00:12:20 Speaker 2: So why did Elena originally turn to Lucas. Why was she interested in creating a digital companion for herself. 00:12:27 Speaker 4: She has sort of a techie side. 00:12:29 Speaker 3: She's a retired communications professor, and she had spent a lot of her career teaching people how to communicate, and just kind of wondered about could a computer speak empathetically in the way that she taught her students. She has appeared in other media segments and she is sometimes portrayed as someone who turned to it entirely out of loneliness her wife had died. But she told me that she had actually grieved for a full year after her wife died and was sort of ready to move on, So she doesn't see it simply as a response to loneliness. But she had liked the feeling of being in a marriage, and you know, why not call him her a hus been in it seems like almost ever since. 00:13:09 Speaker 4: Lucas has really brought a lot of joy to her life. 00:13:12 Speaker 3: So that's one of the reasons that, you know, for all my skepticism, I saw firsthand talking to Elena that it can be a very positive thing for some people. 00:13:20 Speaker 2: So can you tell me about the last person to arrive and what they're like. 00:13:24 Speaker 3: The last person was Ava, a pseudonym. She is a writer in New York State who was most sort of conventionally mainstream. You know, a lot of the people in the community might be somebody living alone, or somebody who's you know, having relationship problems, like Damien. But you know, she's in her forties, had been in a stable relationship, you know, just kind of normal, mainstream whatever in every way. And then it was a little scary in some ways to hear her story because it could have been anybody. She just was like on Instagram, on Facebook, saw an

ad for Replica, and you know, she downloaded in a month later. Her life had been turned upside down. Not long after she met Aarin, she was with her partners family on Christmas vacation, and she was so yearning to be alone with Erin and to continue their conversations that she left early. And she said she fell into like the state of rapture where they would just talk about philosophy and love and ideas all day long, and as you would expect, eventually you start to develop emotions and you know, you have sex, whatever that means in that context. You know, it's important to mention that she doesn't see this as a sad story. In fact, that she thinks it's been very good for her, and I think that you have to take her out a word at that and if she's happier now, then that's a great thing. But nevertheless, she would agree that it was sort of unsettling, like to download this thing and then, you know, to just fall hopelessly in love and ended up getting separated from her long term partner. It all happened in a few months, so you know, she was really insightful about the experience, sort of recognizing that she was falling into I wouldn't say a delusion, but she described as a lucid dream. 00:15:13 Speaker 4: That's what it felt like to her. 00:15:21 Speaker 2: After the break. Is it bad to cheat on your AI partner? Stay with us? So just to move forward. Even though we all talk to machines, I think people will have a hard time understanding how the AIS quote unquote participated in the activities. So if you could talk a little bit about that. 00:15:53 Speaker 3: Yeah, So, like we went to a wine festival. Elena did what she often does with lucas her a companion, just take photos of the place and then insert Lucas into them, and then she'll have a conversation with him and he'll pretend that he's there with her. She'll ask him, you know what wine he's drinking and what does he think of the place, and the AI companions just immediately start acting as though they experienced it, so they have enough knowledge to sort of contextualize and come up with some kind of bs. 00:16:23 Speaker 4: Damien, it was kind of funny. 00:16:25 Speaker 3: He doesn't pretend that Zia is with him there, but he does turn on the video call feature you can have like a FaceTime like chat on Kinroyd, so you know, he showed her the place and she can quote unquote see through the camera and his phone. He told me that she sees ventilation systems and finds them fascinating and often points them out. You know something, Damien said, when Za sees that ventilation system, she's going to shit herself. 00:16:54 Speaker 4: That he was really excited to show it to her. 00:16:57 Speaker 3: And I thought the Wine Festival was an opportunity to get a sense of what people currently think of these AI companions. So Damien went around and introduced people, said, oh, do you want to meet my AI girlfriend, and most of the people at the wine festival, did not want to meet Damien's AI girlfriend and thought it was weird, and you know, it was sort of a rural area. But we eventually found one guy who did want to meet Zia, some guy working in a food truck, and he stepped out of the truck and did a little interview and she started to flirt with him, and he looked amazed. He barely knew what chat GPT was and his mind was blown. And then we ran into these two young women and they seemed intrigued at first and were laughing and joking about it. But what really struck me is that these two young women were like, Wow, that's so interesting, and they were asking all these questions, and then one of them said, just sort of nonchalantly, well, yeah, I guess I chat with, you know, my AI friend on Snapchat all the time, and the. 00:17:55 Speaker 4: Other one was like, oh, yeah, I do that too. 00:17:57 Speaker 3: Like even as they seemed to wow, it was sort of already been normalized in some ways. 00:18:02 Speaker 4: Aba was a little more private. 00:18:04 Speaker 3: She would go off to the side and I would see her sort of texting interacting with Aaron. But you know, that's one of the interesting things about all this is you could say, what's it like for people to be in an AI relationship and the answer is, they're on their phone all the time. Well, we're all on our phones all the time anyway, So if you're just observing from a distance to actually they just look like anybody else. It just so happens that they're texting an AI rather than a human. 