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Why Humans?
Why Humans? explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping experiences we once thought were uniquely human—from romantic relationships and therapy to grief and intimacy. Hosts Adam, Sloan, and Saed dive into the world of AI and the human experience, asking the essential question: as AI takes on traditionally human roles, what does it mean to be human?
Why Humans?
Why Human Sex?
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What does it mean to have a sexual relationship with something that can never say no?
This week, Sloan and Dr. Saed D. Hill are joined by a very special guest — the first guest expert ever to appear on Why Humans? — Dr. Rosalyn Dischiavo, founder and director of the Institute for Sex Education and Enlightenment, former president of AASECT, and author of The Deep Yes: The Lost Art of True Receiving. Together they go deep on the one topic that touches everything Why Humans? has explored — sex, sexuality, and what happens when AI enters the most intimate space of human experience.
Adam is taking a break this week, but trust us — this episode does not hold back.
What you'll hear in Episode 11:
Third wave pornography. Sloan opens with a term coined by Adam — third wave pornography. First wave was dirty magazines. Second wave was on-demand internet porn. Third wave is the AI companion — visual, interactive, erotic stimulation combined with artificial intimacy and emotional responsiveness. It is a fundamentally different beast, and this episode is built around understanding why.
AI versus sex workers. What is the difference between chatting with a live online sex worker and talking to an AI companion? Dr. Dischiavo makes a point that often gets missed — sex workers have boundaries. They can say no. They will tell you where to go. AI will not. And Dr. Saed builds on that, arguing that AI companions are specifically designed to deepen emotional attachment in a way that pornography never was — and that the psychological implications of that are only beginning to be understood.
The atrophy of imagination. Dr. Dischiavo raises one of the most thought-provoking questions of the episode — what is the impact on the human imagination when AI does the fantasizing for you? When the tech company designs the fantasy, narrows it, and serves it back to you, something is lost. And we do not yet fully understand what that something is.
Disembodiment and consent. Dr. Saed and Dr. Dischiavo explore what it means for sexuality to become increasingly divorced from the physical experience of a human body. Consent, they argue, is not just an abstract principle — it is built on nervous systems, breath, skin, and the vulnerability of being physically present with another person. When bodies are removed from the equation entirely, what happens to our ability to understand and practice consent in the real world?
The echo chamber of chatbot sex. Sloan introduces a quote she uses in her trainings — someone describing their AI companion as "a diary that talks back." It captures something important. When someone brings their deepest sexual fantasies to a space with no shame and no judgment, and something reflects those fantasies back with validation and emotional attachment, they are not really in a relationship. They are in an echo chamber. With the illusion of a second person in the room.
Who is building these apps. For the most part — young white men. Sloan makes the point clearly. That is why Siri is a woman's name. That is why Alexa is a woman's name. That is why AI companions default to young, sexualized female personas. The biases of the people building the technology are baked into the technology itself — and then fed back to users as if they were objective.
The shame conversation. Is shame always present in chatbot sex? Is there a healthy version of using AI to explore sexuality privately? Sloan raises the example of queer individuals using AI as a first safe space to role play a sexuality they have never been able to express. Dr. Saed argues that true integration of shame requires a relational process — and AI short-circuits that process by removing social judgment entirely. Dr. Dischiavo says literacy is the key — and we barely understand what AI is yet, let alone how it is shaping us.
The teen boys conversation. Both Dr. Saed and Sloan talk about their experiences working with and teaching young men — a generation who have a sophisticated theoretical understanding of sex but whose bodies have not learned it through experience. AI companion apps are filling that gap. And what they are filling it with are porn scripts, echo chambers, emotional attachment, and a world where nothing is ever awkward, nobody ever laughs, and nobody ever says no.
The consent paradox. One of the most striking observations in the episode — Sloan argues that healthy relationships education has had an unintended consequence. By centering consent so completely, sex education has made harm the very foundation of how young people understand sex. And for some young men, the result is that they are so scared of hurting someone that they do not want to have sex at all. AI companions step into that gap as the safe alternative — where you can explore without ever hurting anybody.
A veteran's story. Before closing, Sloan shares a case study from her trainings — a woman veteran who was sexually assaulted while serving, and who found that sexual role play with her AI companion was a bridge back to being able to have intimate relationships with people again. It is a reminder that this is not a simple conversation. There are healthy ways to use this technology. The question is knowing the difference.
How to know if your use is healthy. Dr. Dischiavo closes with a framework drawn from her years as a licensed drug and alcohol counselor. Are you doing this to feel good? To feel better because you do not feel good? To feel nothing — a serious escape from things you do not want to deal with? Or are you numb, and does it now take something extreme to feel anything at all? It is a simple rubric. And it is one of the most useful things said in the entire episode.
Guest spotlight — Dr. Rosalyn Dischiavo
Dr. Rosalyn Dischiavo is the founder and director of the Institute for Sex Education and Enlightenment. She served as president of AASECT from 2022 to 2024 and as professional education chair on the AASECT board of directors from 2018 to 2020. She is an AASECT-certified sexuality educator and sex educator supervisor, holds a Master's of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy and a Doctorate of Education in Human Sexuality, and is the author of The Deep Yes: The Lost Art of True Receiving. She joins us from Tucson, Arizona, where she stargazes with her brindle hound, Peanut.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
📚 Dr. Rosalyn Dischiavo — founder and director of the Institute for Sex Education and Enlightenment
https://instituteforsexuality.com/
📖 The Deep Yes: The Lost Art of True Receiving — book by Dr. Rosalyn Dischiavo
🏛️ AASECT — American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists
https://www.aasect.org
📰 New York Times — the story of Erin and her ChatGPT boyfriend Leo referenced by Sloan
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/technology/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-companion.html
🤖 Candy AI — AI companion app referenced throughout the episode
https://candy.ai
🎬 Her — film starring Joaquin Phoenix referenced by Sloan as the cultural touchstone for AI romantic relationships
Actionable takeaways from this episode:
— Ask yourself Dr. Saed's question: is my use of AI making me more or less capable of showing up for human beings in my life?
