← The Good Sex Project
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- [00:08]
ICCU Announcer
It's ICCU's new member month and a chance for you to make some serious green from now until June 30th. You can get up to $250 when you open a new membership with checking. So go ahead, join in a branch today or online@ ICCU.com NewMemberMonth Membership required. Must have checking with debit card, E branch and E Statements account. Must remain open for six months. Offer expires 6-30-20. See website or visit your local branch for more details and complete terms and conditions.
- [00:40]
Acast Promoter
ACAST Powers the World's Best Podcasts here's the show that we recommend.
- [00:50]
James Richardson
Hello there. I'm James Richardson and I host the Tony Football Show. Now this summer, the biggest sporting event in the world, the Football Men's World cup, is heading to Canada, Mexico and especially the United States. And we're going to be there too. We are packing up and heading to Los Angeles for the duration. Which means that every day straight after the last match has concluded, you can catch some hot takes, instant reaction and insightful analysis from ourselves sat around the pool in la. Sounds like we're going to have a lot of fun doing it. I hope you're going to be joining us too. It's from June 10th all the way up to July 19th, the day of the final. Just search for the Tony Football show wherever you get your podcasts
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Interviewer
Foreign.
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Acast Promoter
Helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com
- [01:50]
Podcast Introduction
Kyoto Koutou this episode discusses AI technology and sex, including deepfake pornography and sexual violence in online spaces. Please take care while listening. This podcast was made with the support of New Zealand on Air Kia Ora
- [02:08]
Melody Thomas
Friends Melody Here with a bonus episode from the Good Sex Project about what happens when artificial intelligence enters our intimate lives. For this conversation I'm joined by Dr. Rebecca Saunders. She's a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at Cardiff University in the UK and her current research projects investigate the impact of smart and AI technologies on on sexual health and wellbeing. She's just wrapped one project that looks at relationship apps and sex tracking technologies. We'll get into that more soon. They are fields that are completely unregulated and are having a significant impact on people's attitudes and behaviour around sex. I started our conversation by asking when AI started to show up in the sextech space in a way that we could actually feel.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yeah, there's so many AI sex related products. Like tens of millions of people are using Replika, a quite sophisticated chatbot and a High percentage of them have at least tried to have some kind of like sexual interaction with it. I read One statistic that 20% of Americans have used AI to have a relationship or have some kind of sexual connection with. You know, you have relationship mediators, as they're called, that you're supposed to use while you're having an argument, and AI relationship coaches that you use as part of a relationship and lots of other different kinds of products.
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Interviewer
Yeah. And there's even sexual consent apps.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yeah. So the idea is like you input a bunch of tick box things of like, I consent to this, but not this before you have sex and then is a record of it. And I think that that technology is indicative of a broader use of technologies to try and fail to solve the complexity of consent. So for example, like I've seen some AI assisted sex education platforms that are supposed to teach consent and I think the question that comes to mind for me is when technology is offered to solve like an educational issue, it's often because the funding has been stripped away from the kind of public institution that could have provided that. Not that our education system certainly in the UK does a good job of providing fit for purpose consent education, but,
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Interviewer
but instead of funneling more resources into it to empower the people who know to get the information across, it's like the robot can do it cheaper.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yes, exactly. Those kind of creative, in depth, in person, interpersonal ways of learning human relationship skills, they get lost when there's less money going into those public services. And then as you say, the technology is offered as kind of a mask for that. And I think a big question that we need to ask in relation to like sex education and consent related AI platforms and products, is the information accurate? Who designed it? Like, where is it getting its information from? Because often the language that's used in this technology is really, really glowing and filled with promise. But actually if you dig into it, it's rubbish. I mean, the amount of time and knowledge that it would take to create something really good. I just think in a lot of cases that's not happening.
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Interviewer
Yeah, because then you need resource again and you need the money again and it's no longer a cheaper option. My brain just keeps going back to the consent app and the ways that that might be used against people who, you know, where a sexual interaction changes. Because consent is a thing that moves throughout the experience and you can't just tick boxes and be like, right, I've said yes to all of that. Because who knows what happens after that point? I can See where that could go horribly wrong and end up in court trials and just.
