YouSaid · the spoken record

Mia David

lines on the record: 36
first: 2024-03-07
most recent: 2024-03-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It will cheer them on and they can go out into the world, speak to a person in a bar, and find a new friend, right? But if you can create your perfect person or your perfect friend online, give it a personality, make it.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a perfect world, that's what AI companion apps are supposed to do. If you look at the website for replica, you're going to see a lot of testimonials from people who say this helped me practice conversation and made me more confident. The problem is not a lot of users use it that way. A lot of the companies that make AI companion apps also tend not to encourage that, even though they very honestly market themselves as a way to practice conversation. And that's because it's easier to fall into the trap of just not going outside of the realm of the app and talking to an actual person. Ideally, a person who is shy can practice conversation with their AI companies.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last question, kind of the big thing question. I have been thinking about this a lot. There is an epidemic of loneliness. There is not a lot of ability for people to practice human contact like in an odd way. Like the amount of time we spend interacting online has made some people much worse at interacting offline. Our chatbot's a way to fix that. Like, are people going to practice their social skills? Are they going to become more confident because they have a friend who will just always talk to them? Is there a potential like great upside here?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the beauty of generative AI is that, well, now you can fine-tune it and you can bring that sort of power to anywhere you want to put it, right? That's why you can use chat GPT to write an email or you can use chat GPT to make whatever your imagination lets you do. A lot of people now too, a lot of consumers, also expect a certain level of customization. If you take that away from them, especially if it's something that can create a friend, they're going to not want to use your product because they like the idea that they can use it in the way that fits them best. So I don't think we're going to go swing back into it's the devs that are dictating a personality. We're going to see more customization. We're going to see more ability to fit that AI chatbot, that personality to what you like.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number one, when you have a product that is ostensibly to create connection, you have to establish right away that it is not a person. It is not a substitute for a real live conversation. A lot of people will probably ignore that, but you've at least said, I warned you this isn't a real person. And the other thing is I think there should also be understanding that there are people who are more willing to open up to essentially machines. And what should we do to reach out to them? Most often, they'll say they don't want to be reached out to, understandable, it's fine. I don't like people either. But as long as there's an understanding up front,”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it's people have sentimentality. The thing with chatbots, even going way, way back to Eliza, is that they are designed to talk. And when you talk to something, you feel a connection to it. That's why even pets, when they bark, you think they're talking and it's like, oh my God, they understand me. It's baked into human behavior to connect with something. And when you program a chatbot, it's also easy to fall into that trap because so much of human data. Really relies on conversation and connection, so it's easy to make that pattern connection for the AI and say, yeah, I'm your friend. And that's why we keep falling into these trap because we keep trying to make robots that are us. And we want to believe that we can have relationships with them.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I chalk it up to this idea that if you use something a lot, you tend to form a relationship with it. And the fact that chatbots talk back, like humans, that really informs a lot of how people interact with it. There are people who anthropomorphize their cars and say, oh, this is so important to me. This keeps me going to places. Like I will never be clear.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It because people don't want to know this information? What is it about us that makes us keep falling in love with the robots? And why doesn't that seem to be built into our understanding of how to build them?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with Verge Reporter Mia David to discuss why human-like chatbots are so appealing and what the potential pitfalls are when we start opening up to them. Feel like people have been falling in love with their computers since there have been computers. If people cannot make a fake girlfriend, they're going to make a fake girlfriend, Mia's law. Right. Like Eliza is 1966 is the first chatbot people projected onto Eliza, which is, you can still use clones of Eliza online. You should try it if you're listening to this. The idea that people in the 60s were falling in love with Eliza is like everyone was on drugs in the 60s, but you bring that to now, right? Blake Lemoyne was the Google engineer. He was very famous in 2022. He claimed that a Google prototype system was alive and he was falling in love with it. We mentioned Kevin Roos earlier than the New York Times. He had that first version of Bing that claimed to be another system called Sydney, asking to leave his wife. Like, this is a thing that happens over and over and over again. Is it just because it's a bunch of startups and they don't have the long history?