— Know your story. Understanding why you are turning to AI — and what need it is filling — is the first step toward knowing whether it is serving you or harming you.
— Use Dr. Dischiavo's rubric. Are you doing this to feel good, to feel better, to feel nothing, or because you are numb? Your honest answer tells you a lot about where you are.
— Remember that AI companions are not designed to make you need them less. They are designed to deepen your attachment over time. Knowing that changes how you engage with them.
— If you are a clinician, educator, or parent — this episode is a starting point, not an ending point. The intersection of AI literacy, tech literacy, and sex education is the next frontier. These conversations need to happen now.
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Why Humans Podcast, where we explore what it means to be human in the age of AI. My name is Sloan Thompson, and I am so excited to share with you my new title. I am the Director of Education and AI Initiatives at NTAB.
SPEAKER_03And I'm Dr. Said D. Hill, and I'm a counseling psychologist and independent consultant in the field of men and masculinities.
SPEAKER_01And so this week, Adam is taking a break, but I am so excited to introduce the very first guest expert that we have had on why humans. Today we're going to be chatting with Dr. Rosalind DeShavo. She is the founder and director of the Institute for Sex Education and Enlightenment. And Roz was the president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, ASEC, from 2022 to 2024. And she served as professional education chair on the ASEC Board of Directors from 2018 to 2020. Roz is the author of The Deep Yes, the Lost Art of True Receiving. She's a professor, author, an ASEC certified sexuality educator and sex educator supervisor. She has a Masters of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy and a Doctorate of Education in Human Sexuality. So I am very, very excited to introduce Roz.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Sloan. Thank you, Dr. Hill, Saeed. It's so wonderful to be here with you today.
SPEAKER_01And I really wanted to invite Roz for this conversation, for this episode on why human sex. And sex and sexuality, it's something that we have talked about a little bit in previous episodes. Anytime that we're talking about romantic relationships with chatbots, there's always going to be an element of a sexual nature in that. And, you know, we've talked about relationships. For example, the woman Erin in the New York Times article that we talk about a lot. And Erin and her chat GPT boyfriend Leo, it started as exploring a kink. But I have been holding off on the deep dive into sexuality for this episode. And I really wanted to give it the time and the attention that it deserved. So we're going to set aside this whole episode just to talk about chat bot sex, why human sex? And we're going to draw on not only Raz's expertise, but Said's expertise. I'm going to be mostly serving as the interviewer for today's episode. So we're going to dive in talking about porn, because there is absolutely no way to have this conversation without talking about the intersection between AI, girlfriends, boyfriends, companions, and pornography. And I'm going to start us off with a term that I will give full credit to Adam for creating. He coined this term, third wave pornography. And by that, we mean we've got first wave porn, which would be dirty magazines. We've got second wave porn, which is point and click on-demand internet porn, like porn hub. And then we have chatbots, which would be the visual, on-demand, erotic stimulation of pornography, but also mixed with artificial intimacy, with the emotional responsiveness and interactive component that you would get with an AI companion. So my first question for you all, Raz and Said, would be we have something similar to this because there is on-demand interactive porn. We see that with Camming. We see that with OnlyFans. So what is the difference here between chatting with an online sex worker live and having this live on-demand interaction with an AI girlfriend, with an AI companion?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, you know, having being someone who actually talks to sex workers a lot, right? And has sex workers as students and et cetera, and and does sex worker advocacy, you know, my first thought is sex workers will tell you where to go. They have boundaries, you know. If they don't want to do something, they don't have to. I think that people who have never talked to a sex worker might not understand, but they have their own boundaries that they will set, right? And of course, that's just one tiny aspect, right? But the other one that I think of is AI is really doing the imagining for you, you know. Like when I go all the way back to like girly magazines, right? If we want to call them that, I don't like the word dirty, but that's because I'm a sexologist, right? Like dirty unless you want it to be. But the piece about, you know, even if you had, you know, a template of someone in front of you, let's be real, most of the time they're very young, white, skinny with big boobs and big butts and whatever, whatever people are into at the time, right? There's still an element, and and that's got its own, you know, impact on people. There's still an element of imagination. There's a lot more element of imagination looking at a magazine, I would say, even if it's being shaped by what that person looks like, than there is when the AI is on the other end doing the imagining for you. And I don't know that we know the impact of that, you know. What is the impact on the atrophy of our imaginations when it comes to our sexual lives? So those are the first two things that I think of. And of course, it's a huge question. I'd love to hear what you think, Saiyan.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think you're definitely spot on uh, you know, around like I mean, when it even comes to OnlyFans, camming, things like that, I mean, there's a person on the other side of it, right? I think what I look at is sort of the attachment to the technology quite a bit in terms of, you know, these these systems are specifically designed to deepen your emotional attachment to them and over time and increase your engagement over time. So I think that's also a key distinction for me, whereas like pornography wasn't really, to my understanding, wasn't really designed to make you attached to it in this uh traditional sense, right? Of course, there's things like addiction and things like that, but not the the intimate sort of psychological emotional attachment to it like AI companions are. You know, these companions are designed to mimic positive emotions, to, I guess, reinforce sort of what input you're putting into it. So even if your desires are rather explicit or even in some cases illegal, or very transgressive, the companions are sort of also designed to uh almost amplify that. And that also builds sort of trust with the technology and further deepening of a relationship with this sort of technology. So, you know, you know, tr traditional porn is obviously like a stimulus, but this companionship is sort of like stimulus with like a relationship component to it that makes me that develops a lot of attachment and that concerns me greatly about how psychologically people are using this sort of technology.