AI girlfriends are everywhere. So why are the humans they're replacing being pushed off the internet?

This is a chapter from Internet Hate Machine host Bridget Todd’s new Simon & Schuster audiobook, Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy. 

In this conversation, Bridget sit down with 404 Media cofounder Samantha Cole to unpack the booming business of AI companions, sex bots, and erotic role play. They explore why tech companies are racing to build AI girlfriends while human sex workers continue to face censorship, deplatforming, and financial discrimination. 

It's a conversation about labor, consent, power, and what happens when Big Tech decides to monetize our most intimate relationships.

If you enjoy this episode, you can find Love at First Prompt wherever audiobooks are sold, or learn more at LoveAtFirstPrompt.AI. 

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Hi Internet Hate Machine Fans! Take a listen to the trailer from Cool Zone Media's newest show - Better Offline. 

About the show: Better Offline is a weekly show exploring the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society - and interrogating the growth-at-all-costs future that tech’s elite wants to build.

Combining narrative-form storytelling, one-on-one interviews and panel-based discussions, Better Offline cuts through the buzzwords and obfuscation of the tech industry, investigating and evaluating the schemes and scams of everyone from cryptocurrency scumbags to the greediest of the venture capital elite. Tech industry veteran Ed Zitron and a dynamic coterie of guests will help listeners understand the who, how and why of how tech’s most powerful players are changing the world - for better or for worse.

Listen here and subscribe to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!

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Tech shapes almost every aspect of our daily lives. And yet the tech we use has been controlled by a select few for far too long. On the new show B the Way Forward, Bridget talks to AnitaB.org's President and CEO Brenda Darden Wilkerson about challenging this disparity head-on. Let’s reclaim our digital agency, redefine tech, and create a future where those who create tech truly mirror the faces of those who use it.

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Hi, Internet Hate Machine fans! MySpace was the first major social media company. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. What was this internet sensation in aughts? Log on with Joanne McNeil and revisit MySpace through the people who lived it: the users with the new show, Main Accounts: The Story of MySpace.

Listen to Main Accounts: The Story of MySpace now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!

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In the final episode of Internet Hate Machine, we look back on where we’ve been and where we’re going. Plus some big news from Cool Zone Media!

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Ifeoma Ozoma has spent her career trying to make the internet safer. At Pinterest, she created clear content policies that earned the company praise. In return, she was targeted and doxxed by a white supremacist colleague, and then retaliated against by management when she spoke up. She talks with Bridget about the Sisyphean struggle of Black women trying to make a difference.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bridget is joined by James Stout to discuss Cecilia Lewis, a Maryland educator who was targeted and run out of Georgia after being hired to lead a DEI program in Cherokee County schools, thanks to a cooked up moral panic about Critical Race Theory.

"Why the Black Educator Forced Out Over Bogus Critical Race Theory Claims Agreed to Share Her Story": https://www.propublica.org/article/cecelia-lewis-educator-cherokee-georgia

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Bridget is joined by BuzzFeed's Ellie Hall to discuss the online hate campaign facing Meghan Markle and the harassment Ellie herself has faced for reporting on it.

Refinery 29's: "I Went Undercover In The Sinister World Of Meghan Markle Hate Accounts" 

Ellie’s viral BuzzFeed piece about Royal double standards (all of her reporting is great though!):
"People Are Once Again Calling Out A Royal Double Standard After Harry And Meghan Got Attacked For Holding Hands At The Queen’s Lying-In-State"

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Ruby Freeman & Shaye Moss are heroes for their testimony before the Jan 6th commission, but they shouldn’t have to be. In part two of this episode, Bridget continues her conversation with The Daily Zeitgeist’s Miles Gray, discussing what happened when the disgraced president and the right wing digital media ecosystem coalesced to attack Black women for simply doing their jobs as poll workers during the 2020 election.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ruby Freeman & Shaye Moss are heroes for their testimony before the Jan 6th commission, but they shouldn’t have to be. The Daily Zeitgeist’s Miles Gray joins Bridget to discuss what happened when the disgraced president and the right wing digital media ecosystem coalesced to attack Black women for simply doing their jobs as poll workers during the 2020 election.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.