Rob Brooks's Blog

If OpenAI were to ask me how to ensure users don’t form social relationships with voice-ChatGPT, I would recommend: (1) Don’t give it a voice. (2) Don’t make it capable of holding up one end of an apparent conversation. Basically don’t make the product you made.

What happens when it’s not a human bringing on the heartache, but an AI-powered app? That’s a question a great many users of the Replika AI are crying about this month.

If these 'Digital Lover' technologies can cause such pain, perhaps it’s time we stopped viewing them as trivial – and start thinking seriously about the space they’ll take up in our futures.

“Pro-lifers” consider the termination of a pregnancy the moral equivalent of taking a newborn life. Their strategies seek to blur distinctions between aborting a fetus and killing a newborn. I argue that an understanding of that relationship—drawing on evidence from centuries of history and millennia of evolution—leads to the conclusion that abortion is the most humane alternative to infanticide, adding to the case for safe, legal, accessible abortion for women who need it.

The association between diamond rings, matrimony, hetero sex, and the intention to spend one’s life with another provides a fascinating tale of economics, marketing, biology, and culture. And it teaches us about that which glitters more than gold and scintillates more than gems.

Of the 50 plus shades of online anger, one fascinates me more than the rest: the anger of the Incel. Beneath the euphemistic portmanteau of “involuntary” and “celibate” lurks a sinister mass of self-loathing men. They know they are unattractive,…

I recently encountered a man who goes by the rather unusual name of Davecat, and who describes himself using the even more unusual labels of ‘robosexual’ and ‘iDollator’. He prefers the company of life-size dolls over human partners. He’s done plenty…

It started with humans pushing machines’ buttons. Now they are pushing ours. When the COVID-19 pandemic sent so many people into work-from-home isolation, it funneled much of our social interaction onto the internet. Children learn via Zoom classrooms, colleagues meet on Microsoft…

At the moment, it seems, the media can’t get enough of sex robots. I have done a dozen or so interviews this month already, ahead of my book Artificial Intimacy: digital lovers, virtual friends and algorithmic matchmakers. Even though I argue…

First published as “Are Men or Women Driving the Stigmatization of Sex Work?” in Psychology Today KEY POINTS Women have often drawn harsher judgment than men for sexual activity, and some argue that women suppress one another’s sexuality. In a…