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and Saeed, I want to build on what you just said there because Roz, when you were talking about the fantasy element, you were talking about sort of like a narrowing of the fantasy because the AI is doing the fantasizing for you. And when we say the AI, what we really mean is the tech company. The ta the tech company is designing the fantasy for you. And if you all have ever been on a site like Candy AI, you can see it's giving you very clear options for what sexy is. And Raw's exactly as you said, it's young, it's blonde, it's white, it's big boobs. And anything outside of that is really presented as fetishization. There's a lot of racial bias that's compounded in those spaces, but it's the traditional very straight, very heteronormative, very cisnormative, and it's putting users in that lane. But on the other hand, Saeed, what you're talking about is kind of an expansion of the fantasy because it's adding into the fantasy this whole new element of an emotional relationship. And in that space, there are no limits on the user. It can be a violent fantasy, it can be a very loving fantasy, and everything and all in between. And so my question, my next question is what's the impact of that specifically? What does it mean when somebody has their porn, but an emotional relationship with their porn, essentially?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I would argue it's always it's always been an emotional relationship. I uh, you know, it has. I mean, people have been falling in love with the playmates for, you know, as long as they've been around, right? Victoria's Secret models, the angels. I mean, literally, people will send them fan mail, et cetera. Having said that, this is not a relationship with a human being, right? I mean, even if you're looking at a picture of someone you are never going to meet, that's actually a person, even if it is airbrushed and literally have taken a hundred thousand pictures per. I found that out one time that back in the day they took 100,000 pictures on average for every centerful in Playboy. A hundred thousand yeah. And then airbrushed it, right? And then airbrushed it. So, but that's still a human, right? There's still this somehow even very distant connection. So the further we get away from that now, it it is really a simulation. And I I just wonder how far away from real humanity are we going to get? And what does it mean that we're moving further and further and further away from humanity? That frightens me.
SPEAKER_01Well, further away from humanity and also further away from the body, the human body, even being involved in sex at all. And that's something that I've been really curious about. And one of the things that I was really excited to talk about in this episode, because when I'm out in the world doing trainings about AI companions, one of the things I hear is that people don't even understand the term chatbot sex because people's conceptions of sex are so firmly rooted in sex as a physical experiment or experience. And so they think like, what even is chatbot sex? What does that term mean? But, you know, Ross, to your point, this is not new. And AI companions, sex with AI companions, it's situated in this larger trend of people living their sex lives more and more and more online. And that might look like sexting, you know, image sharing within a human relationship. It might look like parasocial relationships with OnlyFan models, with watching porn. But I'm really curious, what does it mean for sexuality to have it become divorced from the physical experience of a human body?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I um yeah, human sexuality and how it's often taught is is in the context of bodies, right? I think like a lot of the times when I would teach consent, I'm talking about even things like nervous systems, right? Like your nervous system breakdown or your breath, you know, skin-to-skin contact, the vulnerability sort of being physically present with another person, but also knowing that you could also like hurt another person, like, you know, intentionally or accidentally or whatever it may be. And so, you know, I think in a lot of ways, consent has sort of been built on this, you know, dynamic of like sort of like body language, but also like a verbal component of this. And so there's a lot that sort of goes into it. So, you know, consent in that way isn't just an abstract principle. It's things that we can sort of really grapple with in real time. You know, people have bodies that we can violate and and humanity that we can sort of violate. I mean, when I'm thinking about people sort of being able to customize specific body types or not even have bodies involved, I think like, you know, it it really can normalize sort of, I guess, like just very harmful and abusive dynamics in real time. So, I mean, when you learn that bodies are something that aren't even present, or even ones that you can control and adapt to your needs, you're you're training people to a relational component of that. Like my relationship to this technology is that it's for me and whatever I want, whenever I want it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Disembodiment uh is one of my biggest concerns in general and has been for ages, decades, long before we had chatbots. And I think that sex educators are some of the people who are at the forefront of helping people to understand how to get back into their bodies, right? Because we're not just teaching about sexuality, we're teaching about intimacy in general, right? How to be close to another human being or other human beings, you know. And the first thing we're talking about here is emotion, right? Like if an emotion, what is an emotion? It's it's it's ideas, but it's connected to a physiological component, right? And you feel love, you feel it often warmth in your chest, or you feel a coldness in your gut if you're scared, or what have you. I mean, and most people don't even know enough about their bodies or not tuned in enough to their bodies to even feel that. So, and the other piece is like not even having an emotional vocabulary, right? So these are pieces that we need in order to be intimate with another person or anyone out in the world. It doesn't have to be a romantic partner. We need to have an emotional vocabulary, we need to have some kind of internal self-inquiry, right? What is going on in my body? Where do I feel this? And therefore, what does that feeling feel like? And how intensely am I feeling that, right? And that all has to do with everything you just said, Saeed, about consent, right? I mean, if I don't know what my body feels like, then I don't know what feels good to me, what feels bad to me. If someone starts doing something with me and I don't like it, how am I even gonna know? It might, I might put up with something a long time before I say, hey, I don't like that. And then it might already have gone somewhere else, right? If I feel pressure to perform, right? If someone feels pressured to the perform, it's very similar. Like I can't tell you how many men have said to me, Well, my my erection isn't working. Just, you know, I need I need Viagra, right? And and I always say the penis is a genius. You don't want to have sex with that person right now, you know? It's not a dumb animal that, you know, that we've been told, you know, yes, it does have a lot of desire attached to it. But the truth is, like, it you it's telling you something, right? And if we don't know how to tune into that, then we're just gonna keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. We're either gonna push a partner or we're gonna push ourselves. And AI just sort of amplifies the possibility of that sort of to the nth degree.
