Artificial Intimacy News

A field report from the place where 21st Century technology meets human social and sexual behaviour.

In this first issue:

• Who coined the term ‘artificial intimacy'?

• Grok AI goes sexy and endangers humanity in the process

• Chinese dating sim adds menstrual tracking to enthusiastic applause

• Chatbots do what smart humans can’t by talking conspiracy theorists round to more sensible positions

• Dale Carnegie’s spirit is alive and well with conversational AI

• and plenty more.

A little reminder: I wrote the freaking book on this topic. If you want a copy look at my recommendations page, or you could buy a copy.

After some procrastination, I’ve decided to go all-in on Substack in 2025. So far it’s been fun. I have published a few new pieces and imported a few pieces from recent years to the platform, with a little bit of tidying to remove the gross anachronisms.

That’s the thing about artificial intimacy – everything moves so fast. So, perhaps predictably, I have decided to start a newsletter where readers can catch up with some of those developments I stumble across every time I open my email or social media.

The focus of the newsletter is ‘artificial intimacy’. It isn’t a term that I coined, nor did any of the other authors who might appear at the top of a search on the topic. This week’s Explainer asks “who first used the term?”

It is a catchy term. Subscribe to be the first to read my rather expansive of what artificial intimacy is in next newsletter’s “Explainer”.

Headlines

Twitter’s Grok AI chatbot releases ‘Sexy AI’ mode

In perhaps the biggest news in a big week, users were somewhere between impressed and shocked at the NSFW mode on Grok AI. It clearly does sexy talk

According to this news article, one Twiter user quipped "‘This may single-handedly bring down global birth rates.’ Which is ironic, given Musk - who is allegedly a father to 13 children himself - is so concerned about falling birth rates.”

‘Her’ is here

Just like you couldn’t leave a party in the ‘90s until Pearl Jam’s Alive had been blasted out of the CD player, so, too, no discussion of virtual friends is complete until the Spike Jonze movie Her has been referenced. In this Variety article, Ethan Shanfield takes a pleasant tour of all the ways in which Jonze’s movie has proved prescient in the 12 years since it was released. It is a good catchup for some perspective.

Chinese dating simulator Love and Deepspace now has a period tracker – it signals a shift in mobile gaming

Dating sims - or Otome games - have been doing artificial intimacy since long before LLMS. The news here is that players of Love and Deepspace can enter various details, including menstrual timing, and the too-gorgeous virtual boyfriend will not only help with tracking but remember and act in appropriate ways. That this is seen as a win shows just how low the bar is for virtual friend technologies to exceed many human relationships.

AI Chatbots are good at talking people out of their conspiracy beliefs

The original paper, and this excellent explainer from the

Seeds of Science

Substack, explain just how chatbots do it, and what that means for the future of conversation AI in general. Fewer consiparcy theorists: good. Machines that can figure out what people believe and talking them around to another belief: not necessarily good.

Machines excel at this because they take the perspective of the human they are chatting with (because they learned on everything anyone has ever written), but they are also good at finding our what that perspective is via patiently probing and listening to the replies.

Cold humans and warm machines (on the seductions of AI conversations)

Explainer - Who coined the term “Artificial Intimacy”?

Short answer: I don’t know.

It wasn’t me, in my 2021 book of that name. But if you get a chance to buy me a drink someday I can gossip about the heat I got from someone for apparently “stealing” a book title they felt the universe owed them. Hell, I wish I had written The Blank Slate instead of Steven Pinker. But ultimately he did a much better job and beat me to it by decades. Reading something you wished you wrote, even if it is just a title, should be a delight.

It also wasn’t Esther Perel, although my Google alerts for the term suggest her 2023 SxSW talk might be the most famous use of the term. And it wasn’t Sherry Turkle, even though her thought-provoking NY Times Op-Ed from 2018 used the term in the headline.

Looking at the academic’s tool of choice, Google Scholar, the first time I see the words side by side in the context of technology being deployed to tap human social or sexual appetites is Amy Flowers’ 2010 book The Fantasy Factory: An Insider’s View of the Phone Sex Industry. The first time I see it used in a title in a work discussing AI companions is Anthony Carew’s 2016 article in the journal Screen Education (Artificial intimacy: Technology and human connection in her). (“her” refers to the 2013 film “Her”; see, it is unavoidable).

Another way of seeing when a term entered the zeitgeist, is to study word use in online searches or social media. I did a Google Trends search, and the results were so underwhelming it was not worth including the graph. But I was gratified that the first and second spikes in Google search data happen just after I published my book in Australia and then the UK/North America.

What I have been up to….

Superhumanize Podcast - Artificial Intimacy: How technology is redefining human connection.

A fun discussion, and the closest I have got to the human enhancement world. Cut this quite a while ago, so hope it has aged well.

Please use the comments facility below send your thoughts, corrections to my inevitable errors, and links to news stories and relevant Substacks. Or if you prefer, you could restack this newsletter.