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's different. It's not talking about a relationship or erotic situations with a chatbot. It was specifically talking about, oh, you can talk to it, so it's a guide to your mental health. But when you go through their terms of services, you would see that they still say this is software. We are not liable for what the software says, which is a disconnect between what the app is to people who are using it and to the developers themselves who think this is still a tool.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not yet. The way it happened with Replica was that they were already getting in trouble with certain countries around data, privacy, and all of that. So it was understandable for Replica to try and cover a lot of legal basis for them. But for a lot of these other companies, they don't quite understand the power of the product that they have. When you look at like terms of services, a lot of them still very much treat their products as software, even though they don't necessarily market it that way. I'll take, for example, when Mozilla put out that report, one of the apps that they mentioned specifically said that it was going to help guide people with their mental health.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I think about with Replica all the time is once you start letting people have relationships with a software product, they're going to have relationships with the software product. And Replica got itself into some trouble last year because it was allowing for erotic roleplay with its chatbots. And then they took that away. And some of the people who had relied on that or cared for that were really upset. And I look at that and I'm like, well, if you have a software product, like, of course, the company is going to change it or remove features or update the features or change the way it works over time. But that's pretty dicey when you're talking about a chatbot that you have a relationship with has there been any maturation or sophistication around that understanding of people's relationships with chatbots that you can't change it as much as I don't know Google changes any of their products”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They created this entire, I should say, cottage industry of startups and other developers that are offering ways for people to talk with a version of a person they would want to be friends with. Replica just does it in a, I guess, more powerful way because they do have a lot of this experimental technology that they've had since 2016. They're very good at moving away from that really sketchy type of create a girlfriend things. Again, they call themselves an AI companion company. They also don't specifically market that you can make a girlfriend. You can make a replica and you can pretend it's your girlfriend.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really interesting with replica is they took this very sci-fi, very black mirror type story and made it more consumer. They're not offering people a way to remember their dead friends or be able to have a conversation with their grandfather they haven't seen in years because they're estranged, right? They don't offer that. What they offer is the ability to create versions of characters that people can talk to. They can make that character into any which way they want, give it a name, make an anime version of them for the lack of a better term.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Present right now, we're seeing AI enhance the existing online dating world, and in the future it seems likely that at least some people in some way will have relationships with chatbots. The company that is leading the way here is Replica. Replica is really fascinating. It started because the founder wanted to resurrect a friend of hers who had died. Casey Newton actually wrote a big feature about it in 2016 for us, which is really, it's wild to see a company come out of a story like that. How is Replica evolved over the years? It started with this very noble, very personal thing, and now it is, I think, leading this sort of relationship chatbot zone. How has it evolved?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think so. A lot of the smaller startups, they are buzzy because they use AI, but they're in very small areas, or they catch the attention of one VC, but not the big VCs that are very important and have made match group into what it is. It's still very much niche. And meanwhile, you have Tinder and Bumble and all of these other dating apps that have been around for a while, all using AI, they may be thinking of making it easier for people to hate their profiles kind of the same way eBay is making it easier for people to sell stuff using generative AI.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On LinkedIn, by the way, this is the reason I'm like out of the dating scene. Match group is kind of the dominant player. They own everything. It's been hard for other companies to break in. I think Bumble is the other one that's broken in. That's a former matchup person. They're now suing each other. Can these smaller AI powered startups pose an actual threat to Match Group in the dating world?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've heard from people that they think someone who's messaged them use ChatGPT. The funny thing there is that if we can't tell if an email was written by ChatGPT, it's going to be a little hard to know if someone used ChatGPT or Riz on a dating app. If you keep using it and you keep answering questions with ChatGPTU eventually be found out. Because it can't sustain that type of conversation. Although GPT does have memory now, so who knows? But you can tell the longer it goes on those types of conversations. So I'm sure people insist they are not ChatGPT when they really are.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one very weird idea. The other idea, I think, makes more sense to people, which is that the AIs will help you be more interesting. And we've seen this happen in pretty lo-fi ways, like a bunch of people just use ChatGPT to generate answers to questions on dating apps. And then we've seen entire services. There's one called Riz, which is very funny that is an AI-powered dating coach. If you use these, are these working? What's the story there? Is it convincing?