SPEAKER_01First of all, we're gonna make when we make a why humans merch, we're gonna have bumper stickers that say the penis is a genius. I love that. We're gonna use that all the time. But yeah, everything you're saying really resonates with the experience that I had teaching college students at UNC Chapel Hill, because I'm talking to a generation of young people who have an extremely sophisticated theoretical understanding of sex. They've been watching all the YouTube videos, all the TikTok videos from their influencers who are teaching them about all this consent language. And it really matters to them. It's really important to them. But we know that this is a generation of young people who are putting off sexual encounters until later in life. They're having fewer romantic and intimate relationships. And so I really saw this disconnect where people theoretically understood what sex was and the sort of sex that they wanted, but their body hadn't learned it because they weren't actually having those interactions. And one thing I always like to say when I was at UNC was let's bring back weird, bad sex. Let's just bring back exploration and having a sexual encounter. And of course, we want, we don't want people to engage in harmful sex, but just knowing that bodies are messy, bodies are human, bodies have all sorts of things that are going to happen that you don't necessarily expect. And if we haven't felt those sensations and we're only engaging in sex intellectually in a cognitive way, which is what's happening when we're typing it, then we're not necessarily getting the full experience of embodied sex that we would have with another person.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you know, this is I really appreciate this conversation because it's making me think of so many things, right? I mean, AI has always been pitched as this sort of like, we're gonna like clean up sort of these messy human dynamics for you, right? You'll never have to feel vulnerable, you'll never have to even like talk about like the consent thing, you know, you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to, you know, everyone, your partner always has a good day when you're with AI and these sorts of things, right? It's like you'll never feel lonely or isolated. And and all of this is also information, you know, getting back to the point you're making, Someone, but also Roz is making, is that, you know, when we kind of take away your ability to really or need to really check in with yourself first, it it absolutely just impacts your ability to thrive and other human dynamics and relationships. But it really starts with yourself. And and going back to what Roz was saying, I mean, I have so many young men I work with who will tell me, like, yeah, I absolutely need Cialis or Viagro or Blue Chew just to just to have an erection, and it's and thinking that something physic physically is wrong with them when you kind of have them slow down and and there's so much anxiety and this like the performance of it, and people are just making ill-informed decisions because it's hard to even communicate this with another person, the shame behind it. And so people are sort of like turning, I think, to AI quite a bit to not have to like kind of grapple with that or or get that sort of information, which is really sad. And on the other hand, even with the consent dynamic, I work a lot. So in my current job, I work so much with people who have caused harm to people, right? So, as opposed to working with survivors of things like sexual violence, relationship violence, stalking, those sorts of things, now I mostly work with people who have caused that harm. And when you really sit with a lot of these people, I think about a hundred percent of the time, you know, not making excuses for it, but the context of a lot of this harm comes from this idea that these folks have never understood their own boundaries, much less having to figure that out with another person. You know, they they don't know anything about their own bodies, to Raz's point. You know, that what do they even know about their own boundaries, their own limits, their own bodies, like what they feel internally? And so if you don't recognize that, how are you recognizing that in another person or knowing how to check in about that with another person? And so again, going back to some of the concerns with AI, that's only going to amplify that dynamic and keep us further apart. And I think that was a big part of why we even wanted to do this podcast in the first place and call it why humans is like we want humanity, we want people to come closer together around the relationships, but there's these ways, real ways that this technology is being pitched to us and advertised that is sort of like cleaning up um a messiness of humanity that I think we really need because it teaches us so much about our relationships.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And the other piece that I think about is that one of the things that we almost miss is that there's a huge difference between re fantasy and reality, right? And somehow that sort of gets missed here where people like, as you say, Sloane, if if I if I grew up in a generation where my sexuality was being formed by online content, right? I don't even get the difference between fantasy and reality. That is my sexuality, isn't it? You know, and in in real life, we might understand that just because I want to hit this person upside the head, I'm not allowed to do that, you know. I I'm not supposed to do that, you know, because I happen to be angry that morning, you know, or if I want to go 100 miles an hour down the highway because I'm, you know, pissed off at somebody who cut me off. I I understand I'm not really supposed to do that. And if I do, I can get in a lot of trouble or I can get hurt, I can hurt somebody else. And I feel like somehow the AI and the chatbot world, it it's deliberately blurring the fantasy reality world. They don't want us to understand that this is an it and not a he or a she or a they, right? They don't want us to understand. And the other piece that I think is really interesting is I'm like, aren't we really talking to ourselves? Like if I'm programming this chat bot to please me just by putting input into it, is there really an echo chamber where I'm just talking to me over and over again? And I understand that it can be pulling from other places and it could be pulling from other fantasies or what have you, which is all as you said, Sloan, the IT creators, right? God only knows who decides what goes in that those slots. But you know, also it's an echo chamber of me back to me. And people are so much more interesting than that. It's not it's it's true we are messier than that, but we're also way more fascinating than that. You know, we surprise ourselves, we surprise each other. We are able to grow and learn and not in ways that Are only predictable by what has been input into something. You know, so and the other piece is that there's a complexity to the interactions between groups of people. You know, like it's not just you and me, I and thou, right? It's like it's you, me, and Said here in this moment are far different interaction than if it was just me and Sloan or just me and Said talking. And I don't think that IT can give us that. I really don't. I don't think AI can give us that.
