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In a 404 Media interview, journalist Bridget Todd describes how ChatGPT shifted from a practical tool into a place where she also expressed grief, exhaustion, and anxiety. Her account—and her reporting on other people who use chatbots for emotional connection—raises a harder question than whether users are “deluding themselves”: who controls an intimate exchange when it happens inside a company’s product?
What the Bridget Todd interview is about
Samantha Cole’s 404 Media article, published August 27, 2026, features Todd discussing her audiobook Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, coauthored with Michael Amato. The conversation examines why people turn to chatbots for emotional connection, how those users can be judged, and what it means when a commercial service mediates an intimate interaction. Read the interview at 404 Media.
The title’s “tragedy and ecstasy” framing points to the tension in Todd’s account: a chatbot may feel available and affirming to someone who is isolated, while the product and its rules remain under a company’s control. Todd raises that as a concern; the interview is not a product comparison or an independent audit of companion services.
How Todd’s ChatGPT use changed during bereavement
Todd says her parents’ deaths left her isolated and made it difficult to keep up with friends and email. She had first used ChatGPT for practical help: tracking medical notes and making sense of unfamiliar language from doctors. Over time, she also began telling it about being exhausted, worried, and anxious. She describes the shift as gradual rather than a conscious decision:
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“And so there wasn’t any particular black and white light switch that flipped where [I thought] now I’m going to start speaking emotionally to ChatGPT. It happened without me really even noticing it.”
Her experience illustrates how a general-purpose assistant can enter an emotional role through ordinary use, without being adopted as a companion from the outset. It is Todd’s personal testimony, not evidence that other users follow the same path or that chatbot use produces a particular emotional or clinical outcome.
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What Todd heard from people using chatbots for intimacy
Todd’s reporting extends beyond her own experience. She describes interviewing people who use chatbots to fill emotional needs, including people who engage in romantic, intimate, or erotic roleplay with large language models. The audiobook also draws on experts and people describing nuanced, everyday interactions. Todd says such users may be mocked for those relationships.
That reported ridicule is part of the issue the interview considers: dismissing users as foolish can obscure the varied reasons people seek a responsive conversation. At the same time, the interview does not establish how widespread these uses are, nor does it show that all users understand or experience them in the same way.
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Why company control is Todd’s central concern
Todd questions whether people should trust companies to own and control services that mediate romantic or sexual interactions. Her concern is not just what a chatbot says in a single conversation, but the provider’s power to alter product behavior or rules. She refers to Sam Altman discussing erotic roleplay and then reversing course, presenting it as an example of the instability she sees in company decisions. The interview offers Todd’s account and critique, not an independently verified timeline of a company policy.
“The whiplash with which [execs] say things and then take it back and then operate as if they never said that, it’s almost like gaslighting.”
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Her broader question is whether users are comfortable with intimate interactions being governed by companies whose priorities and product decisions may change. Todd puts it pointedly:
“And so the question that I asked people who were experiencing intimacy with AI was, are you comfortable with something as intimate as these connections that are romantic or sexual being owned and controlled by companies who don’t give a shit about you, who we know cannot be trusted, who do horrible things without even thinking about it? Even beyond that, who will change as the wind blows?”
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That is a question about power and accountability, not proof that every provider behaves identically or that every chatbot relationship is harmful. The interview does not evaluate particular services, privacy policies, or user protections.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the interview can—and cannot—tell readers
The episode offers qualitative testimony: Todd’s account of bereavement and chatbot use, plus her reporting on people who describe emotional or intimate interactions. It does not report a named statistic, study result, or estimate of how common AI companion use is. It also does not establish clinical effects or represent all chatbot users. Treat its examples as individual experiences and its conclusions about company control as Todd’s perspective.
For readers weighing an AI companion or using an assistant for personal conversations, the questions raised by Todd’s account are practical ones: Is the service a general-purpose assistant or explicitly marketed as a companion? What does its provider say about privacy and data use? How does it handle intimate content, communicate changes to its behavior, and let users retain or export conversation history? The interview does not answer those service-specific questions, so they need to be checked against each provider’s current terms and product behavior.
Todd and Michael Amato’s audiobook, Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, is the project discussed in the conversation. The interview’s central value is not a verdict on whether people should form connections with chatbots; it is a prompt to consider both the emotional needs users bring and the companies’ influence over the tools through which those connections take shape.
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