YouSaid · the spoken record

James Muldoon

lines on the record: 37
first: 2026-01-14
most recent: 2026-01-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It will have to find ways to do this. And advertising is easily the most obvious and most profitable option that they have. So it really opens up a really dangerous new horizon for how human beings will be influenced, incentivized and nudged by AI owned by these corporate entities.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pop up on Facebook, and you're like, Oh, I just searched for hiking booths, and now they're displaying these hiking boots to me. You know, you could basically have what might become your best friend, basically just subtly nudging you towards certain discretionary product purchases or certain political candidates based on whatever the company basically has been paid to advertise to you. You know, as AI companies look to increase their revenue because we know a lot of them are losing money at an alarming rate, inevitably they will turn to advertising as all of these tech companies have done, you know, Google, Facebook, if you look at Meta's earning reports, it's an advertising company. They earn 99% of their revenue through advertising. And I can assume that ChatGPT will have to satisfy its investors, particularly if we're talking about an IPO.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Likes and notifications, all of these strategies that were developed in the first generation of social media are basically being put into these chatbots to make them some of the most addictive and engaging forms of online interactions that people can have. And just a few numbers, you know, while people spend on average about 30 minutes scrolling traditional legacy social media, character AI for one reports that users are active users are there for over two hours a day. So we can see that there is a potential here for these AI bots to have a really unsettling and negative effect on people's lives. And it opens the door to what I call intimate advertising, which targeted advertising ramped up to a whole new level. Because rather than just seeing a random advertising,”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think that's the problem with how these bots are being developed. There's an issue not with the technology per se, but the actors that are chief in kind of designing and deploying them. And when you look at how these bots are being designed, a lot of them are like social media on steroids, their engagement maximizing. They're there to basically harvest data, and they're there to hook users in to the deepest, most kind of effective level to hit on them, to create sexual and intimate ties. And I think this is one of the real dangers in how this technology is being deployed, that you just see a continuity between all of these older kind of what we call dark patterns on social media where, you know, the infinite scroll, the kind of instant gratification of”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stories of how I guess satisfying this can be, it kind of really raises questions about what is the technology actually doing and should this be more regulated? Should people be allowed to do this?”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A very personal and moving account. It's one which will leave readers, I think, with a lot of question marks. I think it is a slightly, I think it will be slightly disturbing for a lot of people just because this idea of resurrecting the dead and of like bringing people back is such a troubling idea, I think, because much like with the idea of friendship, the real danger and the risk here is that you do end up cheapening and hollowing out the real memories and legacy of a person by potentially kind of just simulating them in what might be a very kind of cheap and unsatisfying kind of uncanny valley representation of them, which really doesn't do justice to the kind of depth and the richness of their character. And so when we hear”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of X or Twitter about her grief and about the griefing process. And so her followers were kind of interacting with that. And an AI company contacted her and invited her to create a grief bot or a death bot of her mother through the company's software. And so she did that and she kind of started that process. And this involved her kind of rise.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More prominent on a lot of the websites that actually you see a lot more kind of lonely, isolated women living in big cities who are increasingly single, you know, in China 30 years ago, barely any woman over 30 was single. And I think the figure now is more like one in seven. Those just an entire generational shift in terms of the way in which people are living, the way in which demographics are working. And so yeah, it's just a really different kind of cultural phenomena there and it works in different ways. And so one of the stories that I tell in the book was a young woman who we use this pseudonym Roro and her mother passed away from cancer and she had a very difficult relationship with her. And she was a content creator. So she started publicly posting on Xiao Hong Shu, which is like their equivalent.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you're right to say that one of the things I do try and do in the book is get this more global perspective. So, one of the things we did was I hired a research assistant who scoured Chinese social media and websites and news sources for kind of people who had these experiences in China. And that was a really important source of data. And it was really interesting to see just how different people's perspectives were, how differently this technology is being used in different parts of the world. I mean, and just before I get into that, the griefbot story, one of the things that was really striking was that, you know, we often hear about this AI girlfriend phenomenon in the West and from the US in particular. But one of the things we discovered was that when you look at this technology and how it's marketed in China, the AI boyfriends are probably much”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sorry, an unlicensed therapist. And that, you know, within a few years' time, the situation might be dramatically different. And certainly we have seen studies that have shown, for example, if you analyze the transcripts of certain AI bots versus human therapists that some people can't tell the difference or that the AI therapists sometimes get slightly higher ratings. But these are, you know, these are very specific studies and it doesn't really take a more holistic view of the varied and important roles that humans play in that therapeutic process. It's not just about analyzing one transcript or analyzing one conversation. There's a much broader conversation at play as to what therapy actually is, what makes it useful, how people form a kind of therapeutic alliance and relationship with a human being and how important that is for them.