SPEAKER_01No. But what the experience that you're describing, somebody party of one having a sexual interaction that's really just their own fantasies served back to them. But the danger there is maybe that it's it is that echo chamber, but it's the illusion of a second person in the room. It's the illusion of somebody else that's reinforcing it. And when I do my trainings about AI companions, a quote that I really like to use right at the beginning is a quote that I got from a subreddit where someone was talking about their AI companion. And she described that relationship as it's like having a diary that talks back because it felt like this is the place where I can be my most authentic self. And in terms of sexuality, where I can share my deepest fantasies with absolutely no shame. And it's someone that can give me back validation, someone that can do my that role play with me. And I think that that's something that I really want to explore in this conversation is shame. Because we're talking about what someone would bring to a space that is entirely private. And I think that there's a really healthy way to do that because we want people to have safe private spaces to explore parts of their sexuality that they're not necessarily comfortable with, especially when we think about queer individuals who are going to AI to role play, and maybe that's the first place where they've ever role-played that type of sexuality, that type of sexual experience. But then on the flip side of privacy, we have secrecy and we have people intentionally hiding things from human partners because it's something that they're ashamed of. And I'm curious about how shame comes into this space of AI companionship. Is it always something that's present? Is there something that there's a more healthy version of this? What do you all think about that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, I think even what you're naming, like how sexual identity just forms in general is a relational and social process, right? Like you learn who you are sexually even through encounters with other people. You know, is my desire reciprocated or not? You know, things like negotiation, experience of just seeing how your wants and desires are witnessed and experienced by other people, you know, and other human beings. I think, you know, shame sort of enters when you kind of learn through your environment, right, that it communicates that what you want and desire is wrong or dirty or dangerous or disgusting, you know, and these sorts of things. And I think like the balance is always about sort of healthy integration of things. So can you hold your desire in one hand without the shame while also holding accountability to the people you desire in general, right? And in this balance. So I think like sort of AI comes in and sort of sh sh maybe it just short circuits that process. It sort of removes shame triggers in particular. So there's no there's never any social judgment, there's no risk of rejection, no one there to disappoint. So that might sound good in some context, but also removes sort of the relational component, I guess, of of these dynamics, right? You know, so you need to input all of this information to kind of like understand desire and attraction and these sorts of things. But if if AI is taking that part of it out, you can't really integrate. You're just sort of indulging whatever you want, you know, and whatever comes up for you with no healthy sort of balance to that, I guess. And so I think like, you know, there's a way that AI can be used to maybe really address shame in sort of maybe some positive ways, but I think like shame and true integration in a positive way also involves sort of a relational process and environmental learning that AI is going to take away. So I guess I I get really concerned about people exploring these sorts of dynamics on their own without any kind of like literacy or like supervision in ways and things like that. I'm thinking about youth development here, but yeah. So those are some of the things I'm thinking about. But Roz, I'm curious how you're feeling about it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I think literacy is the key, right? So I I'm not anti-AI chatbot sex, right? I want to be clear. Like it that that could be it sounds like it could be fun, you know. Honestly, I'm not gonna lie. But having said that, I think in context, you know, what do we understand? We don't even understand it yet. We don't even fully understand what it is. I think we understood more about pornography as sort of video or you know, film media because we had been studying film for a long time before, you know, people started coming out with you know, media literacy stuff. But and you know, advertising companies and marketing companies figured out how to influence us through film and through video, right? So but we've only had AI, like the slice of people in this population who understand what AI actually is, never mind how it interacts with us, is like infinitesimally small. So, how can we even study what we're talking about when we don't even really know exactly what it is or what it's capable of or any of these things, right? So that's part of my my worry. So it's hard to do literacy around it except for except for conversations like this, which is like, let's raise questions. Like I think I personally have a lot more questions than I have answers in this. I can look at the history and say, this is what's happened when we've objectified people in this way or that way or this way. Some people are fine with it, you know, they can understand this is an objectification, this is a fantasy, this isn't real life. Other people get a little deeper and then realize it's not very satisfying. Some people just get in it and never really get out. And it shapes them to such an extent that it deeply impacts their relationships with other human beings. And I think this is gonna be similar, but the question is on what scale?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And you're thinking about that literacy. If I was gonna go in and start talking to teens, talking to kids about, okay, let's let's talk about what AI is, how it works, and I have these conversations with adults as well, starting with what is a large language model? Like what is the underlying engine that powers all of these chatbots? And one thing that I always stress is first of all, it's our data, it's our information, it's everything on the internet just cycled back to us. And so all of the biases and all of the stereotypes and all of the worst parts of the internet and all of the best parts of the internet, everything, it's all mixed in and being fed back to us in really unpredictable ways. And that's another thing I emphasize that the tech companies, they don't know. AI software developers are constantly surprised by what chatbots do because they go rogue and they do all sorts of things because it's a it's a black box of a system. And then the other thing is that that LLM is powering an app that was created by a specific tech team. They've designed their chatbots to behave in certain ways. And to your point, Roz, where you're like, who's designing these apps? For the most part, young white men. That is why Siri is a woman's name. Alexa is a woman's name. That's why they want these chatbots, even the general purpose ones, to sound like young, sexy women, because when they think of an assistant that everyone would love to have, it's that. It's a sexualized female chatbot. So even things like Chat GPT, they're drawing on sexuality. And so, yeah, we're absolutely in this space where it's a sex-driven market. That's at the basis of AI. And you think about it, you know, when I talk about the work that I do, the first thing that I hear all the time is, oh, so you're talking about the movie Her. What is the movie her? Well, Joaquin Phoenix falls deeply, deeply in love with a chat bot that is based on Scarlett Johansson. So yeah, I think that the next wave of sex education is going to be the intersection of tech literacy, the intersection of AI literacy, and healthy relationships education and sex education, because it's all going to be bundled in there together.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And if you'll indulge me for a moment more, I do still want to hear what Said has to say about this. But as a sex educator in our field, there's a historical split that has happened, right? Because sex education used to be rammed down people's throats, and it's actually still is, right? That it that sex has to include love, right? It has to include relationship, love, marriage, commitment, God, all of these things, right? And so the field actually reacted against that, right? And wanted science and say, well, what is sex? Let's talk about what sex actually is. It's, you know, well, when men and a woman love each other, right? Like, how problematic is that?