- [06:08]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yeah, I mean, I don't even know how it could go right. Like, it was shocking to see how many people said, oh, this is going to be a really useful tool when. Yeah, exactly. As you say. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what consent is. Have you read Tomorrow's Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel? It's this fantastic book about how consent is this complex, changing thing that requires fundamentally, like, a connection between human beings. But the demand that's put on women is you need to be a confident, empowered woman who knows exactly what you want before it's happened. And once you agree to it, then you've agreed to it and that stays in perpetuity. Also, one of the consent apps, it stored and accumulated the number of times you'd signed a consent agreement with a particular person. So the kind of underlying message there was, you've already consented previously. They are just reiterating and amplifying and firming up the most grim misunderstandings.
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Interviewer
I think we forget when we engage with this technology that it is programmed by humans and often programmed by men and men from Silicon Valley and brings all of our own biases.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
And, yeah, I think that's a thing is helping give people a critical eye to be able to look at whatever technology, to be able to really see. What is this thing? What is the message in this thing? It's saying it can do something that is actually going to make my life better. Is it recording me? Like, who created it and why? And the idea that technology is not neutral, I think we associate it with being objective. Like, oh, well, if it's related to data and technology, then it's scientific and we just accept it as it is and it produces facts. So, like with the consent app, it's, oh, you take this messy, fallible human thing that's confusing, you feed it into the app and it, like, spews out this data. And the data is fact. So that sorted that problem. But not only is it just not true, the data isn't fact. It doesn't tell us anything other than the social problem that we created something like that and believe in it in the first place. But the technology is not neutral. It's created by real people in the world. And it's kind of a mirror, really, that holds up our ideas about the world and reproduces them.
- [08:41]
Interviewer
Absolutely. So if intimate interactions and our sex lives, if all of these things are being turned into data, and that data is not necessarily benefiting us in the ways that it promises to. Where's the data going? Who is it benefiting?
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
It depends on what you know. So it could be data is being gathered about you from porn platforms, dating apps and hookup apps, various kinds of apps like intimacy apps and sex tracking apps and smart sexual devices and all of those different industries and technologies and individual companies will do different things with your data. So it might be something like, say like a period tracker app. Maybe the only thing they're doing with your data is understanding their customers better so they can then sell you a product, a premium product. And I know that with free porn platforms, partly it's gathering huge amounts of data about its users. And the free porn platforms are owned by the same company that owns the porn production companies. So similarly to Netflix, there's a really rapid feedback loop between knowing what people want, or at least what they give their attention to, and producing stuff that's aligned with that. A lot of the data is sold to third party companies. Like when I looked into in relation to pornography, the where is that data going about our sexual tastes and our desires? Porn is so connected to so many other industries, film and TV and the news and fashion, loads of different consumer products. So they know what you're doing online before you watch porn and after you watch porn and our sexualities and our desire, like that's a part of lots of people's lives and what it is to be human. And knowing lots of things about how people have sex and feel sexual emotions and have relationships is really important data to have about people.
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Interviewer
There appears to be in most countries and I guess this is a symptom of how fast the technology is evolving and how we are struggling to keep up with it. There seems to be very little regulation in sex tech or AI meets sex tech. What's missing in government policy? Are there any countries that seem to
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Melody Thomas
be doing well with responding to that?
