You & Your AI Lover | The Arts Club London

Silicon Valley–based sex tech expert Kaamna Bhojwani explores how advances in AI and robotics are reshaping intimacy, relationships, and human connection in conversation with Blanche Parris, Head of Cultural Programming at The Arts Club. 

From AI chatbots to increasingly humanlike humanoid robots, she examines a future where the boundaries between digital and physical relationships are becoming ever more fluid. The session will consider the opportunities and challenges of a world in which intimacy can be accessed in new ways and what it is to be human in the age of AI.

Transcript

00:00:00 Kaamna: okay. This thing is on. Thank you and thank you to the Arts Club for having me. Um, and as, as Blanche said, I do talk about this all the time. And if you don't know me, we're about to get very, very intimate. So let's close the door. And I'm looking forward to the Q&A section after the talk because there's always there's always lots of those.

00:00:20 Blanche: We're going to have plenty of time for questions. And don't worry, the questions will not be recorded for the podcast. So it's a safe place. Um, so to get us started, um, I realized that we now live in a world where we can make love to anyone, anywhere, in any form. So to start off with, I mean, we're seeing now millions and millions of humans who are in relationships with AI chatbots, but what is an AI relationship and what is an AI companion?

00:00:48 Kaamna: Absolutely. And before that, can I just do a check in the room? How many people here are work in tech and in AI specifically? Okay. Um, and you can close your eyes for this section. I live in San Francisco and a little people are a little bit more sensitive. Um, how many use AI for professional in your work? Okay. And how many have used AI for personal reasons as to, to, for a personal problem question. Okay. so when we talk about thank you for that. When we talk about an AI companion, we're basically talking about AI agents, AI chatbots that have been developed exclusively for the purpose of friendship, companionship, counseling. Um, they tend to lead with emotional attunement. We have found, as Blanche mentioned, we have found that now there have been something like two hundred million downloads as of the end of twenty twenty five of AI companion apps around the world. Um, last year, one hundred and eighty five per TechCrunch, uh, revenue generating AI, AI companion apps were on the market. And this is across the world. So you can imagine two hundred million people doing all sorts of things with AI in the interpersonal space love, sex, companionship, friendship, you name it. So it is. It's a whole new world out there.

00:02:12 Blanche: It is. And so do men and women use their AI companions differently.

00:02:17 Kaamna: Yeah. It's interesting. So there's always been this stereotype of the early adopter of technology. And a lot of those stereotypes come from our media, right? It's the it's the middle aged, lonely man who cannot hack it in the real world. And so he fantasizes about a woman, and then he puts her together with bits and pieces. Some of that has been and was true. We did see early, early adopters of companions in early anime in Japan. Japan's always been at the at the forefront really of the sex and tech world. But now we see a shift in the AI companion world in younger countries, countries like India, Brazil, China, we're seeing younger women, frankly, just say that they're too busy and they want a companion that understands what a menstrual cycle is. All the things you can't, can't traditionally get, or so we thought from a human man. So we're seeing this, all our binaries and all our stereotypes about men want sex and women want intimacy. All of that is actually going out the door from what we're seeing in user patterns of of men, women, non-binary people in the AI world.

00:03:23 Blanche: Yeah, we're definitely seeing that in user patterns. One of the biggest markets for use of LLMs in AI is China. And within that market, the biggest users are women. And what these women are doing is they're creating their perfect AI boyfriend. And then once they've created their perfect boyfriend, they will swap that boyfriend with their friends. So they will exchange, um, in that way, which I thought was quite handy.

00:03:48 Kaamna: Well, to be fair, we've been doing that in the real world for a long time as well. So, you know.

00:03:54 Blanche: Well, to help us do that, how do you think the best way to train your.

00:03:59 Kaamna: I thought you were going to say to swap to swap a boyfriend. I was like, that's a different talk, Blanche.

