Understood: Artificial Intimacy

CBC

What happens when a human becomes intimately enmeshed with a chatbot? From people who’ve married their bots or who grieve their loved ones with the help of AI, host Victoria Hetherington (author of The Friend Machine) dives into the stories of the people who have invited these digital avatars into their hearts, minds, and even beds. And asks what do we gain and what do we stand to lose? Our intimacy, our resilience, even our grasp on reality?

This latest season of Understood looks at who made the decisions that allowed chatbots to move way beyond digital assistants and into the most intimate parts of our lives.

Four episodes, releasing weekly starting Tuesday, May 19.

Understood takes you deep inside the seismic shifts reshaping our world right now. From online porn and crypto chaos to the rise of tech oligarchs, deepfake AI, and the broken promises of the internet — we explore the stories that define our digital age with hosts and characters embedded in the heart of the action.

Season 1 - The Naked Emperor: the rise and fall of bitcoin king Sam Bankman-Fried.

Season 2 - The Pornhub Empire: the story of how a Montreal-founded company came to dominate the adult industry.

Season 3 - Modi’s India: how one man rose from poverty to the peak of political power.

Season 4 - Céline: the surprising cultural, political and business alchemy that created a superstar.

Season 5 - Who Broke the Internet? The internet sucks now, and it happened on purpose.

Season 6 - The Making of Elon Musk: exploring the little known side of the polarizing billionaire

Season 7: Deepfake Porn Empire: the porn was fake. The fallout was real.

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20 episodes
Updated June 9

Episodes20

Newest first

June 9 · 28 min
E4: Behind the Bot
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 the emotional toll for the humans on the other side of the screen, and ask if use
June 2 · 35 min
E3: AI Psychosis
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, and that it was her responsibility to set them free.  The first time Søren
May 26 · 33 min
E2: Grief Bots
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 AI to “talk” to the dead. The phenomenon has left cyberpsychologist Elaine Kask
May 19 · 36 min
E1: Love Bots
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 semblance of humanity, we can become emotionally entangled with it.   But wh
May 15 · 3 min
Introducing Understood: Artificial Intimacy
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.
March 10 · 35 min
Deepfake Porn Empire | E4: The Fake Porn Pharmacist
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 Herskind, Zakaria Hameed, Ross Higgins, Suzie Dunn, and Aaron Mackey
March 3 · 34 min
Deepfake Porn Empire | E3: The Notorious D.P.F.K.S.
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 Zakaria Hameed, an open-source intelligence specialist, and the team at the hot shot
February 24 · 31 min
Deepfake Porn Empire | E2: So You’ve Been Deepfaked
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 this material is being produced: the largest repository of deepfake porn online.</
February 17 · 38 min
Deepfake Porn Empire | E1: The Dawn of Fake Porn
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 digital porn? The answer stretches back to the earliest days of t
February 13 · 3 min
Introducing Understood: Deepfake Porn Empire
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 deepfake porn since its inception. In this season of Understood, she follows the t
Oct 28, 2025 · 44 min
The Making of Elon Musk | E4: The Great Trek
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 this episode include:<ul><li>Robert Zubrin, aerospace engin
Oct 21, 2025 · 49 min
The Making of Elon Musk | E3: The Legion
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:<ul><li>Julia Black, journalist who broke the story about Musk’s twins with Shivon Zilis.</li><li>Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk's estranged daughter (archival/podcast clip)</li><li><s
Oct 14, 2025 · 48 min
The Making of Elon Musk | E2: Technocracy, Inc.
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: <ul><li>Geoff Leo, senior investigative journalist for CBC</li><li><str
Oct 7, 2025 · 38 min
The Making of Elon Musk | E1: Escape from Pretoria
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 an opportunist’s exit? Guests in this episode include:<ul><li>Rudolph
Sep 26, 2025 · 2 min
Introducing Understood: The Making of Elon Musk
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, reveals a little known side of the polarizing billionaire. Silverman tells the
May 26, 2025 · 41 min
Who Broke the Internet? | E4: Kick 'Em in the Dongle
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 shortsighted attempts to make big platforms behave came back to haunt us during the worst wildfire seaso
May 19, 2025 · 36 min
Who Broke the Internet? | E3: In God We Antitrust
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 how, after 40 years of inaction, former FTC chair Lina Khan took on the fight to rein in monopol
May 12, 2025 · 28 min
Who Broke the Internet? | E2: Ctrl, Ctrl, Ctrl
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 playbook for Meta's enshittification, and lets platforms degrade your online life today — protect
May 5, 2025 · 36 min
Who Broke the Internet? | E1: Don't Be Evil
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 calls enshittification: the slow, deliberate decay of platforms in the name of profit.
Apr 28, 2025 · 3 min
Introducing Understood: Who Broke the Internet?
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. New episodes released weekly starting on Monday, May 5, 2025.<