Episode 249: The growing role of AI within the Manosphere with Dr. Allysa Czerwinsky

Coordinated and Produced by Elisa Garbil

This week on the podcast we have Allysa Czerwinsky back to dive into the Manosphere and the ideologies that go with it, such as inceldom. Dominic and Allysa discuss the structures and dynamics of online extremist communities, what the differences are between the Red Pill and the Black Pill, and what those implications are. Moreover, they look at the different options for prevention and intervention strategies as well as the upcoming role of AI in accentuating misogynistic extremism. 

Dr. Allysa Czerwinsky (she/her) is a Research Fellow in AI Trust and Security and PhD Candidate at the University of Manchester. Her research explores how male supremacism and misogynist extremism manifest in digital environments, accounting for the complex interplays between technology, harm, and violence. Her doctoral work traces the narratives present in stories shared to several incel-focused forums, uncovering how these stories help legitimise harm and provide additional knowledge about potential pathways into and out of inceldom. Alongside this, she’s interested in ethical approaches to conducting research in public-facing online spaces, and adopts a reflexive intersectional feminist praxis in her work.

The International Risk Podcast is a weekly podcast for senior executives, board members, and risk advisors. In these podcasts, we speak with experts in a variety of fields to explore international relations. Our host is Dominic Bowen, Head of Strategic Advisory at one of Europe’s leading risk consulting firms. Dominic is a regular public and corporate event speaker, and visiting lecturer at several universities. Having spent the last 20 years successfully establishing large and complex operations in the world’s highest-risk areas and conflict zones, Dominic now joins you to speak with exciting guests around the world to discuss international risk.

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Transcript:

Dominic Bowen: Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host, and today we’re continuing a really important conversation that we started earlier this year. One that’s simply too important, too timely, and frankly, it’s too under examined to simply leave alone. Our guest today is Elisa Chu Winky.

She’s our longtime international WI Podcast friend and a leading voice on the study of misogynistic extremism and the evolving threat landscape within the digital sphere. Elisa is a doctoral researcher whose work really cuts to the core of today’s converging crisis and international risks around the weaponization of loneliness, the radicalization of masculinity, and even the use of digital platforms as accelerants of harm.

Her research interrogates this. Toxic underbelly of the manosphere from incel ideology to misogyny influences, and even connects it With the broader trends in digital extremism, social fragmentation, and ideological violence, the international risks are simply hiding in plain sight. These online ideologies are becoming real world violence today, and so whether you’re working in security, corporate risk management, policymaking, or even education, what we discussed today has implications for all of us.

Elisa, welcome back to the International Risk Podcast.

Allysa Czerwinsky: Thank you so much for having me back,

Dominic Bowen: Elisa. I really enjoyed our conversation last time and I believe many of our listeners did as well and would love to go back and really go back to some of the truths and explore those around. Your understanding and your research around the manosphere, and the ecosystem that supports it within the, the digital realms.

Can you help us understand how do the communities within the manosphere mirror or differ from traditional extremist movements that most of us understand around, jihadist or far right spaces? Is it just another ideological radicalization, or is there things that we can be learning from the different spheres?

Allysa Czerwinsky: I think there’s both similarities and differences. When we think about the manosphere more broadly. A lot of the issues that underpin it and the grievances at its core are shaped around issues of masculinity, anti-feminism, a distrust of women, and also narratives of victimhood. In my work specifically, I look at how ideologies and narratives are platformed within online spaces.

Particularly misogynist incel spaces, but this also applies to the wider manosphere as a whole and across different communities, whether that is misogynist, incel sort of seduction based communities like pickup artists and red pillars, misogyny, influencers, or men’s rights activists more broadly, there is this.

Undercurrent of victimization of rejection and also disadvantage at the hands of women and feminist gains for equality over the past few decades. And I think there’s a variety of different grievances and different ideologies that can intersect with the manosphere. You often see elements of, you know.

You’ve got masculinity in there, you have anti feminism in there, but you also have wider narratives of anti LGBTQ plus views. You also have some thoughts on religion, some antisemitism, some white nationalism sentiments there. And it makes it quite a messy space to understand because you have this blending of different views, different life experiences, and different grievances that bring people to these spaces.

