Artificial Intimacy Newsletter: Previous Issues
An archive to make it easier to browse past issues of Artificial Intimacy News
Since early March 2025 I have been publishing the Artificial Intimacy News roughly every two weeks. The newsletter collates news stories, research developments, and insights into the new and fast-moving technologies that engage human social behaviour. The list of previous issues was getting a bit long, so I am using this post to put them all in one place.
Artificial Intimacy News
+ 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.
Artificial Intimacy News #2
+ What do people mean by ‘artificial intimacy’? What do I mean?
+ AI bots to help make online dating and flirting easier, better, more successful.
+ Are companion bots redefining love?
+ How AI will alter human evolution.
+ Is machine learning going to kill the ASMR star?
Artificial Intimacy News #3
+ A virtual friend that has been very, very bad
+ An AI therapist that is very very good at its job
+ Could we domesticate AI and thus keep it from dominating us?
+ Dying alone, or dying with a machine for company? What should we accept from tech?
Artificial Intimacy News #4
+ A delightful conference
+ People are gaming self-driving cars
+ Taking Snapchat and TikTok to court on behalf of young people
+ Anthropic is about to go voice-mode
Artificial Intimacy News #5
+ A flashback to my fieldwork testing virtual friends
+ META’s new chatbots - can they be trusted?
+ AI can change your mind for you
+ Can Baidu’s new AI help us understand our pets?
+ Your face might predict how you age and how long you live
Artificial Intimacy News #6
+ The need to properly test claims that virtual friends ease loneliness and improve mental health.
+ A substantial and far-reaching perspective paper on conversational AI.
+ More (and more) on AI and chatbot romance.
+ Parallels between virtual friends and porn (with thoughts about mechanisms like neurotransmitter balance)
+ Art: an installation. And thoughts about AI-abetted creative explosion
+ Podcast of a panel discussion on the dangers of “counterfeit people”
+ Humanity’s demise is the least interesting thing about the rise of AI.
Artificial Intimacy News #7
In this issue:
In this issue:
+ Smartphones – and the apps they run – can be parasities
+ How OpenAI is approaching human-AI relationships
+ AI beats humans at emotional intelligence tests
+ The need for “socioaffective” human-AI alignment
+ Anxious and avoidant attachment styles affect human-AI relations
+ Yuval Noah Harari has entered the chat …
+ Going viral on the NY subway
Artificial Intimacy News #8
In this issue:
+ Artificial Intimacy gets on Wikipedia (sort of)
+ LLM-induced spiritual psychosis
+ Meo, the jealous AI “girlfriend”
+ Katie Price and the AI-abetted second coming of Jordan
+ The sociopath in your pocket
…. and more