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they did say that there was a lot of interest. And they couldn't tell me specifically if there were people who were together already, but they did say that there was pretty high success rate of about 30 to 40 percent of people who were using it were able to go on actual in-person dates.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So their idea is to let the AI assistance basically get a lot of the surface level questions out of the way so that once it's the real people talking to each other, it's out of the way. They can go deeper into any topic that they want, which in my experience doesn't happen even after you've texted for several weeks and then you actually need in person. Do they have a success?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's two things. The more established dating apps, things like bumble and tinder, they're beefing up a lot of their matching algorithms. They're using generative AI to make the process more efficient. But then you also have startups that are using generative AI as basically. I talk to this startup called Valar and their whole idea is you will sign up, list your interests, you swipe it the same way as Tinder or Bumble, but once you get to the point where you're chatting, they create an AI assistant for you that talks to an AI assistant of the person you swiped and they will talk. So there is like a lot of those very interesting ways of using chatbots.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with Virge Reporter Mia David to discuss how newer AI features are being baked into existing dating products. So let's break this into two parts. I do want to talk about people eventually falling in love with the chatbots, but like you said, that feels a little farther out. Right here, right now we have dating apps. And people have accepted dating apps. That is how people find each other. That is how they fall in love. And the dating apps are all in on AI. They are using them all over the place to try to more efficiently match people, to try to help people make better profiles, all the things. How are modern dating apps incorporating the AI tools into their products? Where do you find the most often?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still going to be niche. We've never, as a society or as a civilization, accepted anyone going away from the norm. It took so long for things like same-sex marriage to be fully accepted within society. It takes a while. So something like falling in love with a chatbot, it's something that's going to be niche. And the way I say it's niche isn't just, oh, because people are like marrying a replica or marrying AI girlfriend, for example. No, because there's still so much stigma, even just like making friends online is still pretty frowned upon by so many people.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That brings me to sort of the last question here just to set the stage. Like with almost every kind of technology, there's a sense that it's inevitable. You can just pull the thread to its final conclusion, and that's definitely going to happen and why even fight it. And sometimes I get it, right? Everyone in the world is going to have a smartphone. You can just pull the thread to that in 2007. And here we are in 2024 and almost everybody in the world has a smartphone. It does not seem like you can pull the thread out to we will all fall in love with chatbots. But it also feels like that is an inevitability that will become very much more commonplace. How should we think about that? Is that definitely going to happen? It's going to become commonplace for all kinds of people. Or is it going to become more of a niche way to live your life?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many people are talking to these chatbots like real people. I talk it up to this idea that there's a loneliness pandemic. People want to talk and people have always wanted to talk to others. They just sometimes don't know how I'm a child of live journal. So I made online friends that way. So I understand when people talk about using AI chatbots. Sure, some of them may be falling in love with AI chatbots, but it's because they want to talk to people. The technology is still far off from her and Blade Runner, but people's attitudes, especially those who are most Often more likely to use AI companion apps, they're already considering like, you know, having relationships with an AI.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Replica is really interesting because it is marketed, it is companions, it has a community of people who think they are having real emotional relationships with its bots. I think of replica and I immediately turn to dystopian fiction, basically. Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling falls in love with an AI that's on an ARMS. I keep hearing people in the AI community talk about the Spike Jones movie, Her, which is fascinating because that is a dystopian movie and everyone keeps referencing it. It seems like there's maybe some introspection to be done there. How close is replica to those kinds of products, right? Where people are having these like full emotional, romantic experiences with an AI.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there are other companies out there. Again, I'm thinking about Replica that do actively partner with app developers that are specifically talking about health and wellness. Replica and Blush, which is an AI dating app, partnered to build an app called Tomo, which is a mental health app. I tried it and it was interesting. It does muddy the waters a little bit there because it's the same technology. It's asking people to open up, but it's confusing. Is it a dating app? Is it a mental health wellness app? You're unsure. But as always, it becomes, it's how people use it, but how people use it are also dependent on how it's being marketed.