Companion Chatbots and Digital Lovers

Joanna Stern was the Wall Street Journal technology journalist for 12 years. She’s an Emmy award winner for her documentary E-Ternal, and recently started her own company New Things, with added advice from ChatGPT!

Over the years at WSJ, I relied on Joanna’s reviews of technology for many purchases (and things I avoided) reflecting her keen and brutal assessments. I also had fun working with her on some of her video assessments of health technologies.

Her book I AM NOT A ROBOT is both hilarious and highly informative. It is a terrific primer for those who are not fully grounded in AI getting into the history of AI and right up to date with generative AI’s progress.

To get a sense for why AI thought she was the next Tina Fey, check out the back cover! No surprise she got me laughing hard throughout the conversation, no less while reading the book.

Here is a short YouTube video she posted on her All In AI year of 2025, referred to during the podcast.

Much of her testing of >100 AI products related to medicine and health care, which is what we especially got into during our conversation. She has 3 major rules in her assessment of AI: (1) Ruthless testing; (2) Benchmark vs human; and (3) Costs, which include “compute cost” that we discussed.

Here are some of the things we covered:

* AI of her blood work

* AI of mammogram and breast ultrasound, and overall experience as a person with increased risk of breast cancer

* AI at the dentist (and ”Dentist Deep Clean”)

* Assessment of Dr. GPT

* Bill Gates on health AI

* Her AI Trainer (Chris)

* Waymo vs Uber

* Her AI Therapist (Ash)

* Nothing Bot Sex (her 2 digital lovers)

* Impact on her children (including 6 F*****g Hamsters, the robodog Sirius)

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Thank you Tara Parker-Pope, MPH, Tracy Paeschke, MD, FACC, Chip Hughes, Bob Fleischman, Gretchen Faucett, and >400 others for tuning into my live video with Joanna Stern! Join me for my next live video in the app.