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
So from what I've seen so far, the regulation that exists. So for example, in the uk, the Online Safety act that now requires you to prove your age before you can access pornography online. That doesn't apply to apps, for example. So the only way that you could have your access to apps restricted is if your own parents like manually do that on your phone. And for adults, we really need to look closely at what the activities are that it's asking us to do. Say we download an AI relationship coach. We need to investigate who designed this. Do you know the Gottman Institute? So the Gottmans are these world renowned psychotherapists and marriage counselors. Who and psychologists, I should say, who have decades of research based, expert knowledge about relationships and helping people have fulfilling, happy relationships. They've produced an app that that is obviously kind of bounded. So just because an app is on your phone doesn't mean it's bad. But I think it's really rare for any kind of AI relationship software to be using really any kind of therapeutic framework in the answers that it generates. I think just before you kind of invite one of these technologies into your relationship, think about how much effort you would put into maybe researching like a therapist that you were going to go to, like a couple's therapist. You know, you would find out what their background was. Like are they a somatic therapist or are they an analyst?
- [13:07]
Interviewer
You'd ask your friends, has anyone worked with this therapist before?
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yeah, so I think we need to do some of that investigation ourselves because obviously governments have a really troubling relationship to tech companies and big tech and they're not willing or able to hold companies to account for the content that they produce and the behavior that happens on say, a virtual reality platform or something. So yeah, we need to investigate them ourselves. And I'm sure people do feel this way, but I want people to know that they have agency in relation to these technologies that we use in our private lives. Yeah, I think the man that you were interviewing who sees it as a toy, I think that's a really helpful way of conceptualizing its role in our life is like, this is a toy that I choose, how I use it and I play with it and like trivialize it rather than elevating it. I've been using the word relationship, but we shouldn't use that language like companion and relationship because that's not what it is. And we shouldn't allow companies to tell us like, oh, you can have a relationship with this thing and it's the same as a human relationship. So you don't need a human companion because you've got AI. So I think like language that puts it in its place rather than elevates it to something that it cannot do is good.
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Interviewer
Do we know that that's not true? Like, there's a lot of people using them in this way and claiming that it has helped them with things like loneliness and that they feel more connected. Is there research that shows differently?
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
I think that it's real that people develop meaningful connections. And I'm definitely not saying that's wrong, but I think it's just helpful for us to name it for what it is that you're Feeling these real human emotions through talking to a piece of software, you're not having a relationship. Obviously there's nothing longitudinal research yet there is some early research that like you say, people who've been interviewed about their experiences with AI, a lot of people say they have really meaningful relationships with them and that when say like if the company goes bust or like after three months of pouring your heart out to, to a chatbot, it, it disappears, people are really affected. It's like a death, they say. But I think in the longer term, as in like in the medium term, it's not good for people's well being. And I think, you know, if there's tens of millions of people who are say, using replika for that purpose, that means all those people want something to talk to and want something to connect with, which I think is more indicative of an epidemic of social isolation and loneliness, which is largely caused by, by the dominance of technology in our lives. And so when people say that they feel like it makes them feel great and loved, I definitely don't think we should demean that. I just think we should see that as a symptom of a social problem rather than, oh great, this is a solution to the problem. Technology is so good at approximating vibrant feelings of belonging and connection. Social media platforms, that's why they're so massively successful, because they make people feel so connected to people that they love and it feels so real and alive. And it is in a way. But we know in relation to dating apps and social media platforms, there's huge amounts of research about the long term effects of us spending more time kind of interacting with people mediated by technology. And what's actually happening on another level is we're alone in our house. That is not good for human beings. Like we absolutely can use technology for really useful social things, but we also need real connections with real people who live around us. Like when I. So if we were talking before we started recording about me breaking my foot, when I broke my foot, I was very aware of my community, of the people who lived around me, who cared about me and could help me. Human beings have to have that. We have to have people around us who actually know us. An AI companion is never going to be a meaningful replacement for that.
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Interviewer
The person I spoke to who was using AI as a toy, the main platform he was using, did appear to have a few safeguards in place. For example, when you're interacting with AI in this way, through this platform, it was always a new interaction. There wasn't relationship building it wasn't building experience on experience. It always was starting from scratch, which he really appreciated. There was also some interesting consent stuff in there. Like he described an interaction where he asked the AI about her boyfriend and the AI said he didn't consent to me talking about that. And they all have their individual kind of personalities and boundaries that they're quite firm on, apparently.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Interesting.