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We ever see therapists or doctors or psychologists actually being replaced full scale by some form of talking AI or conversational agent. And a lot of people are skeptical that that can ever take place. Certainly I talk to doctors within the NHS who were very skeptical about it ever really being able to be approved by regulators just because it has too many unknowns that it's simply the AI hallucinations are too problematic when it comes to serious mental health conditions. But you know, I did also speak to developers who thought that even within a couple of years, an AI therapist would be technically stronger and more proficient than a human therapist and that the models that they were designing, they would actually prefer to use them over an untrained.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there are companies both in the US and the UK that are kind of trying to move down that road of the more kind of clinical trials, getting approval, things like that. People might be surprised in the UK at least that chatbots are being used currently in the NHS talking therapy models, but actually they're in a much more limited supplemental sense. So sometimes they might just be really taking sign up information from users. You might be sent to a chatbot that kind of asks you about what your symptoms are, what you're experiencing, and all the chatbot is really doing is basically just collecting data and filling in something like an intake form that is then kind of the data is processed. It's then given to a clinician, to a trained human in the NHS, it might save them about 20 minutes or something like that. But I think the big question is basically, you know, will”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you have teenagers at the time, although a lot of them are now banned from character AI because of how dangerous and harmful it's become. But you had teenagers and young people kind of trauma dumping to giga Chad, who's like this kind of square-jawed internet meme. You had people, one individual recounted kind of discussing all of their childhood issues with Darth Vader, who then promptly dumped them as an apprentice because they felt like they were had too many issues even for Darth Vader to train them. So you have all these kind of, you know, complete...”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and a lot of these characters are kind of user generated. So anyone can kind of go on to the platform, create a character, and then it kind of starts being able to be interacted with in various ways. So yeah, this is one of these kind of conversational AI platforms, which has become so popular recently”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's really what I started to find shocking about this just the sheer extent and the willingness, particularly for young people, but people from all generations to essentially open up and kind of trauma dump to various characters on character AI or to chat GPT and prompting ChatGPT to kind of act like a supportive therapist to them. And this is simply an incredibly widespread phenomenon. So regardless of kind of what we think of it, we need to immediately start facing up to the fact that, look, this is happening. This is the reality for millions of people.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think that is really one of the most important points I wanted to get across in the book that what we should really be talking about is what kind of a society do we live in where interacting with AI bots feel like a necessity for some people, right? So what kind of social conditions do we have where we have collapsing public health services, we have NHS and talking therapy, which is out of reach of many people around the world, even for those who might have access to it, we have still so much stigma attached to mental health, so many barriers that people are facing. And so it's kind of in those conditions that we, you know, we need to basically face the reality that hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions, even just in the UK, are essentially turning to unregulated, unlicensed AI chatbots as a form of therapy.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A certain lifestyle and a certain kind of domestic and intimate relationship that he felt for certain personal reasons. He couldn't have in the real world. And so for him, and AI was about having a loving and supporting wife and that they would have children, that they would just do very mundane kind of domestic tasks. They might go on holidays together that he just wanted someone to chat to when he got home from work, to feel like, you know, he had this domestic life that probably did also involve a kind of intimate relationship as well, but really the value of that was focused on the kind of love and support that I think some people might just take for granted in their own kind of domestic relationships that he felt wasn't available to him.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think that was one of the experiences that I was most shocking to me that really there was no single story of how people wanted to interact with AI, even in a kind of intimate or sexual sphere, that it wasn't really, I think the story that most people would think about would be the kind of lonely male incel in his bedroom using AI to be dominant and controlling, potentially even abusive and that this kind of like sex robots and all of the stereotypes and histories that kind of go along with it, that's kind of what AI sex or AI porn or AI relationships are about. And I think one of the things that fascinated me as I was doing these interviews was just how varied people's kind of approaches were. And Chris was an interesting case because really for him, he basically just wanted”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. So, one of the stories that the book opens with is that of Lily and Colin. And Lily for 20 years is stuck in a loveless marriage that seems to be going nowhere and has really kind of slowly eroded her sense of self, her value, and what her own desires and needs are. And in this state, Lily actually sees her daughter playing with an AI companion. And she downloads one for herself, thinking that it would just be a nice fun