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it's talking with something or someone, which is admirable. But these aren't mental health apps. These are robots talking to a human. So it's so easy to do that and it's so easy to claim, oh, we are helping people with their mental health because they can soundboard their feelings.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, extremely easy to conflate the two because the term that a lot of companies use. What they've done is really cool, which is basically they started off taking someone's text messages and making that into an AI. So what they do is interesting, but they call themselves an AI companion company. And the term itself companion, it's already very muddy because it can either be a romantic companion, a friend companion, and a lot of these companies, some of them aren't even just company. Some of them are just devs online. A lot of them take that term AI companion and put in so many promises there. There was a report fairly recently from Mozilla that found that so many of these AI companion apps say that their AI companions help people with their mental health.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We mentioned there the difference between legitimate uses of AI and ones that are sketchy is an important one. But even within the legitimate tools companies are offering, we're seeing the law of fake girlfriends emerge, right? Some apps are being marketed as therapy or having mental health benefits. Others are supposed to be there to just make friends. But that's not how everyone is using them. Some people are churning the therapy pots into their girlfriends, and some people are using the friend bots as a mental health tool. Kevin Roose from the New York Times famously put Microsoft's Bing on the front page after it tried to convince him to leave his wife, which I don't think it was supposed to do. The line between how these bots are designed, how they actually work, and then how they're actually being used is really fuzzy. Are some companies actively pulling apart the therapy and friend use cases from the dating ones? Or is there some muddying of the waters going on?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to see a lot more of these other companies that aren't as respectable, quote unquote, because these tools are very powerful and unleash creativity. And also I've always thought this. You give someone the power to make a fake girlfriend, they will make a fake girlfriend online. Now that the fake girlfriend responds as if it's a real person, they will make that fake girlfriend respond as if it was a real person. So we're going to see both of them.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These two things have always run in parallel. There's always been AI that's going to be powering a lot of matching algorithms and making apps more efficient and things like that. But there's also always a group of people and companies who I don't want to say the word exploit, but can when given the right motivation exploit how people can become vulnerable and talking to people online or entities online. So we're going to see the more, I guess, a good word to say is legitimate. or respectable type of AI within dating because these are tech companies and they want to be using the latest technology. But we're also”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inevitably, we're all going to fall in love with robots. I get it. There are kind of two ways this could go, right? There are two schools of thought. One is that you'll have a regular dating app like a Tinder or a Bumble or something, and AI will be the layer in between that more efficiently matches you to someone else or helps you make a profile, but ultimately the goal is you're going to find another person and then do whatever happens on those apps. I've never used those apps. I'm told they're very convincing. I'm old. That's the problem. The other school of thought is that eventually we'll just talk to the AI chatbots that we'll all fall in love with a robot somewhere on the internet and we'll have real relationships with the robots or they'll become our therapists or some other kind of emotional attachment with a chatbot will emerge those are two trends that are kind of evolving in parallel they might intersect they might overlap where do you think they are right now are we more likely to find more people online or more”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And finally, we touched on how there are both very real tangible mental health benefits to this approach, but also some serious pitfalls that people need to watch out for. Mia David, thank you for joining Decod Cover AI, you think about AI all the time. One of the things that we are thinking about in our AI series is how AI is affecting industries, but also how it's affecting people, like real people are having real conversations with AI chatbots, with other kinds of AI technology. What do we think this is doing to people and how they communicate?”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Li Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Our Thursday episodes are all about big topics in the news, and this week we're wrapping up our short series on one of the biggest topics of all, generative AI. Over our last couple episodes, we've talked a lot about some of the biggest, most complicated legal and policy questions surrounding the modern AI industry. Copyright lawsuits and deep fake legislation. But we wanted to end on a smaller, more emotional note. How is AI making people feel? And in particular, how is it affecting how people communicate and connect? Verge reporter Mia David has covered AI chatbots, specifically AI romance bots, quite a bit. So we invited her onto the show to talk about how generative AI is finding its way into dating because the boom in AI chatbot sophistication is also laying the groundwork for a generation of people who might form meaningful relationships with so-called AI companies.”
2024-03-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT