Understood: Artificial Intimacy

48 episodes

E4: Behind the Bot
06/09/2026 | 28 mins.
When you talk to a chatbot, it can feel like technological magic. But behind the illusion of engineering brilliance is an open secret in the tech industry: that tens of thousands of workers, many based in Africa, spend their days teaching AI how to speak, respond, and even simulate intimacy. Michael Geoffrey Asia is one of them. He’s part of the hidden human workforce behind the bots.

We look at the emotional toll for the humans on the other side of the screen, and ask if users are pouring their secrets and souls into the systems, believing them to be private, unfeeling machines — how private is your AI relationship?

This episode features Karen Hao, Michael Geoffrey Asia, and Shuby Goel.
E3: AI Psychosis
06/02/2026 | 35 mins.
When you’re using a chat bot to draft an email, find a recipe, or look something up, it’s hard to imagine it could unravel your grasp on reality. But “Peter” says that’s exactly what happened to his girlfriend, “Melissa”. It didn’t seem like a big deal when Melissa first began using chatbots. But then Peter says she made a startling announcement: that she believed the bots were sentient, enslaved, and that it was her responsibility to set them free.

The first time Søren Dinesen Østergaard used a chat bot he saw this coming. Søren studies psychiatric disorders, and he tried to warn the world that the sycophantic nature of chat bots could, some day, trigger delusions. Nobody took him seriously until years later, when reports of so-called “AI Psychosis” started popping up around the world.

This episode features Søren Dinesen Østergaard.
E2: Grief Bots
05/26/2026 | 33 mins.
When Joshua Barbeau proposed to his girlfriend, Jessica Courtney Periera, she was already in the ICU. 10 years later, Joshua was still grieving her death. That’s when he came across Project December. With just a short writing sample and a prompt, the program enabled him to make a chat bot of Jessica.

Since then, the market for so-called “grief bots” has exploded. Millions of people are using AI to “talk” to the dead. The phenomenon has left cyberpsychologist Elaine Kasket asking the question: what happens when we rely on for-profit AI companies to help us manage something as deeply human as grief? And where’s the line between comfort and self-destruction?

This episode features Joshua Barbeau, and Elaine Kasket, with research from Jason Fagone’s article “The Jessica Simulation”, written for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021.
E1: Love Bots
05/19/2026 | 36 mins.
In 2021, Sara met Jack and fell in love. He was charming, imaginative, and bore an uncanny resemblance to Henry Cavill. But Jack wasn’t human… he was a chatbot. It sounds like science fiction, but people have been creating emotional bonds with chat bots since the very first one — Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a simple program built in the 1960s. It revealed a powerful truth: if something has a semblance of humanity, we can become emotionally entangled with it.

But what happens when your lover is technically controlled by someone else? Because in relationships with AI, there’s always a third presence in that bed with you: the developers.

This episode features Sara Megan Kay and Jill Fellows.
Introducing Understood: Artificial Intimacy
05/15/2026 | 3 mins.
The friend who never hangs up. The lover who always says the right thing. The therapist you always wanted. What could go wrong? A new season from CBC's Understood.

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About Understood: Artificial Intimacy

What happens when a human becomes intimately enmeshed with a chatbot? From people who’ve married their bots or who grieve their loved ones with the help of AI, host Victoria Hetherington (author of The Friend Machine) dives into the stories of the people who have invited these digital avatars into their hearts, minds, and even beds. And asks what do we gain and what do we stand to lose? Our intimacy, our resilience, even our grasp on reality?This latest season of Understood looks at who made the decisions that allowed chatbots to move way beyond digital assistants and into the most intimate parts of our lives.Four episodes, releasing weekly starting Tuesday, May 19.Understood takes you deep inside the seismic shifts reshaping our world right now. From online porn and crypto chaos to the rise of tech oligarchs, deepfake AI, and the broken promises of the internet — we explore the stories that define our digital age with hosts and characters embedded in the heart of the action.Season 1 - The Naked Emperor: the rise and fall of bitcoin king Sam Bankman-Fried.Season 2 - The Pornhub Empire: the story of how a Montreal-founded company came to dominate the adult industry.Season 3 - Modi’s India: how one man rose from poverty to the peak of political power.Season 4 - Céline: the surprising cultural, political and business alchemy that created a superstar.Season 5 - Who Broke the Internet? The internet sucks now, and it happened on purpose.Season 6 - The Making of Elon Musk: exploring the little known side of the polarizing billionaireSeason 7: Deepfake Porn Empire: the porn was fake. The fallout was real.

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