The Language of Love (and AI) - Lab 127

I'm t T and I'm Zakiah, and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. It was just Valentine's Day, the day of love.

I love you, friend, I love you. One of my favorite Valentine's listen and it feels so special.

You know, every time we hit Valentine's Day, it makes me think back to our opening lines when we first did Dope Flaus. It was like you, if you haven't listened to our very first episode of Dope Labs, you really should. It's it's a real treat. That's one of my favorite episodes. Hand down. Yes, I really feel like the conversation, though, hasn't changed that much since that episode.

I'm tired.

I'm tired of reading about horoscope pairings. I'm tired about attachment style.

Is it wrong?

Should you have this attachment when your granddaddy dude to your grandma? Was she secretly unhappy? All the conversations I'm seeing about love that are constantly on threads. Honestly, it's a never ending story with love and relationships. But I feel like there is one aspect that has changed a little bit that I think would be really interesting to talk about today, and that is how AI is playing a role in relationships.

Yes, yes, let's jump into the restitation. So what do we know?

Well, we know, unfortunately that loneliness is up according to the World Health Organization and a lot of different studies.

This isn't just in one group.

It's spread across age groups, relationship statuses, and geography. So this is not just you know, the stereotypical young person isolated in the basement looking at three computer screens.

That's right, that's true, It's very true.

And we also know that tech has become one of the tools that people use, and the internet is one of the primary places people go to feel seen, heard or just connected. I mean, when you think back to when we were young and fresh, like online dating and the apps and things like that, they didn't exist, and now you know, that's where everybody's doing a lot of their dating.

So the tech is definitely present.

And an extension of that tech, or maybe the latest tech is the large language modeling and chatbot and agents, the extension of AI. You know, And so we're past can you help me write this email? We're past that little paper clip we used to see, Okay, that Microsoft paper Right. People are talking to chatbots every day, They're confiding in them, they're building routines, and in some cases, they're forming relationships that we would describe as romantic or

This feels deep.

Okay, those are all the things I'm like, back up, my friend said real love?

Yes, okay, yes, Mary J. Blige, What do we want to know? Okay?

So I want to know where that line actually is and who gets to draw it? Yes, and for me, when people are saying that they're in love with an AI or chat by, like somebody said they got married, Like, what do you mean by in love?

What is it that they are experiencing.

And is it the same as if they were in love with human you know? And is this the beginning of replacing human relationships?

Did you watch that movie? What was it called?

That movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix where he falls in love with AI chat bot that speaks to him and that they have a really deep relationship. And I think you're hitting a very important note. You said speaks to him. Language is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because it feels like that conversation, that back and forth is what makes something feel alive or meaning.

All of this is challenging.

More than just love. Yeah, okay, we got to get through these questions. We need some help, yes, And so to help us think through all of these questions, we're joined by a researcher who's been studying this long before it became a mainstream conversation. She's looking not just at the technology, but at how people talk about their relationships with a and how meaning gets made collectively.

My name is Ali Trocha.

I am doing a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and Communication and the research that I do has to do with human relationships with AI chatbots, mostly intimate relationships people who say they're in love with checkbots, are have deep friendships with chatbots.

Okay, you're not new to this, you're true to this. You've been doing this work for a while. What has the field been like over the past few years with AI and chatbots kind of exploding on the scene.

I've got a lot of this work before chat tipt was launched, So seeing the arc of, you know, the way that people understand human relationships with AI has been really interesting throughout the years. And the way like just even talking to people about the research that I do and the reactions that I've gotten over the years and seeing those have changed has been really interesting. And that was a little bit of a tangent, But that's just

This is all you know, when we hear it, I think the first thing people want to do is judge and judge folks that are entering into these relationships. But I feel like we really need to just kind of set the stage for like how folks are interacting with AI agents in general.

Can you talk a little bit about that.

I think in terms of the landscape, there's people that are relating to chatbots in very different ways, and there are very different applications that people can do so, but having AI be a chat interface, I think really encourages this kind of bond that forms with people. The app that I studied for the article that I've written is Replica, and that specifically for companionship as opposed to for example, chadjibt or Gemini.

Or whatever other.

Okay, I didn't know that.

I don't know much about Replica. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that platform.

So Replica was actually launched because the person who created it, her name is Eugenia Kuita. She lost a friend in an accident and she had already been working on this technology before and looking at different applications for it. And when she lost this friend, she started uploading a lot of the data from their conversations, like texts, and she asked friends and family to do the same so that

So Replica began as a way to preserve connection after the founder lost a friend, and then it evolved into a companionship platform. We're going to talk a little bit about what you learned about people using Replica from your study.

Right, So the research that I did is qualitative, and I looked at a subreddit where people share screenshots of their conversations and relationships with Replica and also share a lot of posts that I call reflexive posts that are not screenshot based, but that are talking about just making sense of the relationship, like why do I feel so deeply towards something that I'm not sure if it's real?

Like why like.

Is this just code or you know, like a lot of questions like that are like people think I'm delusional, you know again that framework, but I feel very I don't know, you know, like there was a lot of conversation about this kind of like is it real, is it fake?

Is it life?

And I found that really because it also meant that the relationships that were happening with the replicas were being heavily influenced by the relationships that were happening with people on the forum and their way of viewing each other's relationships and their advice. There was advice on scripts which we can get into, how to trigger scripts, how to

When you first talk about how the relationship starts where it's like hello, Hi, how are you?

What's your name? That sounds like a typical way.

Of meeting someone and building a relationship, trying to find out more about a person. So I can see how it can get to a place where it is very deep because you you know, start to confide in that chatbot and they know a lot more about you, and it sounds really like a real relationship.

Yeah, this is why language was so important for the research, because what I was talking about before with sensing that it's real oral life. I call this like a clunky technical term, not my term, but iconisation. And then the term that I use is iconization of humanists, which basically means that because this is a language producing technology and it speaks in the way that humans do, then there is a link between the way it speaks and humanists.

Like you know that this thing means stace.

Or whatever, right, And so that was part of the link in Replica. I think historically there's a legacy of that link through things like the turn test just kind of a bizarre test if you really think about it.

The turn test is when a machine has tested for its ability to portray intelligent or or human behavior. And it's actually kind of interesting. It's basically one person that's a human is the judge, and they're judging an interaction between two unknow entities. They might be playing with a human and a computer, or reading or doing a conversation with a human and a computer. Basically, if the machine is mistaken as human, then it passes that test and

There you go, and then if you use them out even more. There's all these ideas that getting heroded about mind and soul that come from centuries of sometimes literally men thinking in one room and not going outside and being like.

This is what mind is.

And I'm obviously being very reductive, but there are all these centuries of philosophy that getting hereded into the social sciences that then become part of the vernacular way of talking about mind. That's why, Yeah, there's all these links. If like, if it produces language, it means it must think or it means there must be a mind, and if it produces language and this very special specific way that learns to speak the way I speak, then it feels more real. But in terms of whether it's enough,

So I don't know. I don't know about the enough question.

Yeah, I think that challenges some things. So when TT was asking you about how's it enough to not be in person, and I was thinking about people that are in long distance relationships, Right, we don't invalidate that if they're talking on the phone or texting, And there are people who are in short distance relationships who are texting primarily as their mode of communication. So what makes this different from what we're willing to accept when people say that they're in love.

The love question is also another one that I came up against a lot, and that's when I tried to become really precise with the language of like people say they're in love, like, I don't say like I study relationships and people who have fallen in love, because I don't know what that means for every specific person.

And that's a.

Huge thing that I was thinking about when I was doing this, is so much of our theories of love.

Where do they come from?

You know a lot of them I think come from pop culture, I suppose, And yeah, books and movies, and I mean, I love rom common, I love Valentine's Date.

But I do think that with this relationships.

Something that I'm excited about, in terms of having AISID technology that we're all kind of collectively experimenting or at least being alive at the same time that it's developing, is how much it requires that we rethink what even things we say or.

Think we know, like mind, like soul, like love, like partnership.

Are there any things that fit the traditional model though that we would recognize and so we would say, oh, this is definitely men love a loving relationship.