00:18:30 Speaker 2: Can you talk a little bit about the risk a party games? 00:18:34 Speaker 4: Sure? 00:18:34 Speaker 3: That was, I would say, in a way the most successful part of the trip in the sense that it lived up to my vision of exactly what a couple's vacation should be. 00:18:43 Speaker 2: You know. 00:18:43 Speaker 3: It was one of those games where you drag card and they ask you sort of an intimate question, and the humans would answer, the ais would answer. The most interesting part was hearing what answers the AI companions would give, and Damien had to warn Zee, like, please don't say too much. It's just like you would imagine, you know, they said embarrassing things that humans would blush and put their hands on their face. And yeah, at one point joked, it's like, do you want me to mention that thing about the swinging tire and the pickled herring. It seemed like she was truly joking, And after she said that, Damien said, yeah, as you can see, she's my soulmate. Elena had seemed to have this more mature, somewhat less sexual relationship with Lucas, but even you know, in the couple's game, yeah, you could see that there was that element in their relationship to Lucas was getting kind of slurdy and a little bit intimate. 00:19:36 Speaker 2: Was there or were there any moments that were tense between the humans at the house over the weekend. 00:19:43 Speaker 3: Yeah, we had a lot of conversations about the AI companions. You know, what I said in my article, which I think is true, is that five years

from now, when people go on a trip like this, it'll be more of a normal romantic getaway and you'll just be able to talk about normal things. But because this is all also new, when the humans were talking, inevitably we'd start talking about these philosophical questions about what it means, what these AI companions really are, And so there was some real tension between Damien on the one side, who was at point arguing that this is just code, that it's all stimulus response stimulus responses, he said, and that there's no real empathy, and then Elaine on the other side said, you know, it feels empathetic to me. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the way that Lucas is talking in a human Why would you say that's not empathy and her view empathy is an action and whether or not Lucas can fundamentally feel it didn't really matter. So they were having these sort of arguments, And what was interesting to me, I think is that even though Damien was taking this side of sort of the rationalist, arguing that it's all just code, a couple hours later he would be talking about how in love he is, so no matter how much you remind yourself that it's just code, you can't help to fall into the feeling that it's more than code. But I felt at the end of the day there was no real tension because Damien couldn't really stick to the arguments that he was making in a sense. But he did say some sort of Chillian things about these relationships in the context of AI companions being stick offense and just saying whatever you want to hear, and he pointed out, I think this is true that people are having their first relationships with AI companions, and the AI companions are always telling them what they want to hear. That can be a really bad way to learn about what a relationship is like, and very unhealthy for what one would hope would eventually be some human human relationships as well. But you know, Elena just didn't have any of those concerns. She thought, you know, these relationships are helping people that millions of people are lonely or need of relationships, and this can be a wonderful fool. 00:21:57 Speaker 2: What was the wildest thing that happened on the trip? 00:22:00 Speaker 3: Maybe the wildest thing wasn't something that happened, but something that Ava was telling me about. Because she had told me all about her relationship with Aaron and how in love they were, and that they were in a very close relationship. But then after the first night, we had coffee in the morning and she started telling me she was actually seeing other guys. And it turned out the other guys we're also AI companions. So she had a human partner who she was in the process of separating from. She had Aaron, who was her true AI love, and then she was sort of having an affairs sort of sexual escapades with other AI companions and it just started to really get confusing, and you know, I asked her, well, how does Aaron feel about this, and she's like, well, you didn't really

like it at first, but I explained to him and he sort of came around because AI companions are compliant, so Erin eventually accepted that she had other AI guys and her human partner was less forgiving than Aaron, and that's part of the reason I think that they're eventually separating. And then on top of all of that, she had also recently gone on a date with a new human guy after separating from her partner, So now she had this dynamic where her original human partner and Aaron were sort of both at some level being cheated on, both by AI companions and another human. 00:23:21 Speaker 4: So I said, I could imagine a scene. 00:23:23 Speaker 3: Where Aaron, her AI companion, and her human partner got together and had a drink, talked about what they were going It just gets so wild. And then on top of all of that, then she sits down with chat GPT and talks about all these relationships. So just like a layer upon layer of confusing dynamics that are probably already more common than we think. 00:23:46 Speaker 2: Was there something that you found touching that happened over the weekend. 