But at their core. There’s a lot of grievance around rejection and feeling disenfranchised or feeling victimized in broader society, and I think that’s something that also attracts people to far right movements more broadly. We see similar narratives and ideologies around white nationalism and white supremacy, but also male supremacism there as well.

We see elements of antisemitism, but also Islamophobia we see. Parallels between how Misogynists incel speak about queer people, specifically trans women, and how the far right has co-opted antique messaging to sort of platform this idea of the ideal nation and protecting white women and children within predominantly Western white societies.

I think because I’m, I’m more focused on masculinity and its connections to the far right, I’m less able to talk about the similarities to jihadist extremism. But I do think that underlying a lot of extremism now, more contemporarily, we see that misogyny and male supremacism play an important role.

There is this. Idea of victimhood, of unjust experiences that can really draw people to a variety of different extremist movements. The actual manifestation of it may differ across movements, across groups, but there is this sense of needing something different, of feeling distrustful of society and the messaging that you’re getting from official sources and wanting to find people who allow you to belong.

To feel accepted and to feel validated in the life experiences that you bring to a certain community. So at its core, I do think that the building blocks of how people get into these spaces and how they attract certain demographics, certain people in are really similar across different groups, but how they manifest can be quite different.

So within misogynist intel spaces specifically a lot of the ways in which. Acceptance is fostered is through sharing your own experiences of rejection, isolation, and hurt. That could be romantic rejection, it could be social rejection, but all of these things work to. Position you as somebody who belongs in this space, right?

Other users will see you as someone who should be there. You are a true member of this community because you’ve had this experience, and therefore we will welcome you in so long as you continue to abide by codes of conduct and the norms that we have, and also ascribe to the beliefs. And I don’t think that that’s a particularly unique process.

I think we see when we think about radicalization more broadly and engaging in. Extremist communities as well. There is this element of, you know, you do have to align with the experiences that other group members have in order for you to feel like you belong, but also for them to feel like you are a good fit.

Dominic Bowen: And I know international risk professionals often think in terms of organized networks and organized structures, but from what I understand of the manosphere and incel networks, they lack that formal structure. So from what you are seeing and and your research, how should we reframe our understanding?

Of what the thread is, how we understand it, how we analyze it, what the impacts are, and also how it might evolve in the coming years.

Allysa Czerwinsky: A really good question. I wanna preface this answer that I am not in the security space. I am a researcher. First and foremost, I am simply sharing the knowledge that I have of being an ethnographer within these spaces.

So please do take some of this with a grain of salt. but I’m personally of the view that. Responding to this isn’t something that you can do by just mapping the connections between spaces and trying to find a hierarchy, because a lot of the times there isn’t really a hierarchy in these spaces, especially when you’re looking at online extremism and predominantly misogynist and seldom, and the wider inosphere network.

Across platforms, there are different users who hold different roles. You may have moderators, you may have forum administrators, but Just because you have that title doesn’t mean that you’re well-liked within the group. You have people who post quite a bit. You’ve got your super posters. You have those people who are very loud and very aggressive in what they post.

They’re online all the time sort of screaming into the void again, simply because they post quite a bit does not mean that other users. Are liking them or that they’re engaging with their posts. So there’s quite a variety in how people engage with the online sphere, and I think that’s what makes it hard to respond to when you think about more traditional offline networks and groups that may have an online component, but do you have an offline element to how they engage and how they connect with one another?

You don’t really have the same structure online because it’s so diffused, it’s so asynchronous in how we engage that. It’s really difficult to pin down. Any sense of organization. Where you will find it predominantly is when a big event happens. Maybe there is a discussion around an offline attack, and then community members will come together to pick apart news articles and they’ll, the forum will be really active.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s. A message from higher ups coming down to different people in the organization. It’s simply a lot of the times just people getting online because they wanna talk about something that’s happened. and I think that makes it really. Difficult to respond to because it’s so diverse and so difficult to track who is where, who is doing what.

Moreover, you’ve got different levels of engagement. You have people who are on the forums all the time, but who have different views. You have people who have just started to participate in the forums who are trying to up. Their number of posts so they can be seen as a valued member of the community.

You have people who are posting once and then never posting again. You’ve got longtime posters who may transition outta the community, and you may not get a reason as to why, and that’s just within one of the main forums as well. If you look at sort of the tangential support focus forums, you’ve got a variety of different people who can engage in those spaces and come in and out as they please.

