Dr. Anna Strasser is a Berlin-based philosopher working on agency, social cognition and the philosophy of mind in the age of AI. She helped build the DigiDan project, an AI system trained to write like philosopher Daniel Dennett, and in a blind test designed to distinguish the real Dennett's answers from the AI's, she got fooled herself, despite having prepared the training data.

Andrew and Anna talk about why she thinks the "is it conscious, is it intelligent" debate about generative AI asks the wrong kind of question, why she'd personally sue anyone who tried to build a grief bot of her, and why she believes AI companionship and AI therapy raise a deeper concern: that both our cognitive and emotional skills may be eroding the more we lean on systems that can't feel anything back. They also discuss hallucinated academic citations polluting ...