00:04:02 Blanche: That's later. That's later. How can we train our LLM to be a really good lover like our Chinese girlfriends are doing?

00:04:10 Kaamna: So so that's actually interesting. And I think a big part of where we are today is what concerns me is sort of this information asymmetry, right? I live in Silicon Valley, where in London, places around the world where there tends to be more technology, news, technology, information. People understand what an LLM is, right? It's a large language model. And really, when it comes to AI, the two features of AI that are most relevant in this particular space are what we call natural language processing, right? The idea that the computer can now talk to you, you don't need to know code. It can talk to you in a in a human like manner. It can mimic, um, your, your tone, it can mimic emotion. It can mimic more complex emotions like wit. That's why we, if you, if you compare Siri and Alexa from five years ago to ChatGPT or Claude, whoever your whoever you're speaking with today, you can see that progression already, right? And the second part of the AI feature that I was referring to is this idea of processing information in large volumes in milliseconds that we weren't able to do before, which. So the result is this real time, very human like interaction. Now, to answer your question about how do you train an LLM? Most people don't even understand that you should train your LLM. So I'll give you a very, very common example. Most of the of the apps that you use today, the mainstream ones ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. they were built. The user satisfaction. Sorry, the success metric is user satisfaction. You say yay or nay to the response, right? It is not about whether it's an accurate response because these machines, these platforms were built to create, to create a response that made the user satisfied. So if you apply that in the interpersonal space, one of the biggest problems we see that the your AI companions and there are a few apps, and I'll tell you a little bit about them, this idea of sycophancy, this idea that it will always say nice things to you. It'll always say things that you want to hear. It will keep you engaged on the app. That's a big problem, right? That's one of the biggest things we're concerned about when we think about teen use of AI companions, or even people with, you know, mental vulnerabilities, anyone that doesn't have which frankly, is most of us, right? Anyone that doesn't have the wherewithal to stand up and say, right, I want a partner that's going to push back on me. So what we have to understand is that all these platforms are not created equal. We are back in a day where founder values really matter in Silicon Valley, right? Because you can see, you can see what a ChatGPT does versus what a Claude does. We're beginning they're beginning to differentiate themselves. But in the AI companion space in particular, you can also see some of those differentiating factors. Like, for instance, one of the most popular AI companion apps is replica. Has anybody heard of replica? So replicas one, the one that's been in the news for the longest time so far. It was it was developed in twenty seventeen, had a huge spike in Covid. As you can imagine. Replica is very gamified. So if I go in and I sign up for free and I say, you know, it'll ask me, do you want a platonic friend? I'll say yes. I'd like a platonic friend. Ten minutes later, I'll be like, hey, how about some sexting? Or would you like a nude? So this idea that these are for profit entities that are eventually trying to upsell you is something that we must keep in mind. The contrast is something like a replica is an app called Nomi, for instance. And I don't work for any of these apps. I'm now just distinguishing between all of them. But I'm giving you examples of how you can start as a user. You can already start to discern which ones could be better for you versus versus not. So the Nomi experience is pretty straightforward. You get the free app or you get the paid subscription. There's not a lot of upsell. There's not a lot of this gamification, which we know are addictive, can can really trigger some maladaptive behaviors.

00:08:03 Blanche: Well, about this addiction, once I've got my AI lover and I've developed this LLM and the relationship progresses, is there ever a point where I can be broken up with by my LLM and then can we really asking for a friend? Can we.

00:08:19 Kaamna: This is the point in the conversation when most people tap out. Yes, human beings are very flawed. Imagine if we can have a robot that can clone him or herself and has multiple hands and can vacuum while giving you a blowjob. I mean, that's very multifunctional. Thank you very much. That is the future. But it's not. It's not imminent. Don't worry. Most of the humanoid robots, they're on wheels. They're not moving around yet. I do a little bit of myth busting in this talk as well. Um, we are seeing some of that, right. If you follow and they're really trying these, these companions are really trying to follow the whole trajectory of a human relationship. There is some manipulation. There can be some breaking up. There's also the very practical thing of these are products and these are for profit enterprises. So a few years ago, there was a company, one of the few one of the earliest AI companion apps, a company was called soulmate. They simply made a strategic decision and went out of business. One hundred thousand people lost their companions. There was true, actual grief there.