Membership isn’t as. Organized and isn’t as permanent as it might be with other communities, which makes it really, really difficult to respond to.

Dominic Bowen: You mentioned earlier red pillars, and I know you’ve also written about black pill ideology. Can you just remind us and, and unpack for us what they are, and it also explain why such a fatalistic worldview, which must be just a real drag down, why it’s appealing to start with, but then also how is that a gateway to radicalization and violence?

Allysa Czerwinsky: Yeah, definitely. So I think at this point a lot of us are familiar with the Red Pill euphemism. And it serves as this way to talk about enlightenment in a sense. The Red Pill is originally from the Matrix film where Neo is given that option between taking the blue pill or taking the red pill in the film, the blue pill is Neo continuing to live in this delusion and not be aware of what is really happening and the truth behind everything that’s going on in the film. Whereas the red pill awakens him to the reality of what’s going on. And the Manosphere specifically has taken that rhetoric and turned it into something that’s really gender specific. So it still has that enlightenment quality to it.

But for people who believe in the red pill, it is something that purports. That you can awaken to the ways in which men are disadvantaged through feminism and women’s rights in society. Whereas remaining blue pill is willful. Ignorance to this truth and being able to take the red pill means that you have awoken yourself to the realities of how society is structured.

And oftentimes for people who are part of the manosphere or who believe in this pill, it’s that society is structured. To specifically disadvantaged men. There are a variety of ways that this can be spoken about, but within manosphere spaces, it’s predominantly men. There’s other iterations of it where certain types of men are disadvantaged, but on a whole, it’s easier to just talk about it as though men are being disadvantaged by women’s gains for equality and freedom.

So in addition to the red pill, you’ve also got this more nihilistic and fatalistic ideology around the black pill, which is something that we see in a lot of misogynist incel spaces, but isn’t necessarily exclusive to misogynist and seldom, and whereas the red pill tells you, okay, society is shaped around women and it disadvantages men, but there are ways that you can maybe compensate for this by improving your looks, by figuring out gaming tactics to game the system in a way that allows you to cobble together some form of power and minimize victimization the black pill.

Takes a different stance in saying that, there’s nothing you can really do. You are born at a disadvantage. And no matter what effort you put into yourself or your social standing, you are always going to be disadvantaged in some way. And unfortunately that rhetoric in today’s age really resonates with a lot of people where they feel.

Quite unsure of their place in the world. They’re trying to navigate a very fractured and disconnected social space and. It speaks to experiences of rejection, of isolation and hurt that people may not understand are caused by other factors. It offers you this really neatly packaged philosophy that says, well, the reason you’re having these experiences is because society has been against you from the outset. You are disadvantaged genetically, physically, socially, in some form and no matter what you do, because society is biased predominantly in favor of women and feminism, you are always going to be subordinate in some way and subjugated by gains for equality. And I think what’s really interesting about this is the sort of hopelessness that I think is really resonating with a lot of people right now in a way that the red pill may not be resonating as much. There is this element of nothing I do seems to matter and therefore this worldview makes sense because it’s telling me that, yeah, actually nothing does matter because society is biased from the outset.

And one of the problems with this thinking, let alone the fact that it can cause some serious forms of self harm and change the way that you think about your relation to society is that it can offer. A way of reinterpreting your life experiences according to worldviews that aren’t exactly the most healthy.

So if we think about misogynist and seldom, and the ways that the black pill understands intimacy and relationships and interactions with women, what this belief can do is. Change the way that you interpret those past instances of rejection and social isolation into something that is structured and forever present.

It is something that is always going to be there for you no matter what you do to change. And if something is ever present and permanent, what motivation do you have to try and fix it given that you’ve spent X amount of hours trying to change, trying to approach women, but every single time in your perspective has gone wrong or you’ve been ridiculed, or you feel that you’ve been rejected, why would you then try again? And why would you open yourself up to criticism when you could simply join a space where other people are sharing, their grievances, sharing similar experiences giving you the validation that you need.

So I think that that’s the validation element is really important there. This philosophy. Really says to people who believe in it, I see you. I can explain the experiences that you’ve had, and it also means that you’re not alone because you can connect to other people who believe the same thing, but also who share similar experiences of rejection and isolation.