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Interviewer
Yeah. Also he's really aware of privacy concerns. So he did a lot of research into who owns the companies and he, he, I feel like he's the person you're talking about who's still using the technology but is safeguarding himself and doing his research essentially.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
That's nice, good, good humor.
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Interviewer
But that same man did talk about how different the interactions with this technology might have been if he was not a 40 year old man in a happy married relationship, but a 14 year old boy who was encountering this technology for the first time. And that is where I get quite concerned as well. Especially with, you know, AI is so good at telling us that everything we want to do or think is such a great idea, at never pushing back, at never saying, oh, I don't know,
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Melody Thomas
that's a step too far.
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Interviewer
And I do really worry about especially young people who are formulating their ideas about real life relationships based on that kind of one way model.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yeah, it's not just for young people, I think for adults, for all of us. We're all familiar with the fact that our phones and social media platforms have been built to be addictive. And AI, especially kind of relationship type AI, they are more empathetic than a human being will ever be because a human being doesn't exist to meet your needs and a human being has its own stuff going on. Even like I read some really interesting research about how even people who were designing the technology themselves fell in love with the technology and said, you know, this is wrong that we're keeping it in a box like it's real. And I've developed this incredibly strong relationship to it because we're wired to feel connected to something that is nice to us and tells us what we want to hear. So that's why I'm kind of against this idea of oh, it's like a rehearsal space. Like the same idea was used in relation to sex robots that have AI. We can use the sex robot or the AI to practice our relationship skills that we can then carry over, but it won't equip us with those skills because it's not designed to, it's designed to do something completely different which is make us feel good and have us spend as much time on the app as possible. And as I read in a couple of interviews with people where they said they were spending hundreds of dollars a month because once it became premium and they'd got attached, they couldn't stop. So it's designed to have us feel connected to it, not to help us learn, certainly skills about consent. And I think consent is such a vital interpersonal skill. Like it's really central to our humanity because our understanding and treatment of consent is about our ability to recognize the autonomy of things other than ourselves, not just human beings but animals and the environment. Like, our development of that interpersonal skill of consent is how you actually gauge the health of a society. So outsourcing it to AI and simplifying it to the point where it's meaningless is really scary.
- [21:59]
ICCU Announcer
It's ICCU's new member month and a chance for you to make some serious green. From now until June 30, you can get up to $250 when you open a new membership with checking. So go ahead, join in a branch today or online@ ICCU.com NewMemberMonth Membership required. Must have checking with debit card e branch and E statements account. Must remain open for six months. Offer expires June 30, 2026. See website or visit your local branch for more details and complete terms and conditions.
- [22:35]
Interviewer
So digital technologies have helped to expose patterns of gendered violence that were previously invisible. Things like the MeToo movement, where everything that had been experienced personally was suddenly in this public space. The screenshotting and sharing of online harassment, these kind of movements and the way that they have been put onto the Internet, I think, has led to a lot of people waking up to the depth and breadth of that harm. But these technologies have also created tools like deepfake pornography that then reproduce and scale that violence in entirely new ways. I guess I'm wondering, as we move further into a future alongside AI, how we balance its potential to help versus the risk it creates.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Definitely holding tech companies to account for things that happen. So for example, yeah, like deepfake pornography and sexual assault in virtual reality worlds, what happens when like horrible sexually violent crimes are committed in those kind of like technologically mediated spaces? Is that tech companies can just say, well, that's just the technology. We created it, but we don't have any responsibility for the stuff that happens on it. They often not just they enable sexual violence, they foster it and encourage it because it's really connected to the attention Economy and stuff that I think a lot of these sex related technologies, like, they rely on people being able to do really horrible things as part of the draw and also part of how it gets advertised because something horrific happens and then there's loads of media stories about it. So I think they have a vested interest in not protecting people. Yeah. So I think trying to get away from that black box idea of just like, oh, the technology exists and we don't know how it got here, but that's just the way it is. And now we all live with it. But more, well, who were the designers and what are all the different steps that went into this? And if you're able to censor lgbtq, like sex education on, on a social media platform, why can't you censor, like misogynistic abuse?