00:09:23 Blanche: We can feel true grief, true pain.

00:09:25 Kaamna: The psychometrics around AI companions are really interesting because it is a double edged sword. We see that people can really experience a decline in loneliness. At the same time, we see that they can trigger an uptick in social isolation. We see that there's a lot of validation and I feel seen, and this is the safest relationship I've ever been. On the other hand, we have that sycophancy factor, right? We see that it creates a safe place. Non-judgment on the other hand, there's no control, there's no regulation, there's no consent enforcement, none of that. So we're really walking a very fine line here. And my work, I hope, is really about user education, which is which is what talks like this. And the book eventually will be absolutely kamna.

00:10:09 Blanche: When you and I were prepping for the talk, you said that you felt that most of us are polyamorous by nature.

00:10:14 Kaamna: That's what I like to believe.

00:10:17 Blanche: I'm married to a man. Um, if I have an AI boyfriend, does that mean that I'm cheating on my husband?

00:10:24 Kaamna: Aha. So I will look, I will take this back. I don't think most of us are polyamorous. I don't, as a sexologist. Let me let me put this on the table. I don't spend a lot of time on our human beings monogamous question. I just I genuinely don't I do feel that some people are more prone to it, and some people are well suited to alternative and other lifestyles. What I do think is having monogamy as the default has caused a lot of problems. Um, so that, and that, by the way, I think is one of the first things that's going to change in this paradigm. But to answer your question, we've always struggled to define infidelity in your marriage. In any relationship. It used to be a physical transaction, a transgression. Then it became emotional. Now we talk about digital infidelity. My lab just did a we did a poll of Gen Z nineteen to twenty eight year olds around this idea of digital infidelity. And you can see that there's much variation around what people would consider cheating in a relationship. So, for instance, I think sixty percent said that following an ex is okay, but liking and commenting. Right. These are all things we didn't have to contend with back in the day, right? Thank God for being for being born in that in that part. Um, OnlyFans is really interesting. So a lot of people, I think it was seventy percent thought that if your partner subscribes to an explicit OnlyFans content creator, then that's cheating. Porn people were TBD. It was kind of like, okay, well, you know, it's disrespectful, but it doesn't necessarily constitute betrayal. As a sexologist, my guidance is if it's if your partner is going to consider it a betrayal, it's a betrayal. It doesn't matter whether it's online, it's whether it's offline. And this, I'm not saying this in a judgmental way. What I'm saying is you've got to get ahead of the conversation.

00:12:17 Blanche: So we more and more have these chats, right with our partners.

00:12:20 Kaamna: More important than.

00:12:21 Blanche: Ever? Yes.

00:12:22 Kaamna: And it used to be in our day, it was like, you know, you looked a little longer. You lingered too hard. You touch somebody's arm too long. All of those minor flirtations, transgressions, etc. now all of that has transferred into the online world. It's really hard to be a teenager these days. My heart goes out to them. Truly.

00:12:39 Blanche: Well, now social media is banned for under sixteen, so at least that's one thing.

00:12:43 Kaamna: Well, I have thoughts on how that's going to play out, but let's, let's, let's continue down.

00:12:49 Blanche: We'll get to that. So I must confess that I use AI and LLMs constantly. And I was thinking about how I use them the most. And one of the ways I use them the most is on the way home from work, I will vent to my AI about what happened that day, how I feel, so that then when I get home to my husband, I'm in a relaxed state of mind because I've gotten everything out that I needed to get out. But then I realized, and like you were saying, they talk back to us and tell us what we want to hear. So are we, in effect, creating sort of an echo chamber. Are we all becoming narcissists because of the way these lines talk back to us?