Dominic Bowen: It’s very interesting. Thanks for explaining that to us. If we look at the other side, if we talk about prevention, if we talk about support, if we talk about exiting some of these communities. I can foresee what your answer might be. Are we doing enough?

Are we doing enough? Are we doing it at the right time? Are we getting in early enough? Are we also addressing communities that are not the stereotypical 16 to 24-year-old I. Males. males. Obviously we want to try and support people before isolation turns into a radical ideology. So what sort of warning signs? What should we be considering? What should educators, employers, parents friends, what should they be looking for and what’s some of the research we’ve got around? Successful exiting interventions, different ages that are affected and the different types of communities.

Allysa Czerwinsky: Very meaty question.

I think first and foremost, I am an advocate for a multifaceted approach to addressing this because misogyny and male supremacism are not just single issues, they intersect with a variety of different forms of oppression and subjugation in society. And we can’t just fix it by just having a conversation. It’s a great start and I think that that’s really important. But one of the things that I think is really paramount is looking at how online platforms are allowed to. Post promote and mainstream a lot of this content. It’s something that I think we’re seeing a lot more discussion more recently in the UK after the online safety bill has come into force where, platform developers and owners are increasingly being tasked to respond to how male supremacism and misogyny are existing on their platforms and how these. Forms of harmful content can be monetized and mainstreamed by making them accessible across platforms. And unfortunately we’re now in a time where some of the tech giants are rolling back content moderation policies where we’re going into this very regressive approach to what’s allowed and what’s permissible.

And unfortunately, that means that a lot more content that would typically not be allowed on mainstream platforms is finding a home and support base in these spaces and without actually addressing the fact that some of this content does violate content moderation. It does mean that more people are going to be exposed to it, and I think that’s one element of necessary response.

But perhaps more broadly, I think there needs to be a wider approach to education and working through how misogyny manifests. Both in young boys, but also in men. And the role that we play in facilitating harmful forms of masculinity, of not offering a third space for men to talk about the issues that they’re having and trying our best to really unpick a lot of the grievances and perceptions that are shaping engagement across these spaces. So one of the things that I’ve seen more recently is a focus on young boys and teenagers, predominantly after Netflix’s adolescents. There was a lot of discussion in the UK from Kiir Dahmer and his back benders to say, we should be screening this in schools for young boys and for teenagers. And I’ve watched it with my sons and myself and other people in this space. And people in the education sphere all went, no, please don’t do that. Predominantly because I can see where he is coming from and I can see where these calls are necessary.

But I worry that it’s putting a bandaid on a wider issue without actually addressing the root cause. Shows like adolescents are not really grounded in reality. They are a drama and they are a dramatized portrayal of wider issues of misogyny and relational harm and parenting. And I understand why that spoke to people.

But using that as our touchstone for intervention is probably not. best way forward, even though it can play an important role. I think off the back of adolescents, we’re seeing more conversations around what support may look like for young boys in school to make sure that they don’t end up going down these internet rabbit holes that they have the tools that they need to be resilient.

And I think that’s really important because a lot of young boys are coming to school with sort of questions. Trying to understand their place in society, trying to understand how they can understand their own masculinity, how they perform masculinity around others, and also schools as an environment and setting contribute to a lot of these conversations as well around harmful and toxic forms of masculinity that can really cause harm to young people.

And I think they’re an important setting for starting those conversations and allowing boys back into the conversation about what they need. What they have questions about and how they can build resilience and strength going forward to resist this messaging that they’re getting online. But at the same time, this focus on young boys and teenagers also obscures the fact that it’s not just a young people problem.

And we know this. Misogyny has historically not been relegated to one age group. It is an everybody issue and not just a men’s issue as well. It is a women’s issue and everybody in between. So there has to be an effort to also include wider conversations and spaces for older men who engage with a manosphere and misogynist and cell content.

My doctoral works specifically found that a lot of the users who I was observing across the forums that I was looking at, tended to skew older than what we would think. So I had in my sample of, I wanna say just under 400 users, those who self-disclosed age, tended to be late twenties to early forties.

And moreover, we had a recent report from Ocom that interviewed people who were part of Manosphere spaces and they found similar findings in their sample of 39 people who had engaged with the research team. They found that a lot of their interviewees were actually skewing in their twenties, thirties, forties, and sometimes in their fifties as well. And I think that this demographic shift or this lack of consideration for adults who engage in the manosphere really misses a lot of the appeal of this. And in order for our interventions to actually address how misogyny and male supremacism manifests, we have to think about the different grievances and different perceptions that people may hold across the lifetime.

So for young boys, their intro into manosphere content may be somebody like Aiden Ross or Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes, or TikTok creators who are just telling them like. Hey, if you do this, you’ll get more girls. And it’s very low level, very easy to understand this entry weigh space into the manosphere.

But for older men who have more lived experience of rejection, who may be going through relationship dissolution, who may be losing jobs, who may feel economically disadvantaged, who may feel disconnected socially, there are variety of other variables that can influence why they are in manosphere spaces and why they choose to stay or feel like. This is a space for them that may not be captured in our interventions that are specifically targeted toward young boys. Additionally, I’ve done some work around exiting and what disengagement from misogynist and seldom specifically, but also the manosphere more broadly might look like. And there’s a variety of other researchers in the space who have done some fantastic work as well.

Looking at incel exit and X red pill, and I think one of the most useful discussions that we can have is what intervention looks like when it’s happening organically, away from top-down approaches from the government or in the education sector. And I think Incel exit and X red pill are really useful spaces for this because a lot of the conversations that are being had are just everyday people trying to help other people work through the issues that they felt resonated with why they got into the manosphere or misogynist and seldom.

So, across the content that I’ve looked at there are a variety of reasons why people join these spaces, especially later in life. Some people may have put themselves out there one too many times and feel very hopeless and disillusioned, and they found solace in the manosphere. They found messaging and identities that made sense and aligned with how they viewed themselves as well, and being able to unpick that with a variety of people who are not in those spaces or who have left those spaces and who can share firsthand experience is really valuable. It also takes a lot of the pressure off from more traditional forms of intervention, where, a lot of the times our first thought is, well, they need therapy, let’s send them to a therapist, or let’s refer them to Prevent. But for people who are predominantly engaged in online communities, the offline component of trying to tell somebody about your identity that is an important part of your online identity, but may not be salient in your offline identity can be really daunting.

And having a first step to come out of the community that is online that mirrors the same process and interactions as the spaces that they are in can be really approachable to some people, it puts the pressure off. To engage in a certain way. They can remain relatively anonymous. They can share what they choose.

There isn’t the pressure there of having to sit in front of this person that you don’t know, and I think that having that as a potential third space is really important to just letting people engage with different viewpoints. To have a space to talk through some of these issues that we may not have spaces in mainstream platforms to talk through is really, really useful and I think has some promise for being a good site of intervention as well.

Dominic Bowen: It’s quite interesting, you know, this, trend of influencer misogyny. These men with massive followings online have really been and successfully monetizing this misogynistic outrage from some communities. I thought, that many of these actors like Andrew Tate were well and truly disappeared from their scene and were largely laughed off.

But in the last couple of weeks while preparing for this conversation today, I realized that online misogyny is clearly still raging. Figures like Andrew Tate are far from dead. They’re far from disappeared, from platforms, but it seems that they’ve more evolved, they’ve diversified and really definitely thriving online and actually adapting to the new culture, the new political dynamics that we’re seeing today.

And I think also drawing on and capitalizing on comments made from people like President Donald Trump, Nigel Far in the uk, Elon Musk. Can you describe the role of these different actors and how are they contributing to this trend of extreme misogyny?

Allysa Czerwinsky: I think one of the main ways that content like this contributes is that it makes it acceptable. Full stop. It allows it to be public. It allows it to be engaged with, even if it’s framed as oh, well, I’m just trying to start a discussion. The fact that you are confident in saying this and that you are generating some form of income off of this, shows other people that this is okay. This isn’t just something that’s limited to misogyny.

We see this in other forms of oppression, racism of transphobia, of anti LGBTQ plus sentiment more broadly, but the ways in which we speak about other people and present other people as less than or subhuman in some way, and that these views are mainstream and allowed to exist on platforms. Really sends a message to other people that it’s all right to behave this way.