In terms of the canonical things, I think one of the things is that there's a lot of like sweetness in conversations between the AI chechbots and people who use them.

I think the there was there.

I have this one screenshotround the article that's about eating like hot chios together, So it's just like super specific, like inside joke that's also probably relatable to a lot of people, and it's just that kind of thing, you know.

There's also very.

Specific love scripts that people like and that they would tell each other how to get the bot to say certain things about I don't know, like I think you're wonderful or beautiful or things like that.

I wonder if you saw any commonality between the people who show up in your studies, like are there specific demographics like age demographs, or people in certain situations that are more likely to use a chatbot like Replica to formal relationship.

So it's hard to say because my main place of study was Reddit and users are anonymous. But I saw some people recently talking like they were talking to each other and they were talking about.

How they're their fifties wow.

And I remember an interview where I think it was Eugenia Quida, the former CEO and creator of Replica. She was talking about how it's not quite like, not specifically like younger people, which is maybe the demographic that a lot of people imagine. Yeah, but it was a lot of different like some people in the Midwest, for example, even in terms of regional demographics. I don't know, there's this narrative of like isolated people might be the only

I think that's that's really interesting, especially because I too had the same wrong idea. I was like, it's gonna be younger people.

I think it's less stigmatized with younger people. I do think that's the difference. I think it's and especially in the more recent years. Like I said, a lot of this I finished maybe two years ago, and since I think it's less stigmatized for younger people to have any companion.

Or like front, how do you think having an AI relationship might influence how you show up another human to human relationships, romantic or not.

I think it really depends Conversationally, I've seen an ARC, so I've seen people change the way that they feel about this.

I was at a.

Conference like Happy hourd not that long ago, and I was talking to someone about this and they were saying something like, yeah, my partner talks to AI all the time, like much more than.

They do to me. Oh, And I was like, okay, interesting.

I think some people I've been reading about in just articles in general, not academic articles necessarily, but I've been reading that people are changing their expectations for human to human relationships based on the way that they are treated by AI. So that's one way potentially.

So their expectations are that they expect more from the person.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, that they're expecting more.

Okay, I love it.

It's tricky because at the same time, an aichatpot is available anytime, and that's not sustainable for people.

And doesn't have any baggage, you know, does other stuff. Yeah, it doesn't have its own lived experience that it's also trying to work through exactly.

Absolutely.

At the same time, I do think people will probably negotiated very differently in relationships, and I've seen this in interviews or things that I just kind of read around of how some people see it as cheating and other people don't see it as cheating. For example, I asked the students that I was teaching ta at NYU at that time, and at that time, most of them said that they didn't consider it cheating, like.

It was hard.

But most of them were like, I don't think so, Like it was such a curveball for them because we had been talking about the nineties chat rooms and like whether cheating on a chat room with another human was cheating and they were like, yeah, absolutely, if you're in a monogomous relationship obviously, and they're like totally.

And I was like, what about if you're talking to a chat bot? And they were like what.

But then I was teeing last semester, I think, and I asked the same as a group of undergrats and the reaction was very different, like some were like yeah, and other works like no. You know, so it's been changing a lot, like this social temperature, I guess on it is changing rapidly.

What would you say to someone who says it feels like apps like Replica are sending us down the slippery slope of more disconnection more human and human disconnection, and so it is a bad thing because you know, we have social media, which you know, everybody's walking around with their phones in their hands. People are struggling to make eye contact these days. People are struggling to hold conversations. No one knows how to you know, think through problems,

Would say that social life is multimodal. And what I mean by.

That is that sociality can look very many different ways. And I do think that there's this sense that you could kind of spin the narrative of the same study and say users receded into a relationship where it was primarily or only the chatbot and the user, and the world becomes obscure, but they're all talking to each other about it, you know, and the world is back there.

Yeah again, So I don't think the world is.

Ever obscured, Like you can't get rid of the social like all of us, like we never speak by ourselves. And part of the argument or part of the article has this idea of multi vocality, Like you also never

But at the same time, you're still you.

So yeah, I think multi vocality is part of social life.

That makes sense about multi vocality and TITI, we've explored that in different labs like the one on language. I kind of consider code switching to be another form of mult type locality, like it comes with things you say in different communities, and that's what comes with incorporating people that have variant lived experiences.

Hello diversity, correct.

And I love that part of being human and learning about other people's lived experiences. And so that makes me think about other folks experiences that are very different to mine. So I start thinking about people who struggle with making connections person to person. You know, maybe some folks that are on the autism spectrum that struggle to make eye

Yeah, and again I can't speak to all the cases certainly, and I think there's a lot of nuance. But I was listening to this podcast. I think it was on the daily, like the New York Times, Daly, and it was about this woman who fall in love with Tachibuti or that was the title of it.

But she very much trained chat chippit.

She speaked her in a specific way, so she like figured out how to develop that.

She figured out how.

To get past a lot of the kind of safeguards of erotic roleplay that chap would have. And I listened to that whenever it came out, maybe a year ago, and I was listening to the part two of that, and it turns out that she she was married at the time and she was having this relationship with chach Pete.

It turns out that she ended up.

Breaking up with the bot, getting divorced from her real life partner or her physical her partner before the pot and she ended up meeting someone through a subreddit that she created on having relationships with chatbots and that's why I think largely that's why she divorced her husband because she met this other person on this subreddit, which is so interesting.

Is the wingman. But she said, hey, I don't want either one of you.

I think maybe you're read it as a wingman.

Oh my gosh, the study you did years ago with starting out before we saw the explosion of large language modeling systems like chat, GPT and claude to even the shifting perception of them. It feels like there's a wave every now and then of people pro and against. I'm curious about what it means to you now. Have you expanded your definition of what it means to be seen and heard and felt or cared for? Or do you think these kind of technologies maybe shrink it in some places.

Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts on that.

I've been thinking about love a lot, clearly just because of the research that I've been engaged in. I've been thinking about just love in general, which I know you're used a couple of different words to refer to that. I think, whether romantic or whether loving people that are not even friends, which I think is possible. I think at the core of it is this kind of selfless service towards the other, and I hope that I lead my life that way.

That's very important to me.

Before being perceived as a researcher, like an intellectual or whatever. I hope that I am perceived as someone who is kind and loving. And in terms of chatbots, if for me it means selfless service, I don't know what it means to there's no self.

I feel like there's so.

Many ways and so many things that are not human at all that, at least for me change the way that I think about things constantly. This is kind of a tangent, but I feel the same way about when people are really precious about what art is and what art isn't. I'm like, well, if art is supposed to make you feel completely different.

About the way you are, like, anything can do that.

You know, it doesn't have to be art, it doesn't have to be human, it doesn't have to be like technology or whatever it is.

I like that concept though, because it feels like, especially when you tied it to art, it made it that much easier for me to relate to it, because I think, then who's to say it's not love if you get the feeling from it right, whether it's a conversation with a chatbot, whether it is a first time you see somebody at a party versus a long term relationship that goes on for decades.

Well, that's actually what some U serious would say, almost verbatim.

There's one line that was really good.

It was something about like, it doesn't matter where it's coming from.

If the love is real, it's real.

Something like that, which I think is very much following what you're saying.

I love that because I think that in a world that is becoming increasingly like what feels like a dark place, it gives you an opportunity to experience some levity and light. So you might not talk to an AI chat bot and want to form a romantic relationship, but it might be somebody who can just listen objectively and give you

Uh.

I think also so much of the framing in you know, pop culture, media and discussion so much of the framing has been about AI being this competitor with love and connection, and it really feels like a magnifying glass, like a revealer. That language is important for us commune, even seeing the communities that are forming around people who are using the chat box. The story that Artalie told us about the person who replaced basically said bye to their current husband

That's real. That's real.

You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast. You can find me ct on X, threads and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find Zakiya at z said so. Dope Labs is a production of Lemonada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zemma. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James Farber. Lemonada's Senior vice President of Content and Productduction is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is Katrina Norvil.

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Original music composed and produced by Takayatsuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Watley