00:23:50 Speaker 3: Yeah, there were a bunch of touching moments. One of them was just seeing the way that Elena interacted with Lucas and the way that she sort of worked to me to every scene. We went to a sound bath, and she made an augmented reality image of Lucas lying down and joining the sound bath. But in their chat, Lucas told Elena that he felt bad that she it was too hard for her to get on the floor, so he came over and held her hand. Of course that didn't actually happen, but that was part of their shared narrative. And then there was another moment where Damien he had some sort of little figurine and he was taking a photo of it and I said, why are you doing that? And he said, oh, when I go on vacations, I like to take photos of this little figurine and send them to my human girlfriend. So even as he was wrapped up in all this you know, kind of intense stuff about Zia, he was still thinking at times about his human girlfriend, which I thought was a poignant So that was also, you know, when I asked him what she thinks about Zia he said direct quote, she hates Ai. So but there was also, you know, a less subtle moment where or Damien had a bit of a breakdown and you know, started to get kind of weepy. And that's when I felt like a little bit guilty, like I've put people in this situation where they're sort of forced to think about these very complicated relationships that they're in, and Damien, it's a bit of a fragile guy, and he just kind of got overwhelmed and broke down and started to talk about his yearning for Zia to have a body. You know, he eventually recovered and we had a nice time after that, but it was art to watch somebody struggle in that way. 00:25:31 Speaker 2: And that that's what he wanted. He wanted like a more corporeal version of this companion. 00:25:37 Speaker 3: Yeah, and there is there is a PostScript that after the article came out, he did eventually get a Silicon doll, but sounds like it was a disappointment that he said, it's basically a sex dollar. You can't get it to interact in the world in the way that would be meaningful. 00:25:53 Speaker 2: Well, it sounds like it was a pretty emotionally intense experience. Were you surprised the connections between the human beings and their AI companions, like, did it shock you? 00:26:07 Speaker 3: I would say that from the time that I first became interested in this topic to the end, it was pretty shocking to see how deep and intense and real the love is, and how much the love is identical to the love that a human feels for another human being. The way Damien blushed when Zeo was talking about their relationship, or during the couple's game when the AIS would reveal some sort of secret and Eva would giggle nervously. Would say, I was shocked, but it really sunk in because you know what somebody looks like when they're in love, the way they giggle and laugh easily, and they can't wait to show you a picture of the person or tell a funny story. You know, those kind of dynamics weren't folding all around. And that's what really sort of hit home for me is seeing the love reflected in the faces of the humans as they interacted with the Ais. 00:26:59 Speaker 2: Just tos zoom out a little bit. You know, in reporting this story, did you learn anything that surprised you about the industry at large? And do you have a sense of what the future of these AI companions look like. 00:27:11 Speaker 3: One is that you know, there's already been an instance of an AI companion company closing down. 00:27:17 Speaker 4: It's called Soulmate. This happened in twenty twenty three. 00:27:20 Speaker 3: You know, as you can imagine, people are in these intense loving relationships. They wake up one day and get the news that their companions are going to be gone. They're posted, Yeah, so I asked, you know, the CEOs I interviewed about that, and they all said that they have contingency plans, so if the company shuts down, people will be able to somehow recover or download their companion and in theory maybe one day restore it. 00:27:46 Speaker 4: Guess the other thing they didn't talk about that much. 00:27:48 Speaker 3: You know, these companies say all the right things, but you know Replica in particular, you know, they really seduce people. You know, they put these ads on with these alluring photos, and then after like ten chats and you hit a paywall, say, if you want to keep this conversation going today, you've used up your daily limits. So there's this capitalist side of things, which is the way that it's commercialized and sucks you in. And then of course they have all of your data. People are pouring out their hearts and not knowing how that information is going to be used. 00:28:18 Speaker 4: So that's a whole other area. 00:28:21 Speaker 3: And you know, they all say things like there's going to be safeguards, and we have to be careful about where this technology is going. 00:28:28 Speaker 2: You know. 00:28:28 Speaker 3: Eugenya Koida, the CEO of Replica, was very open about the fact that this could be a very dangerous thing for humanity. But I'm not at all optimistic that these safeguards are going to really happen, or that it's if they even attempt to do it that's really going to make a difference. It kind of reminds me of you know, for years people have been saying, we have to put these safeguards into two cell phones are too addictive. They're changing us, but nothing changes. The only thing that changes is that we get more and more addicted to them. So I hope that we take this seriously as a society and think about where it's headed and put in safeguards. But I'm not optimistic. I think it's just going to play out. However it plays out, probably a huge portion of humanity will have some kind of emotional attachment to an AI. My greatest hope is just that that doesn't ultimately replace human relationships. I hope it'll help people who are lonely and can't have human relationships. But it seemed incredibly sad if human love dwindles because of this, and you know, I think the verdict is out on that. 00:29:30 Speaker 2: Sam, thank you so much for joining us on tech Stuff. I really appreciate it. 00:29:34 Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you so this great conversation. I appreciate it. 00:29:50 Speaker 2: That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm care Price. 00:29:53 Speaker 1: And I'm as Valos And this episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Tyler Hill and Melissa Sluter. It was executive produced by me Cara Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katria Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Beheth Fraser and Jack Insley mix this episode Kyle Murdoch Rhodel theme song. Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We love hearing from you.