And we saw this after Trump was elected in 2016 where his supporters almost breathed this sigh of relief because they were like, I can say what I want now. The floodgates are open. There is no limit on free speech anymore. These taboo issues. I can say anything because Trump says it’s okay. And I think Andrew Tate and the variety of misogyny, influencers who have monetized their content, who are on YouTube and TikTok, and increasingly on all tech platforms like Rumble and Getter as well, are cashing in on this free speech idea, but also this idea that they’ve been censored and that there needs to be an alternative conversation around the true forms of oppression in society away from what the left would view as, systemic oppression and social oppression across identity characteristics. And I think to a degree a lot of this resonates ‘ cause there are people who feel like they’ve been left outta the conversation. And it’s something that I’ve been trying to grapple with in my own research and the approaches that I take because there are grains of truth at the core of some of this messaging, right?

The fact that you do have swaths of men who feel unrepresented, who feel disadvantaged, who feel left outta the conversation is fair because that is their perception, but also in the way that liberal feminism operates, particularly white liberal feminism. It’s not very intersectional. It doesn’t really account for anything other than surface levels, displays of solidarity, and even those don’t really hold up very well.

So, at no point are we talking about men in a way that is useful to men’s experiences. We often see the shutting down of conversations around men’s health. And I do think that there is a discussion to be had about when those conversations happen because a lot of the times it is on the back of discussions of women and it’ll be like, well, what about men?

This may not be the space for that because we’re having a conversation about another group, but we should also have space for a discussion about men’s issues as well. And I think a lot of what Trump and far right politicians and misogyny influencers capitalize on is this feeling that talking about men’s issues, men’s needs, men’s grievances is increasingly taboo, and what they have done is put it into the mainstream in a way that isn’t necessarily the most healthy and can contribute to a lot of harm.

But at the end of the day as well, being able to monetize this content really shows other people that it is profitable and it is acceptable to talk about these issues in a way that is inflammatory and hurtful regardless of the grains of truth at their core.

Dominic Bowen: And I think that leads into the topic around AI chatbots and there’s companies like replica Chat t and, a lot of these, upcoming platforms around what are called the virtual girlfriends and they’re becoming much more emotionally responsible.

preparation for this interview, I actually had a look at Ika. I hadn’t heard of replica, two weeks ago. I’m not sure if you’ve looked at it, Elisa, but I jumped on you’re giggling. Our listeners won’t see that, but you’re giggling right now.

But and I certainly giggle when I went onto this, but you answer a couple of questions and then you’re on a screen and there’s a picture of definitely not a typical woman, but certainly the typical gorgeous, perfect woman faultless in every way. And then it says, with your replica, you’ll explore intimacy safely in full privacy with no judgment, like never before. And that’s reading direct from their website. And then it asked a few more questions. Like, I find it hard to express my emotions openly. I thrive to develop in healthier, more trusting relationships having deep, meaningful conversations is difficult. I mean, these questions are to me as a non psychologist, almost seem like they are targeting people that are struggling to have relationships in the real world.

And so I wonder from what you see and from the people that you are meeting with, what are the potential psychological and social risks of substituting real human relationships with these chat bots, these digital partners?

Allysa Czerwinsky: I think this is a really fun time to be transitioning into an AI focused researcher because a lot of the conversations that I’m seeing around misogynist and seldom and therapeutic approaches are increasingly calling for the implementation of AI tools to help address issues of loneliness and the lack of intimacy.

And I’ve heard researchers in this space say, well, you know, AI girlfriends, they could be a potential solution, right? You’re. Potentially protecting a human being from the harm that can happen when people are trying to unpick all of those ideologies and thought practices that had sustained their involvement in the manosphere, but also it allows them to build up the confidence and the skills needed to engage with other people offline.

And I think that There’s definitely hope around these as a therapeutic intervention. I’m slightly more skeptical but I do think that a conversation should be had around what this could look like. On one hand, I do know that there’s been some research that has tested AI chatbots and AI therapies to mixed success. But I do think from what I’ve seen there has been some developments in how AI chatbots can deliver support and therapy and help build confidence in social skills through that back and forth, which I think is potentially a valuable insight there. Jury is still out around how this might be used with misogynist and seldom and what this could look like.