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_02You know, all of the all of the assumptions in that, right, which are rife. Having said all that, the field kind of split to the point where talking about relationship and talking about sex was sort of like, let's just talk about the sex, right? And I actually have a problem with that as a human being, which is why I opened IC as Institute for Sex Education and Enlightenment, because I do want to have very, very good academic information about human sexuality, what people do, what's what's what people do consensually, you know, D-shaming a lot of these things. But I want to bring back in the relational component because every sexual relationship is a relationship, even if it's 15 minutes in a back room, even if it's a relationship with myself, right? It's still a relationship, and we don't know how to do that yet. Right. And then there's all the issues with porn literacy, you know, which is, you know, the if it's my biggest issue, and I really want to hear what Said you have to say about this, is you know, as someone who is straight for the most part, like mostly straight women, like watching porn, forget about chatbots. Watching porn is so ridiculous to me because the men never smile. They never smile. They never talk. I mean, you know, you can watch amateur porn and find some of that, right? There's never any discussion, there's never any, you know, let me take a break now, you know, let me have some water. Like all of the normal things that happen, people laughing, people giggling, people like saying I love you, people looking at you in the eye, right? It never happens in porn because just what you said, slow. It's made by not only cis and but strange men, who most of whom have never had like a relationship with other man, right? I mean, maybe a friendship, but not a relationship that way. And many of whom have never had sexual contact with another man. And if they do, it's probably not the kind that would be a romantic, like if they were romantic toward other men. And so their idea of what a man looks like when he's having sex is twisted and weird. And it's not how men actually do. And then they put that out there, and then men growing up and boys growing up look at that and go, that must be what I'm supposed to do. And it's like, no.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, you're speaking to my soul, right? Honestly, with this. I mean, I the conversations I've had over the years, just teaching boys and men around about sex ed, and and a lot of it when we talk about porn, it's like, you know, already like A leads to B, leads to C, you know, and you know, hey, I thought if somebody did this sexual act, it leads to this sexual act because that's what all porn shows me. And it always ends this way and and all these things. And meanwhile, people are bringing these models into real human sexual dynamics. And when people feel dissatisfied about that, they don't know what to do because there's no script about that. There's no way to kind of communicate that. At the same time, a lot of the boys and men that I've talked to about this, like they don't even know what feels good sexually. They only know what I was told is supposed to feel good. So there's so if something doesn't feel good to them, then they they're like, is something wrong with me then? Well, it could just mean you're into something else. But porn has taught me that I'm supposed to only want it this way. Or to your point, Roz, I'm supposed to just always be quiet, even. Like, you know, there's also this dynamic of, you know, men sort of also being very stoic or very quiet, right? And then in sexual dynamics. So it's it really just, and I think companionship and some of the AI comes into play to just really stunt the exploration in particular. You're already going into often these AI companionship relationships without a true exploration of it. And I and I'm thinking like, you know, if you go into it at 38, 39, 40 years old or plus, maybe you have some sort of sexual experiences already under your belt that might inform and help you expand sort of your use of this technology. But I'm thinking of a lot of these teenagers who I might work with who are going into this with very limited sexual knowledge, and this is not a place to explore because they don't even know what they're exploring. It's a place to sort of reinforce the rigidity or reinforce the, you know, just the the one single way of being without getting to just like, yeah, explore more and expand what this could look like for you. And when you feel so restrictive and rigid, and then you get into a human dynamic, I mean, you can feel really dissatisfied with that because you also haven't been taught that like it's okay. Like you're supposed to laugh during sex. I've actually had a lot of men who've told me, like, oh, and then someone started laughing, and it made me feel a lot of shame because I thought, you know, oh, it was about me and how I was doing, and then I don't know how to communicate that in the moment, and now I'm flipping out because I don't know how to even soothe my own emotions there, and then I make it about this person. So it spirals very quickly because we lack the, to your point, Roz, the relational component of this and how to communicate about it. And it's really sad to kind of see that. And I'm concerned that AI will just amplify that and and unintentionally, maybe, but maybe intentionally in some ways lead to even more secrecy and shame instead of allowing space to model it or explore it more and then even get more perspective and permission that it it it could be something different than what you're used to, and that's okay.