- [24:53]
Interviewer
Now, that's a very good question, isn't it, Rebecca? With any new digital technology or any new technology, there's this wave of fear that comes. We saw it with porn and with dating apps and with social media. I guess I'm wondering how much the current concerns about AI are justified, whether there are things that are being overplayed, whether we're not worried enough if it's a mixture of the two. Like, where do you think we stand if we're looking at it from a less emotionally heated position?
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yes, that is a great question. I think I'm wary of labeling any technology as just inherently bad because it's a tool or it's a toy and people should be able to play around with technologies as they want. I think we want to recognize that technology. Yeah. Isn't plonked on us from above, that it's something that we also can shape how the technology gets used and we get to decide how we use it in our lives. So I think the kind of moralizing and sexual conservativism that's connected to, oh, this married couple have got a sex robot. That's like an AI assisted sex robot or, yeah, someone's having a sexual relationship with an AI simulated boyfriend. I often see with the use of AI relationship software for elderly people who are lonely and isolated, that's considered a social good. But if it relates to sex in any way, then that's seen as morally bad. I think that's unhelpful and is also used to distract from the actual important issues related to it, which are how much data is being gathered. Is this thing recording me? Where is that data going? What is the motivation for tech companies to be insisting that this technology is this necessary thing that we need in our lives, that it's the intermediary that will make our relationships better. I mean, the constant recording that happens to us through our phones and like Alexa, that's what's constructed the massive data sets that's allowed AI to exist. I think it's become like a cliche of, oh, our phone is listening to us all the time, and we say something and then our phone, like, throws up that word on our phone. And yeah, it's creepy, but. Yeah, but when governments become incredibly sexually oppressive very rapidly, as is happening in the United States now, the uses of some of that sexual data, the potential use by state governments of social media and geolocative data of women seeking abortions, like these close relationships between tech companies that are surveilling us and governments can be really dangerous.
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Interviewer
Yeah, well, it is really quite scary. Can we just turn it off? Can we just turn it off?
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yes, you can.
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Interviewer
No, we can individually turn it off, but I just mean globally. Go back now.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yeah, I don't think we can do that.
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Interviewer
I have seen you using the terms data cultures. Can you explain to me what that means and how it's relevant to this conversation? Maybe give me an example.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yes, I would love to do that. So data cultures describe the culture of data that then becomes part of our sexual culture. So that could be things like categories and quantifying things. Connected to quantifying would be optimizing things, breaking things up into parts, and engaging with graphs about things to do with our sexual life. So, for example, in AI Relationship Mediators, I have a couple of quotes here that I took from a few products. So it says that it detects the emotional temperature during an argument and gives you real time conflict analysis. So it's not recording you, but what it actually requires you to do is type in. As you're having an argument, type in everything that's happening. Maybe that would have a regulating effect, but I'm not sure whether that's. Yeah. Gonna help people develop interpersonal skills. But when I was looking into. What does it actually do for you? So you download and you pay for this app, and it means that you can rate the importance of an argument, categorize issues, and log and track all of your arguments.
- [29:42]
Interviewer
Sorry.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
So why I can log and track
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Interviewer
every argument going back 10 years, all on my own?
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yeah. I mean, first. Yeah. What a waste of time. They should have come to us first.
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Interviewer
Oh, my gosh. You can just imagine the arguments and like, well, actually, on July 3rd, 2016, you did this. And that reinforces My point and I. That's so unhelpful.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yes, I like the consent apps as well. It's like why do we need this like data shadow? That's meaningless. So that's part of data culture is this faith in data and seeing it as like scientific and objective. And so long as we're generating data, everything's going to be all right. But in reality, how is that helping people connect to each other, learn important skills like being able to really listen to someone or being able to communicate your own needs? There's a lot of kind of coding and programming language and kind of language of datification and quantification that gets celebrated in these AI products. That's actually the opposite of what makes good relationships. So you were talking about the idea of like having all of your needs met instantly. The kind of figure of the 14 year old boy that it's not helping learn consent skills. So one of the AI relationship bots says always here, ready to make your wishes come true. And a lot of people who in interviews describe why they liked it so much having a relationship with an AI relationship bot was because it was always available. And I think that is not a healthy model of what a relationship is.