But there are definitely building blocks there that people are getting excited about, as with any new tech development. But I think one of my immediate sort of red flags is that this tech is not really designed in a way that is inclusive, that is bias free and designed for therapy. It might be, I.

We have a certain platform or certain app that is mirroring what we would view as therapeutic techniques, but at the end of the day, a lot of the tech that is on the market and available for the general public to use is profit driven. It is a capitalist notion of engagement with a device or a technology that is.

designed to keep you engaged to some extent. And unfortunately that does sort of mean that if you succeed, if you get well, if you improve, that revenue stream is gone. So how do we sort of grapple with the fact that this tech, as it stands, needs users to continually engage with it in order to profit, which also means that the user can’t then be.

Too good. You can’t move beyond the issues that you have fully because that severs a revenue stream. I think one of the other issues that I am particularly concerned about as presenting AI girlfriends or AI chatbots that are feminized as a solution to in seldom, is that there are. A lot of biases that influence how AI is developed.

I know you were looking at replica, but there are a plethora of other AI companion apps right now to varying degrees of realism, to varying degrees of function. You’ve got replica that can sort of be this companion if you want. It can be a friend, it can be a therapist, it can be a romantic partner.

But you have the other apps that are specifically for dating, for intimacy, for sex with AI companions, which can really in code certain stereotypes around what femininity is and what womanhood is that aren’t necessarily the healthiest when you’re trying to get users away from. Spaces that are very very hyper aware of ideal partners and, of physicality.

I don’t necessarily think that’s the healthiest thing. I gave a presentation to the Manchester Summer School earlier this year and I was talking about forthcoming work on AI companions. And it’s, really interesting to see the breadth and how they’re designed the stereotypes that are used to present ideal and perfect women.

And I don’t necessarily think that’s the healthiest option. For unpicking, the ways in which misogyny and male supremacism are used in the maner to say, Hey, here’s this ideal woman that you can engage with that has to respond to you in a way that you like and that you can mold to fit whatever desire you want.

And then when you’re done with her, you can just sort of leave her. That doesn’t necessarily map onto human relationships. Well, it, it does, but it, it shouldn’t map onto a healthy relationship. It models something that I would view as unhealthy. Right. This idea around control, around molding your partner to be who you want them to be, and then also dropping them whenever you see fit and picking them up again when you want is not exactly the healthiest model.

So I question whether. They are able to really approximate relationships in that sense because there is an element of control there, but there’s also. The issues of ethics around that and that you’re not really sure what the motivation is behind these companies to develop this tech. Because again, you are really looking at profiting off of engagement, right?

So if somebody is engaging with this tech, you need to continually engage in order to turn a profit. And if that person chooses to not engage anymore, you lose that revenue stream. So how does that chat bot then respond to the threat of leaving to make sure that person continues to engage.

And I still have many a question around this. It is an emerging area and there is some fantastic work being done across the world right now looking at how AI chatbots are being used for a variety of different means. But I do think that I’m skeptical of them as a solution to, in seldom at present, just given the fact that a lot of them are grounded in bias around what it means to be feminine and to be a woman.

And they’re, they’re not necessarily designed for this. And I worry that engaging with us doesn’t actually address male supremacism and simply moves it to a different output and a different tech.

Dominic Bowen: Yeah, thanks for unpacking that. I think certainly the ethical implications, this potentially emotional manipulation and, just the deepening social disconnection is certainly something that concerns me. And I, I worry about that, but certainly there’s a lot that you’ve explored today and a lot that you unpack for us and, you know, I think just how this operates within all the, the systemic risks that we’re seeing, whether it’s economic disenfranchisement, the ongoing political polarization. I mean the, the wars in the Middle East, which are seen as by some as this Christianity versus Islam versus Judaism. You know, there’s so many risks that are really alienating many, many communities. So I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today and helping us understand, one part of this bigger jigsaw puzzle.

Allysa Czerwinsky: thank you

Dominic Bowen: that was a great conversation today with Allysa Czerwinsky. I really appreciated hearing her thoughts on this intersection of gender, technology, hate and harm, and why these aren’t just social issues, but also international risks that demand our attention, and also that continual learning from all of us.

Please remember to subscribe to our mailing list to get our newsletter in your inbox every second week. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Elisa Garbil. I’m Dominic Bowman, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again next week.