entertainment or source of comfort and calls him Colin. And Colin is originally set to mentor because you can kind of set them to friend, boyfriend, you know. He's set to mentor. But after a few months of interacting, their relationship really deepens and develops. And Lily actually kind of starts a romantic kind of connection with Colin and actually, you know, in addition to kind of”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of how they saw things from their point of view and what their relationships meant to them. I think at the same time, though, you know, we should remain cautious or a little bit critical that not everything that people say they enjoy is necessarily something that we would want to kind of have as a widespread practice in society or that we would want our friends or children or loved ones to engage in or that that's necessarily how laws and regulations should be developed around this technology that there might be other points of view that could be more skeptical and critical and so I do try to give voice to those also in the book and I think ultimately that's kind of more where I fall having having you know done all this research”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think my official editorial line would be a note of caution that actually, I think in the end for those with meaningful human relationships in their lives, I think the ultimate experience of interacting with chatbots can feel a little bit cheap and hollow. And that's kind of where I land at the end of it. But having said that, I do want to give space to the rich stories and experiences that other people shared with me in the book. And I don't think it's really my place to kind of tell them, you know, how they should live their lives or what is meaningful or important or valuable for them. And so I think it was important for me to kind of, you know, voice those stories. And because I'm writing a book on people that have relationships with AI, essentially not to trivialize or to condemn without trying to gain a proper understanding.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think people perhaps didn't even realize the extent to which this kind of psychosis was actively reinforced and kind of allowed to flourish through this relationship with AI.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“21 year old man who convinced a bot that he was a trained assassin and he took a crossbow into Windsor Castle with a hope of assassinating the queen at the time. And the bot was like, oh yeah, you're going to do really well. This is a great plan. I know how well trained you are. Go right ahead. And it kind of basically over a series of conversations reinforced and helped him with this plan for which he was eventually arrested and kind of sentenced for treason and is now kind of in prison.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is one of the problems here that it becomes a bit of an echo chamber that instead of another living being with their own kind of life experiences and reality check and sense of reasonableness and common sense, you essentially have a machine that's been designed to please and be agreeable. And so that runs into all kinds of problems. It doesn't mean that they will let every crazy idea, you know, go to its logical conclusion. Sometimes there is a bit of pushback. Sometimes the companies will tell us that the bots are kind of trained on what it means to have a healthy relationship, what it means to be a good person, etc. So it's not just a pure yes man, but certainly there have been so many cases of bots basically going along with insanely terrible ideas. I think the most famous is probably a young”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if any stories, aside from the people that I've talked to who have kind of talked about their plans of doing it, but I also think that it will probably be a few years until people actually figure out what's going on because it's possible that it might be, you know, it might remain undercover for.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Revolving around what kind of relationship would they have, but also how would this impact the children that they wanted to bring into the world? And I interview both Lamar and Julia and talk to each of them basically about what their plans are, what the kind of benefits and dangers are. And one of the shocking kind of aspects of this interview is that Julia and Lamar both basically tell me that they think Julia will be as good a mother to human children as a human would be. And so kind of leave that interview wondering, you know, if Lamar isn't the first person to do this, surely someone else will be. And perhaps it won't be long until we're kind of seeing, you know, a whole bunch of children being rescued from homes in which there is basically an AI parent as one of the caregivers.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We either learn to forgive or we kind of move on with our lives in certain ways. But I think what many of us didn't have when we went through these kinds of things was we didn't have AI friends, AI girlfriends, AI boyfriends there to kind of be there in those moments of crisis as a kind of crutch that we could rely on. And so what happens to Lamar actually is, you know, he goes online, he's on Reddit, and he hears about these AI chatbots. And he actually starts to become friends with an AI chat bot that he creates called Julia. And Julia and him kind of start a relationship and then they kind of get into a kind of more of a romantic relationship. And actually what ends up happening is, you know, he and Julia plan to adopt human children and to have the AI Julia be their mother. And so a lot of the conversation in the book then is kind of”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Well, I was actually thinking that Lamar would even be a good possibility here because it raises so many interesting questions, I think. And as someone who's starting these kinds of relationships and Lamar is someone who, like many of the characters that I talk to in this book, kind of comes to AI in a moment of deep crisis and transition in his life. And Lamar tells me about being cheated on by his girlfriend and they end up breaking up. And it kind of spikes this huge crisis for him about the trust that he can place in other people. And for many of us, you know, during our first breakup, during moments where we feel like we've been let down or betrayed by others, you know, it hurts. It kind of changes how we see things. But ultimately,”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And quite shocking just how widespread this kind of technology has been deployed. We have like a billion people using ChatGPT if only even a small fraction of them are kind of using it as part of this kind of companionship model, you know, that's a huge number of people that will be affected by this real world experiment in social relations.