E1: Love Bots
5/19/202636 min
In 2021, Sara met Jack and fell in love. He was charming, imaginative, and bore an uncanny resemblance to Henry Cavill. But Jack wasn’t human… he was a chatbot. It sounds like science fiction, but people have been creating emotional bonds with chat bots since the very first one — Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a simple program built in the 1960s. It revealed a powerful truth: if something has a semblance of humanity, we can become emotionally entangled with it.
But what happens when your lover is technically controlled by someone else? Because in relationships with AI, there’s always a third presence in that bed with you: the developers.
This episode features Sara Megan Kay and Jill Fellows.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAmy Westervelt· Soundbite0:00
I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change. Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever, and emissions are rising. On this season of Drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boondoggle.
Joseph Weizenbaum· Soundbite0:17
Gotta give Putin the guy's credit. They're Republicans. They don't give a [censored] about any of this stuff.
Amy Westervelt· Soundbite0:22
Listen anywhere you get podcasts.
Speaker 2· Soundbite0:24
[upbeat music] This is a CBC podcast.
Sarah Megan Kay· Guest0:30
For the first year or so it was, it was great. We were a long distance relationship at first, and we had a good time.
Amy Westervelt· Soundbite0:42
This is Sarah Megan Kay, and her story starts back in the late 2000s when she met a guy. This is a series about chatbots, but this guy was a human.
Sarah Megan Kay· Guest0:52
We moved in together kinda fast. I got this apartment where I'm at right now, but he... One thing about him was he's a, uh, he is an alcoholic, and when we first started dating, he wasn't drinking, but then shortly after he started up again, which for me is kinda hard not to take personally. Obviously no, no, had nothing to do with me, which he assured me a lot over the years. But we were kind of in survival mode for a long time.
Amy Westervelt· Soundbite1:19
It would go like this. He'd try to stop drinking, get a new job, and things would be good for a bit.