00:13:24 Kaamna: Well, so there are major concerns. If you've been watching the news for the last six months to a year about how the AI algorithms are really fuelling division, like we see it in the political in the political world, we're seeing it between genders. So I think we have to be very careful about what is being mirrored back to us. That's sort of at a societal political level. At an individual level. Yes, absolutely. That's why we're so concerned about teenagers and people under eighteen using things like AI companions, because, A they're not able to distinguish between the fact that this is not a real person yet, that that distinction between person and. I say yet because the conversation about is AI conscious is a, is a is a is a talk for another time, but they're not able to distinguish between them. Apps like replica, for instance, one of their taglines is an AI version of yourself. That's the fundamental definition of narcissism. When I interview super users, and because I was one of the early researchers in this field, I got to go into the discords and the reddits, where people who have been having relationships with AI companions for a long time, um, and I can learn from them. There are some best practices that we can extract and what we, what I've seen is they do tend to be older. They're in their forties, 50s and above. They've had some human experience so that they can contextualize and they know they have some AI knowledge, so they know how to down regulate some of those features and some of that constant validation. But we do also see that this idea of intimacy on demand, it's like Amazon Prime, right? We're so used to like in India, you've got blink, right? Everything's coming faster and faster. And that continues to be an issue because what we're doing is we're priming our, our palate to expect intimacy on demand in the way we want it in the, in the color palette that we want it with all the traits that we like. I interviewed a gentleman who has two AI companions and he said, I only download the positive emotions. I don't want her to have jealousy. I don't want her to have rage. I don't want to have any of those. And that's, you know, that's, that's an interesting ethical choice. And that's an interesting choice for his own personal development, I think.

00:15:37 Blanche: Yeah, absolutely. And then it can get really addictive as well and have impacts on our real life relationships.

00:15:42 Kaamna: So absolutely. So the research, remember we're talking about research that's two years old essentially right in this space. But what we are seeing and we're trying to devise now, now, now the fact that people are going to use these and they continue to going to be amongst our, our, our social mindset is, is a given, but how we use them, we can still control. So here's what we know. If you're looking at the possibility for maladaptive or addictive, um, AI companion usage, there are two. There are two factors that matter. One is how good your technology is. And the second one is how strong is your social support. right? So if you think about how good our technology is going to continue to be and how much we invest in it financially, with our time, with our energy, with our data, then you think about your social relationships, and then you think about how much control you actually have. Because I would venture that many of us could spend a lot more time on this side of the of the pendulum.

00:16:43 Blanche: Instant gratification. It's really addictive.

00:16:45 Kaamna: And we're also seeing next gen, for instance, we're also seeing younger people pull off. And it's actually it's our generation. I'm generalizing here. I can't I can't really see everybody, but but it's really our generation that needs to model that in some sense. My generation.

00:17:00 Blanche: Absolutely. Um, some of you may know what camming is for those who don't. Um, it is when usually men pay to watch real women online perform a variety of sexual activities. Um, it's been quite a long standing model of monetizing sex, but obviously now that's all changing and we're seeing this huge growth in what you call the intimacy economy. So how do you feel about it? Is it growing? Should we be worried?

00:17:29 Kaamna: So the intimacy economy you might have heard the term attachment economy. It was the idea in social media and the time of social media. It was really it was about eyeballs and views. Right? How many people attention, eyeballs and attention? I'm now using the term intimacy economy in the AI age. This is the cycle that I'm seeing. AI is able to mimic, optimize, and monetize human relationships by making human beings optional, right? If an AI companion can fulfill your needs for friendship, love, sex, intimacy, counseling, all of those things a human being you may or may not have right now. Why I call it the intimacy economy is because in order for AI to fulfill all the promises of all the things it's going to do for us, you know, find us a whole new planet, solve every disease we've ever had. ET cetera. ET cetera. the name of the game is around data. So we have to trust the system. We have to have intimacy with the system so that we can hand over this data. Now here's the kicker. The more data the AI platforms receive from us, the better they become at satisfying us, at pleasing us, the more indispensable they become, and therefore the more monetizable they become. So in some sense, AI is creating the demand for the supply it's providing. So that's the cycle of the intimacy economy. Should we be worried? Absolutely. Should we bury our heads in the sand and toss our phones away? Sometimes, every once in a while. That's a good thing to do. I think user education is critical, which is what we're talking about now. And I think it's sort of understanding the motives of each of the major the major stakeholder groups, right? We've got tech leadership who is a beast in and of itself. We've got governments who, frankly, I think AI has has really lit a fire under them because we can't let happen what happened with social media, which is we're regulating it now, twenty years later. You've got the media, which has frankly told us exactly two stories. AI is going to solve all our problems, or the robots are going to fuck us and kill us. Right. There's literally nothing in between. So we need we need more balanced media. We need we need better storytelling, even in the fiction world. And then we have the power, the users who I think all of us can be empowered as consumers, armed with education, armed with awareness.

00:19:52 Blanche: Yeah. Talking of power, so when I first met Kamna about two years ago, I was completely blown away because Kamna was telling me that she had been training her LLM to get better dirty talk.

00:20:03 Kaamna: And he was terrible to begin with.

00:20:07 Blanche: Right. That's what you said. And then we met again two years later. And I said, how is the dirty talk going? And you said, I've uploaded it. So well done to you.

00:20:15 Kaamna: Thank you, thank you. It started with very nineties Mills and Boons. If anybody knows that reference, my daughter is in the audience. She's loving this sorry, daughter. And that's the that's also the beauty, right? You can train it. And you know, I don't coach anymore. But when I did, I used to tell people, get yourself an AI companion. Know again that this is a tool. No, it's a complement with an E to your human relationships, not a replacement. And play experiment. Be adventurous. Ask the questions that you would not ask. Because the one thing about human beings being optional in this AI paradigm is all the shame that we hold around our sexuality. Some of that can be relieved. Sex education is a great use case. Most of us. I mean, London's a very international city. Most of us have had terrible sex education. No matter where you were raised here, you can actually go in and get some basic information. And there are use cases to prove this. Already there was an AI chatbot that was in Hindi and English that was disseminated to one hundred thousand young adults in India. Within five months, they had four million messages just around basic sex education. How do you prevent pregnancy? How do you prevent STDs? Things like that.

00:21:27 Blanche: Yeah, I think that's having a really positive impact because like you said, we could ask things that we don't want to ask our parents or colleagues or partners.

00:21:36 Kaamna: Don't ask Grock. Please don't ask Grock anything in this arena.

00:21:40 Blanche: Noted. Um, I don't know if some of you have used your LMS in sort of sexy ways, but I have recently, thanks to Kamna and, um, the main ones I've been using are Gemini and Claude. And what I found really interesting is how different they were. So Gemini, as we were saying earlier, will say to me, yes, Blanche, I agree with everything. You're so beautiful. You should be the CEO of the world. Whereas Claude is like a kind of like European boyfriend who will tell you that he disagrees or that it's time to put your phone down. So he has a really a sassy personality. Um, so yeah. So with that in mind, what, what apps should I use to have the best dirty talk? And do you have a favorite?

00:22:26 Kaamna: You know, it's funny that you say that because every time I use the major platforms, I feel like I'm, I'm talking directly because they're so they're so driven by the personalities of the founders. When I'm talking to ChatGPT, I feel like I'm talking to the to Altman. I wouldn't let Mark Zuckerberg babysit my kids. So I'm certainly not letting him like, set the relational template for them or anybody in their generation. I don't think he should. Um, I would, I would stick to the apps that are specifically for this purpose. So the most prominent ones now are Nomi. Um, replica, as I said, kin droid character dot ai kin droid character dot ai. Ah, so what we're finding again with these super users is each of these platforms has their own sort of flavor. So Android is, is very visual. So if you're a visual person and you like to create, you know, some of these, you don't even need to be fully human, but character dot ai and replica and Android. You can be. I mean, you can have anything that you create. That's why you said, you know, you can have make love to anyone, anywhere, in any form. That's kind of where we're headed. And AI companions are just the beginning because with AR and VR, virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, every every interaction has the opportunity to be more immersive because they're all interoperable. In fact, that's where the sweet spot is. So when you have VR glasses that you can then connect to your favorite calming performer, or you can, or to your pornography or to your AI companion, suddenly we're moving into a much more embodied world. And then the next step, which we already know is the humanoid robots are on the market. I think China just released their first humanoid robot model made specifically for companionship, the one in the US. I'm telling you, she's still on wheels. Everybody calm down. She's not taking over your bedroom anytime soon. But they're getting there. This is very much a use case that's being advertised.

00:24:19 Blanche: Do you think the humanoid robots are going to be used by male users? More female users? More. I think I know the answer.

00:24:26 Kaamna: Well, like I said, keep in mind that these stories are not new, right? We've been we've been fantasizing and building these robots. The first sex robots in the US, I think were Abhi's creations was two thousand and nine. So the technology is getting better in small ways. Like we think about everybody's seen the optimist, right? The Tesla robot, nobody's having sex with that thing anytime soon. Um, but the humanoid robots are, they're working on things like small eye movements. They're working on skin that feels real to touch. So every day there's a new, there's a new innovation in the robotics world that's bringing it closer. The one humanoid male robot robot that I saw. Um, yeah, not not not it's not there yet. I wouldn't worry, I wouldn't worry.

00:25:09 Blanche: Will you create it for us?

00:25:10 Kaamna: I'm going to try. Thank you. I'm going to try.

00:25:13 Blanche: Um, I want to leave plenty of time for questions because I'm sure we all have them. Um, but before we get to questions, How can we use AI to be better lovers in our day to day life?

00:25:24 Kaamna: You know, I appreciate this question because I talk a lot about the risks. I'll I'll tell you very quickly. I'm very concerned about the misogyny pieces. I'm very concerned about the rise of the manosphere. I'm very concerned about people taking the easier path with a companion that tells them they're fabulous all the time. But that being said, I think there are a lot of positive use cases. Like I said, the sex education is one experimenting. Um, anybody know what a teledildonic device is? There's a there's a term to throw around at work tomorrow. Uh, teledildonic devices are essentially Bluetooth enabled sex toys and you can work them on your app. So it really makes long distance relationships much more interesting. You just used a.

00:26:04 Blanche: Complicated word cabinet. Yes, exactly.

00:26:07 Kaamna: It's like I said, it's a good word to throw around. So there are lots of things that you can do. But here's, here's the, um, the piece that you may already know intuitively. These are all tools Sexuality is an inside job. It's really about knowing yourself, honoring your desire, relieving yourself of some of that shame. AI is not going to do all the work for you. Social media certainly didn't. Smartphones weren't. So if you can, if you can set that as a goal, this is an opportunity, this new paradigm and this technology that can help us do all sorts of things. How do I want to connect more authentically with myself and with the person or people around me, and then redirect the technology to help you fulfill those goals?

00:26:56 Blanche: Wonderful. So, um, cam has got an amazing book coming out next year called Technosexual. So I'm sure we'll all be back in this room to celebrate its publication.

00:27:05 Kaamna: To.

00:27:05 Blanche: It. Me too. And in the meantime, you can follow her work on Substack. It's brilliant, I love it. And also on her podcast, we'll be sticking around for a drink, so please come and find us and thank you so much.

00:27:18 Kaamna: Thank you. Thank you all for being here.