(CNET) – In her new book, Bridget Todd argues that the problem isn’t people who use AI for companionship, it’s the tech companies building them.

In her new book Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, Todd, creator of the podcast There Are No Girls On The Internet and a MacArthur fellow, uses research and personal experience to paint a complex and emotionally nuanced portrait of people who form intimate connections with AI chatbots. Instead of directing our judgment toward those human-bot relationships, she argues, we should instead be examining the exploitative nature of the companies that built the technology. 

“We’re asking whether it’s healthy for individuals to develop relationships with AI when we should be asking whether it’s ethical for companies to engineer emotional dependency and then profit from it,” Todd writes in her book, which was co-authored by social scientist Michael S. Amato. (Read More)