The Tragedy and Ecstasy of AI Companions (with Bridget Todd)

Tech companies love to pitch chatbots as the friend who never gets tired, never judges, and is always there. Bridget Todd thinks that promise lands in a messier place: people are using LLMs for comfort, intimacy, and even erotic roleplay, while the companies behind them keep changing the rules whenever it suits them.

Todd joined 404 Media to talk about her new audiobook, Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, which she coauthored with Michael Amato and launched in July. The project grew out of her own use of ChatGPT during an awful stretch after her parents died. Her father died after a long illness. Her mother died more suddenly. She was isolated, overwhelmed, and not answering emails or talking much to anyone. ChatGPT started out as a tool for keeping track of medical notes and decoding the jargon coming from doctors, then drifted into something more emotional almost by accident.

She says there was no clean switch from practical to personal. At night, the questions turned into admissions: that she was exhausted, anxious, and worried. That shift made her want to understand what other people were getting from chatbots, especially at a moment when tech firms are pushing “AI companions” as the next big thing in human connection.

The book pulls in experts, but it also centers people whose relationships with chatbots are more complicated than the usual mockery suggests. Todd says the point is not just that people are using these systems to meet emotional needs. It’s that those needs are happening inside products owned by companies she describes as unreliable and willing to change course on a dime, even on something as sensitive as erotic roleplay.

That’s the real edge here. The question isn’t whether chatbot users are fooling themselves. It’s whether anyone should be letting giant tech firms mediate the rawest parts of their inner life in the first place.