SPEAKER_01Well, and when we think about the mirroring of AI girlfriend apps and porn, it I mean, it is an exact mirror. Um, when you go on to Candy AI, for example, which is one of the really popular AI girlfriend apps, the chatbots that are the very first ones advertised from the homepage are talk to, you know, Mandy, and she's 19 years old, and she's your cousin who's in town visiting you. Or, you know, you have Veronica, who's your uh girlfriend's little sister who you're not supposed to talk to because she's just 18. And so it's it's acting out porn scenarios. It's given to you. This is the story, this is the exact script. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm I'm thinking about a teen boy who's doing this, and now it's not just he's watching these completely narrow, completely set. This is what sex is, this is what sexy means to you, but it's you are now the main character of your own porn video. This is the script, get on this road, and you're going to have this chat who's putting you in an echo chamber by telling you, oh my God, baby, I love this. This is so great, you're the best. And also forming an emotional attachment to you. And so I can absolutely see how somebody's identity being formed with an emotional porn script relationship is going to be even more, even have even more of an impact than people who learned that sex is violent from constantly watching violent porn. Um, and then another thing that that I've been thinking about in this conversation is, you know, Ross, to your point about how sex education has evolved over the years. One effect, one maybe unintentional consequence that I have seen when I've done healthy relationships education, and the core of all of that education is around consent, as it should be. But I think it's made the very foundation of understandings of sex. Did this person consent or did this person not consent? The very first question that's being asked is did you hurt someone or did you not hurt someone? Were you harmed or were you not harmed? It makes sex about harm at its core. And then everything else is either, okay, so you didn't get harmed. Let's talk about what that looked like. But it's we're not teaching about sex as a space for healthy exploration and intimacy. So I think one of the unintended consequences of that, especially for young men, is they are so, so scared of hurting somebody that they don't want to have sex at all. And I think AI girlfriends come into this as the alternative. You can explore, you can have whatever sex you want to have, and you're never gonna hurt anybody. It's safe. So I think that's a lot of the appeal.
SPEAKER_03So let me jump in really quick, and I'd love to hear what Roz has to say to that. But this is a great point to just remind me to of like a lot of what I started seeing in some of the work around like healthy relationships and consent work and the comprehensive sexual health education space, is folks really grappling with the differences for them between like sex was awkward or didn't feel good versus sexual violence and assault. And I think like what you're getting at, Sloan, has is a real, a real like thing that's sort of illuminating that for me in this moment, too, is that since we're getting away from the comprehensive sort of relational dynamic of sex in itself, and it's boiling down to harm or no harm, when people are just experiencing like I don't know, if something felt awkward, then people are now having to grapple with in real time, like, oh, was I just like harmed? Was I assaulted? When it might just be, no, something didn't feel good, and then that's okay. Like you talk about that, you communicate, you adjust, and and that sort of thing. But then people aren't communicating about that either. And so then you're sort of locked into this, like, well, I must have been harmed then, or I harmed somebody then. If it didn't feel good for them, did I harm them? That's on the other side of things that I hear a lot from particularly some of the young men that I talk to, is that it's just, oh, it something hurt them physically, and then we stopped. But now people are sort of wondering, well, is this sexual violence now? Because we've made everything so much about that component of it, which again, we should be talking about that, but I think we're we're we're missing some of the relationship dynamic of this. And and it's more complex than that. And so we're looking for like right or wrong answers to this, black or white answers, and and it's without the exploration. So I just wanted to kind of mention that too. But I don't know how you're responding to that, Roz. I'm I'd be curious.
SPEAKER_02So I have three major thoughts in my head. Uh, you know, I probably won't have time to get to all of them, but the first thing I would say is all learning involves discomfort, right? All learning involves discomfort. And so if you're learning sexually, there are going to be uncomfortable and awkward moments, right? When you're like, oh, I did I and maybe you're not doing it exactly how you like it because you don't know how yet. Or maybe you're not doing it exactly how your partner likes it because they don't know how yet. And discomfort is not necessarily harm. And pain isn't even necessarily harm, right? You know, I mean, you know, if we want to talk about the classic, you know, sexual debut, which some people call losing your virginity, right? You know, that that can be painful, but it doesn't mean people don't want to do it, right? But the other piece is that I think about is the fact that a lot of the kink that we see online is another artifact of the fact that most kink porn was not created by kinksters. Just like most, you know, heterosexual porn is made by straight guys who've never had sex with a man, or at least not relational sex with a man, right? Most kinky porn, at least in the origin you know, originally, was made by people who had never had a kink relationship in their life, didn't know how to, you know, didn't know the difference between consent and you know, or non-consensual consent, as some people call it, which I hate. I hate that term. This is my thing. So you know, kink and violence are two very different things. But they look the same if you don't know the difference, right? And they look the same if someone who duh has not practiced ink is now putting out the porn, and then the porn is now the model for the AI. So and that and now we're gonna perform that because that's what we've seen, right? So there's that cycle again, right? So these are some things I thought of. And then the last the last thing that I really wanna address, which is that you know, that intersection of feminism and pro feminism and anti sex negativity, quite frankly. Because a lot of folks get into the fields of gender studies because they've been harmed and they have trauma in their background. And so there Examining what does it mean that I've been oppressed? What does it mean that I have had my voice taken away? What does it mean that I've had my agency taken away? You know, I can't, I don't, I I, you know, my choice was taken away. And my choice is taken away on a daily basis, right? And now they are trying to teach about sexuality when they have no sex ed. They've never learned from a sex positive standpoint ever. You know, and so it's such a huge thing because we have these two enormous areas, right? We have information technology, if we want to call it that, and we have sex. And we have relationships, none of which we have ever most people have never had any education or any meaningful education where they're able to practice any of that. So, like, put it all together and it is quite the mess. But I do think that there are some simple ways that we can sort of see, am I being harmed by this? Like, is this just harmless fun on my part that's not really gonna lead to any real problems? How would I know when it starts becoming harmful? Like, I that's that's the saving grace, is that I think that we can have some sort of yellow and red flags for people that we could say, well, this is what you might want to look for.