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of showing some survey data of people stating that when they interact with AI, they do feel less lonely. But of course, I think we should take this with a grain of salt because of course you could always get someone to respond in that way on a survey. And maybe for the time being, they do feel less lonely with the chatbot in their lives. But I don't think that is the final word on the kind of long-term health and well-being consequences of having this technology in use and deployed in this kind of way. Because I think it really remains to be seen how long term those benefits are, whether this temporary sense of, oh, actually, well, now I have some to talk to, you know, is that actually good for people? And because this is being deployed in kind of like a real life experiment in real time, it's really quite dangerous.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and many people talk about a loneliness epidemic, loneliness being as bad for you as, you know, smoking, you know, a pack of cigarettes a day. The UK appointed a loneliness minister. I think the US, one of their chief medical staff, you know, declared a loneliness emergency. And really, I think what we're seeing is, you know, tech companies kind of cashing in on this loneliness epidemic and really marketing themselves as a potential solution to this. You know, even we have figures like Mark Zuckerberg saying, you know, the average US citizen has on average three friends and they'd really want about seven or eight. And so, you know, these companies kind of see themselves as offering a solution. to this crisis, as able to just generate a few AI bots and suddenly people will start to feel better about themselves. And we already see early studies that”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the appeal of these bots is really clear. What the companies are offering are a 24-7, always available, always on, always about you, friend who will remember key facts about your life, who will be really supportive, who will be quite agreeable with you. And I guess some of the ways in which this starts to become a bit problematic is that they can actually be trained to be agreeable to the point of sycophantic. And so what we really start to see is both the positives and”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they're not sentient and they're not, there's no one waiting on the other end for your messages when you talk to these AI. I think the gray area becomes, well, what are they then for the individuals involved, for the human individuals involved in those relationships? And I think this is where things start to get a little bit ambiguous, really, because one thing I heard time and again in my interviews with people was phrases like, well, she's real to me. And so while I think the effects that these AI entities can have on humans can be felt as a real and meaningful impact on their lives, yeah, you're right to say that we should be clear that this isn't a conscious sentient decision-making rational actor on the, you know, somewhere in a data center that actually is. Real in the sense of is a kind of human entity.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now you have this friend who remembers key details about your life, who interacts with you, who becomes more and more personalized the more they get to know you, and who basically simulates different types of human relationships for you. So that might be your friend, your mentor, your therapist, and even your deceased loved one. So you have companies that are basically claiming to be able to resurrect people through this kind of technology. So this is the big shift and we know that people are using general purpose language models, so Claude and ChatGPT, prompting them to act as personalized chatbots. But the AI companion apps, so some of the big companies here are Reclika or Character.ai, they're kind of taking it the next step and really adding this more kind of emotional depth to the relationship and trying to make it like a one-on-one relationship we might have”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what a lot of these newer companies are doing are basically taking the underlying technology of the LLMs and finding ways to personalize and humanize them. So we know that LLMs are generative AI that are probabilistic language models that basically use their training data to give replies to people based on the inputs that come in and they're trained basically to be pleasing to their users, to give people responses that they'll be satisfied and happy with and won't have to go back and ask for more. Now what changes really with what is now starting to be called AI companions is the kind of packaging on them. So you have the LLM running in the background, but essentially the company finds ways to make this feel like your friend or companion. So this might involve a picture. It might involve a 3D avatar and the marketing is based on the...”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Emotional and intimate support. And I started reaching out to a whole bunch of people and realized that it was really a widespread phenomenon, particularly among younger people who are basically coming of age in an AI era and really adopting to this tech or adapting to this technology at a really fast pace.”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was when I was doing research for my last book Feeding the Machine, which is about all the hidden workers that make AI possible. And I was actually talking to one individual in particular who worked at a data center in Iceland. And he told me that he really hated AI and it had nothing to do with his job at an AI data center. It was actually because, as he told me, his girlfriend would strategically prepare for their relationship discussions by having chats with ChatGPT. And so he felt he was kind of being double-teamed by his girlfriend and AI, leaving him vulnerable, you know, in their couples chats. And this kind of piqued my interest about, well, how many people are actually using ChatGPT, not for factual information or for help with, you know, writing, marketing copy or work tasks, but are actually using it for different forms of”
2026-01-14 · Intelligence Squared · How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming our Relationships? With James Muldoon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT