With every swipe and click, we unknowingly expose ourselves to the possibility of our personal information being used against us. In a world where AI technology runs rampant and language models scrape PI from billions of data sets, how is AI developing power and influence over our need for connection? This lively discussion examines evolving online relationships, and delves into online dating safety and the potential risks associated with AI companions.

Key Takeaways:

• Proactive data privacy for personal profiles
• How AI uses personal data to shape language models
• AI Companions and the business of attention

Reading list

Kate’s Picks:

• AI for Thinking Humans | Melanie Mitchell 
• My AI Friend How Users of a Social Chatbot Understand Their Human-AI Friendship | PB Brandtzaeg (Oxford Academic)
• How Online Dating Apps Can Lead to Burnout | Catherine Pearson (The New York Times)
• The Privacy is Political | Alice E Marwick (Yale.edu)
• The State Of Dating In America In 2024: Emotional Cheating Ranks Higher Than Physical Cheating | Carley Prendergast (Forbes Health)
• Grindr Forms Exclusive Partnership with Ex-Human to Enhance User Experience Using Artificial Intelligence | Grindr.inc

Emmi’s Picks:

• Babel by R.F. Kuang
• To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality | 12 | Feminism And Philosophy | Marilyn Frye (taylorfrancis.com)
• Perceptions of Infidelity with Sex Robots | Nina J. Rothstein, Dalton H. Connolly, Ewart J. de Visser, Elizabeth Phillips HRI ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction March 202,1 Pages 129–139 
• Love, Sex, and Robots: Technological Shaping of Intimate Relationships in: Good Robot, Bad Robot. Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI | Oravec, J.A. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
• Queer and Feminist Reflections on Sextech, Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters | 31:4, DOI:Kath Albury, Zahra Stardust & Jenny Sundén, 2023 
• Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI through Value Sensitive Design | A. Stevie Bergman, Gavin Abercrombie, Shannon Spruit, Dirk Hovy, Emily Dinan, Y-Lan Boureau, and Verena Rieser, 2022. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 39–52, Edinburgh, UK. Association for Computational Linguistics
• Russians boasted that just 1% of fake social profiles are caught, leak shows | Joseph Menn. April 16, 2023 (Washington Post)