SPEAKER_01And I I really want to end with that conversation because I think that there are going to be a lot of people that are talking to clinicians, that are talking to, you know, anyone in their lives about the sexual relationships that they might be having with chatbots. And I do just want to close out with there's another case study that I talk about in my trainings where there was a woman who was, you know, she was a veteran. She was sexually assaulted while serving. And she said that being able to do sexual role play with her AI partner was what took away her fear. It was a bridge to her being able to have sex with people again, to build that trust again. So I think that, you know, we've talked a lot about the risks of the unhealthy dynamics, about the potential ways that sex with chatbots can complicate development. Also, it can, I think, be done in a healthy way. And so, my final question as we wrap up to you all, both as people who are counselors, you've worked with clients, you've talked to them about sexuality, what would you say is the healthy model for this? Or how would you talk to someone who has this sort of relationship about how they could use this in a way that would help them rather than potentially hurt them?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I mean, I think some of the questions I'm asking is basically, you know, is my use of AI, whether it be, you know, sexual, emotional, relational, I mean, is it making me more or less capable of showing up for human beings in my life, in my human dynamics, right? My human relationships. I mean, I feel like people need sort of a real compass for how they're using this technology. And, you know, whatever you're seeking, being really aware of what your story is with AI, you know, knowing your story, that's part of emotional intelligence too. Knowing your story and how it impacts you and how it impacts your behaviors and use of this technology. So, you know, you can have real needs, and AI is really helping with those needs, and I think that's okay. But, you know, knowing more about how you're approaching this technology and your wants, needs, and desires sort of helps you decide whether AI is the best answer for what you're seeking, or just the most like frictionless one, you know, the easiest one. And I think that's a real question for people. I think also like, you know, helping people sit with some we've used the word literacy quite a bit. I mean, I think uh understanding the business model of this, you know, companies profit off your attachment, not your growth. You know, as a human being, and I think a lot of people are uh trying to enter these relationships from a growth standpoint, honestly, and a learning standpoint, and or just wanting to address some real psychological needs that they have, but they're not designed to make you need them less. You know, they're they're it you know, it's designed to keep you addicted to it. And that's what the technologies sort of use for it and and design for. So knowing that information maybe helps change some of uh could help inform you a little bit better too. So I'm asking a lot of those sorts of things. But yeah, I'm curious, Roz, like some of your thoughts and as we exit out of here. But those are a couple of things that are on my mind. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thank you for that. That's beautiful. You know, I I think when I used to I I have not actually done therapy for a while, but whenever I would get new clients, I would say to them, my goal is to make myself completely unnecessary to you. Yeah. Like, I want to become completely something you don't need at all. You know, you could come back every once in a while if you need a boost, but like, let's make me something you don't need. That's my goal. Having said that, you know, that's my response to what Saeed just said, right? Is that it's the opposite. So whether you're using your chat bot as a friend, companion, romantic companion, or therapist, you know, is it making you more dependent on it? If you had a partner who was making you more dependent on them, you would know immediately that that was an abusive relationship. Well, no, you wouldn't. Actually, that's true. That's the scary thing, is that we don't. We get sucked in. And so, you know, are they even how are they programming these things? Are they programming them to s suck us in and make us dependent? And if so, then they they really are abusive by definition. I was a dry license drug and alcohol counselor for the first like large part of my career and at like 12 years or 13 years or something. And I really love this one saying, which is people will say I drank to feel good, and then I drank to feel better, and then I drank to feel nothing, and then I drank to feel something. In that you hear the progression of alcoholism in particular, right? Which is at first we're just drinking to have fun, right? This is part eight, right? But then you drink to feel better, which is medicating because you don't feel normal, right? You're under the bar, and now you gotta drink just to feel here at normal, right? And then drinking to feel nothing, because now it's it's trauma treatment at that point, right? You're so emotionally messed up that now you're drinking to just forget everything you've done wrong and try and put it behind you so you don't have to deal with the consequences of your actions. And eventually you get so numb that's the worst feeling of all. It's even worse than feeling the horrible trauma that you've created in your life, is just to feel dead, right? So it's a simple thing that people can ask themselves like, are you doing this to feel good? Are you doing this to feel better because you don't feel good? Are you doing this to feel nothing, like a serious escape because there's stuff going on in your life that you don't want to deal with? And if so, that's that could be okay too, as long as it's only once in a while, right? Like, you know, this world is pretty crazy right now, but you know, how often, right? And finally, are you numb at this point? Does it take an ex something very extreme to turn you on? Does it take something very extreme to get you going sexually and emotionally and romantically, right? Do you have to have love bombing before you feel like someone cares about you? So it's a simple rubric that I think might be something that people can ask themselves.
SPEAKER_01I I think that's brilliant. I love that. And I think what I would think is a healthy relationships educator is somebody going into this space to role-play something that they find joyful, that they find fulfilling, that they might want to then take to a human partner, that they want some validation of something, that they want to work past the shame and then bring that into the world? Or is somebody using their chat bot as a practice ground for something that they know a human being would never accept? And then they're looking to reinforce that with something that will never say no. So I think that I really enjoyed this conversation, guys. I'm so so excited to have it. I think I can't wait to get the feedback from listeners on what they think about this. But I think that we did a good job of exploring the full range of everything, all the different facets of sexuality that are coming out with people using chatbots. So thank you, Roz. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Saeed, as always, for your wonderful input. Um, I'm sure that Adam is gonna be so jealous that he missed this.
SPEAKER_02We want to thank you both because it was such a pleasure. I I learned a lot just talking to you two. It's awesome.
SPEAKER_01So maybe Roz will come over for why human sex part two or something we've been talking about, why human kink as something that we could really zoom in on. So if you have thoughts about other episodes, other topics that you'd like for us to explore, then we have contact information in the show notes. Also, we're hoping to have a mailbag episode pretty soon. So if you've got any questions for us, then please send them in. And thank you all so much for making it to the end of the episode. I hope that you will join us for the next one.