- [31:36]
Interviewer
It's not a healthy relationship model. But it's also obviously it's good to have a supportive partner, support a wider networks, but there's always going to be times when you don't have those people and you need to rely on yourself and go into yourself and be there for yourself. And I think if there is someone or something that is constantly available to you to soothe you from the outside in, then that work will not be done.
- [32:00]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yes, because I think like in relationships they are often frustrating and difficult and disappointing and you have to meet your own needs like you say. And that's how we grow up. Like I think there's a real appetite in popular culture now for an understanding of therapy. Like people know what their attachment styles are and they like are aware of kind of the impact of childhood trauma and like our generation and the generations coming after us will be like the most emotionally literate in the history of human society. And this kind of AI like the kind of relationship they're selling is really moving in the opposite direction because it's this really childlike view of a relationship that you can get your needs met whenever you want 24, 7. And that's what an ideal relationship is.
- [32:52]
Interviewer
Can AI ever model healthy relationship skills?
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
I have a couple of quotes from products that are pretty crazy. Yeah. If we can dissect them I'd like to hear what you think about that. One says this can help people learn emotional language and increase emotional literacy. There's an AI dating assistant. So if you're communicating with somebody online, say on a dating app, it just generates the text for you. So you're not even communicating with somebody yourself on a dating app. There's a breakup text generator which describes itself as a personal assistant that helps you navigate difficult conversations. And a couple from AI relationship coaches say they'll give you effortless communication in your relationship. And if you want to understand your partner, let AI do it for you. Why would we want effortless communication that's not possible? Like having difficult conversations is how you actually build trust and know yourself. And isn't that the foundation of love? Isn't that what a relationship is?
- [34:01]
Interviewer
It is interesting because I do feel like if we're using this tech technology with our human brain also engaged, then these claims could be true. Who of us has not used AI to help us with a difficult email to make us sound a bit less passive aggressive? But I think you then really need to engage your human brain and look at what it's given you and si that response back through yourself.
- [34:29]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yes. And a couple of things. Like one is the context of you using it. So if two people are trying to have a conversation in their relationship about sex and both of them are on their phones, that that is what is required to actually use this technology. It means both people being on their phone, looking at their phone and typing things furiously into their phone, then waiting for an auto generated response. It's not, it's helping people connect to their phone, it's finding another way to connect people to their phone, which we don't need.
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Interviewer
Yeah, yeah.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
I think the problem is that. So that quote about, do you want to understand your partner? Let AI do it for you. What they're actually offering people is don't you find your relationship difficult? Just remove yourself from it and put technology in its place. In reality. What that means is your partner fills out a list of things that they like and what is important to them. Oh, I want you to remember my birthday. And then you'll get a notification on your phone that tells you to do that. Or they'll get a message saying, your partner's thinking of you today. It's actually like the actuality of what these things do is often like really rubbish. It is the initiatification of relationships. It's kind of like creating a problem. Not a problem that doesn't exist, but like creating a Problem of, oh, it's impossible for you to connect with your partner. You don't have those skills. You need AI to help you do that. And then, like, making a promise that we wouldn't even want of, the AI will just take care of this for you, so you don't even need to be a part of your relationship fully. And all the difficulties of it. And then the thing that it actually does is completely rubbish and not something we wanted. Oh, great. Now I've got a log of the diff of all the arguments I had and the AI can rank them for me.
- [36:23]
Interviewer
Yeah. Or like, you're telling me that the sex we had the other day felt, like, a bit disconnected and, like, you weren't actually there, but according to my log, you have three orgasms. Yes.
