Understood: Artificial Intimacy

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 t...

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,...

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...

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 sembla...

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.

Almost a year after Ida Herskind started her investigation in Copenhagen, the digital chase is over. The team have identified the person allegedly behind MrDeepFakes.com: a Toronto-area pharmacist named David Do.  CBC reporter Eric Szeto takes the investigation into the streets, closing in on the Canadian deepfake porn kingpin and demanding answers.  Featuring: Eric Szeto, Ida Hersk...

Journalist Ida Herskind is working at a Danish newspaper when she comes across a story that stops her cold: it’s about a porn video that looks real — but isn’t. And the woman in it never consented. As Ida starts digging she discovers the top hit for this kind of material is a single site: MrDeepFakes.com. Determined to do something for the thousands of women targeted there, she teams up with Zakar...

When “Taylor” found out she’d been deepfaked in 2020, she also learned she wasn’t alone. She teams up with another target, and together they start comparing notes to figure out who did this to them. As they narrow their search, a familiar face emerges. But the user they uncover isn’t just targeting them. And when they dig even deeper, they’re led not to a single person, but to the factory where th...

When a streamer who goes by QTCinderella starts trending on Twitter, she isn’t expecting to see her face on a porn site — her face, doing things she never did. Because the videos weren’t of her. They were deepfakes. Instead of staying silent, QTCinderella decides to fight back.  And her story raises a bigger question: how did we get to a world where anyone can be put into realistic-looking di...

Non-consensual deepfake porn is becoming increasingly pervasive, and it didn’t just come out of nowhere. These deepfakes were created and curated by people, on platforms, inside online subcultures. And they were allowed to spread, while governments dragged their feet, tech companies shrugged, and the targets — almost always women — paid the price. Tech journalist Sam Cole has been covering de...

Finally, we launch into Musk’s ultimate quest — his desire to colonize Mars — and how he went from wanting to save earth to wanting to escape it. We hear the origin story of SpaceX, including why one astrophysicist calls Musk’s Earth-exiting plan “delusional.” Is the red planet the ultimate “bubble” of total control, or does it represent a level of hubris that’s out-of-this-world?  Guests in...

What does Musk, father of 14, expect from his “legion” of children? We unravel his quest for genetic optimization, including alleged embryo screening, and his pronatalist views. And we hear from his estranged daughter, Vivian.  Voices in this episode include: Julia Black , journalist who broke the story about Musk’s twins with Shivon Zilis. Vivian Wilson , Elon Musk's estranged daughter (arch...

Could Musk’s authoritarian streak trace back to his Canadian grandfather? Before Joshua Haldeman brought his family to South Africa, he made waves as part of the radical 1930s Technocracy movement. And while the two men’s lives only overlapped for three years, we find echoes of Elon’s worldview in Haldeman’s pro-tech, anti-democratic ideology. Guests in this episode include: Geoff Leo , senior inv...

Where did Elon Musk’s epic ambitions begin? In search of clues we return to his sheltered youth in apartheid South Africa, a world engineered for white supremacy. Along the way, we connect the dots between a bizarre White House ambush of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to teenage Elon’s ego-powered quests in video games. Finally, was his “draft dodge” from military service a moral act or a...

What explains Elon Musk? Could his most outlandish ambitions and most toxic qualities trace back to his youth in Apartheid South Africa? Understood: The Making of Musk explores his seemingly insatiable drive for dominance, which connects everything from his birthrate obsession (and fourteen children) to his fixation with colonizing Mars.   This four-part series, hosted by Jacob Silverman...

It's 2025. President Trump is back, and the richest men in tech are on stage with him. What started as a dysfunctional internet run by tech giants, and enabled by failed legislation, has morphed into something even more dangerous: what economist Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism. Host Cory Doctorow traces how U.S. trade pressure dragged Canada into America's broken internet model, how shortsi...

American antitrust laws were designed to stop companies from wielding the power of kings. But in the 1970s, a legal scholar named Robert Bork convinced Washington to ignore those laws. Host Cory Doctorow traces how Bork's influence gave digital giants like Amazon a decades-long free pass to dominate markets, crush competitors, exploit their own business clients, and treat users like hostages — and...

In 1998, the United States Congress tried to tame the wild internet with a new law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But buried in its fine print was a provision that would end up giving tech giants ultimate legal protection and control, and stop innovators from fixing what's broken. Host Cory Doctorow traces how a law written for a different era led to the arrest of a researcher, became the...

Google Search was the gold standard — a product born in a dorm room during the internet’s early, idealistic era. But when internal emails surfaced they revealed a deeper conflict inside the company: was Google making Search worse, on purpose, to boost ad revenue? Google says its changes are all about benefiting users. Critics say it’s all part of a bigger pattern — one that host Cory Doctorow call...

It's not you — the internet really does suck. Novelist, blogger and noted internet commentator Cory Doctorow explains what happened to the internet and why you're tormented by ads, bots, algorithms, AI slop and so many pop-ups. Spoiler alert: it wasn't an accident. In a four-part series, Doctorow gets into the decisions made by powerful people that got us here, and most importantly, how we fix it....

In the aftermath of René Angélil’s death, a Céline-aissance. But then, illness strikes. In the final episode of Céline: Understood, a look at her recent years, and why her fame endures.

Céline Dion becomes inescapable in the mid-nineties with her hit song from the Titanic soundtrack, My Heart Will Go On. She achieves a unique level of global fame, earning fans from Jamaica to Iraq. But her ubiquity will also inspire a backlash in North America.

With her manager René Angélil by her side, Céline Dion is starting to crossover into the US. But there’s a secret René and Céline have been keeping: one René feared could stop Céline’s blooming career in its tracks.

Céline Dion slept in a drawer as a baby born into a poor francophone Catholic family in Québec. At 12, she gets discovered in an office in Montreal, and she becomes a rising star in the insular constellation of Québec celebrity. But just as Céline is trying to break into English Canada, political tensions are running high in Québec. And some accuse her of selling out.

Céline Dion is having a moment. It’s not her first. And millions of fans are hoping it won’t be her last. While Céline’s international stardom seems obvious now, it was all so unlikely. This four-part series hosted by Céline expert Thomas Leblanc explores the surprising cultural, political and business alchemy that created one of the most enduring superstars the planet has ever seen. Four episodes...