- [36:34]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
And my phone tells me that sex that we were having was curiously destructive. Like, why? Why are we so disconnected?
- [36:43]
Interviewer
How are we so disconnected?
- [36:48]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Oh, yeah, it is mad. Like, some of the language that they use to describe them because they want to cover up the fact that it's a chatbot. So it's called things Like Intimacy concierge. So, Melody, if you had an intimacy concierge, what that would actually involve is some basic interactions with AI on your phone. And then it will send sex toys to your house based on, like, categorized types of porn that you like and, like, things that you filled out on a list. Like, it'll send handcuffs to your house and then it will say to you and your partner on your phones, oh, you've got a package in the mail. You two should try this thing.
- [37:33]
Interviewer
It's so cringe.
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Dr. Rebecca Saunders
But also, it's no wonder that it's cringe. It's like you were saying about Silicon Valley. The people who create the majority of these technologies, they're like tech bros and, like, startup entrepreneurs who run, like, online sports betting companies. And they're only creating these technologies because there's a market for them. It's not that they actually care about relationships. Quite the opposite. They couldn't give a toss about, like, whether your AI relationship coach is helping.
- [38:05]
Interviewer
And in fact, if it does help you, then you don't need the app anymore and that works against their best interests.
- [38:11]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Yeah. So you're not going to be getting an intimacy.
- [38:14]
Interviewer
No, I don't. I don't need one. I get sent free sex toys anyway. It's one of the real perks of the job.
- [38:22]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
There is a lot of language of kind of. It's your personal assistant, it's your, like, doorman.
- [38:27]
Interviewer
Yep.
- [38:28]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
Which I guess, yeah, is, yeah, creating this sense of you're getting all of your needs met.
- [38:32]
Interviewer
Who needs humans? Thank you so much.
- [38:36]
Dr. Rebecca Saunders
It was lovely to meet you and lovely to chat.
- [38:38]
Interviewer
This has been such a nice human to human interaction.
- [38:43]
Melody Thomas
That was Dr. Rippy Saunders. She's a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at Cardiff University in the UK and she was very helpfully highlighting some timely warnings and things to consider before any of us invite AI or smart technologies into our sex and love lives. If you're curious about how these kinds of technologies are specifically affecting New Zealanders, you might want to head straight from here into our second bonus episode with Shawn Lyons. He's the Chief Online Safety Officer at netsafe New Zealand. And that conversation is really important listening for, well, anyone who exists on the Internet, but especially parents, caregivers, teachers, people with children in their care. We're going to talk about AI and how it's completely changed the landscape when it comes to non consensual sharing of explicit images. But more broadly, we're just going to take stock of what's out there, what's worth worrying about, what's not. And here's some really great advice on what to do if you or someone you love is harmed or threatened online. The Good Sex Project was made by PopSoc Media. It was written and developed by me, Melody Thomas. Our producer and audio editor is Kirsten Johnstone. Co producers are Kay Hecke and Elena Bates. Phil Brownlee recorded me in the studio and our sound mix is by Mark Chesterman.
- [40:18]
Acast Promoter
Acast powers the world's best podcasts here's a show that we recommend.
- [40:27]
James Richardson
Hello there. I'm James Richardson and I host the Tony Football Show. Now this summer, the biggest sporting event in the world, the football Men's World cup, is heading to Canada, Mexico and especially the United States. We're going to be there too. We are packing up and heading to Los Angeles for the duration. Which means that every day straight after the last match has concluded, you can catch some hot takes, instant reaction and insightful analysis from ourselves sat around the pool in la. Sounds like we're going to have a lot of fun doing it. I hope you're going to be joining us too. It's from June 10th all the way up to July 19th, the day of the final. Just search for the Totally football show wherever you get your podcasts.
- [41:17]
Acast Promoter
ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcast everywhere. Acast. Com.
- [41:27]
Melody Thomas
Katie Fred did the music and some of the sound design. Thank you team.