106. Companion AI with Giulia Trojano

This month we're chatting with Giulia Trojano about AI as an economic narrative, companion chatbots, deskilling of digital literacy, chatbot parental controls, differences between social AI and general AI services, increasing surveillance in the guise of safety, advertising creeping into GenAI services, ReplikaAI, lack of research in emotional AI, techno-determinism, and more...

Date: 3rd of December 2025
Podcast authors: Ben Byford with Giulia Trojano
Audio duration: 01:01:23 | Website plays & downloads: 2 Click to download
Tags: Companion, Emotional AI, Social intelligence, Relationships | Playlists: Companions

Giulia is a competition lawyer focusing on abuse of dominance actions against Big Tech companies as well as environmental claims. She recently completed her masters in AI Ethics & Society at Cambridge and writes for several journals and academic publications on the interplay between technology, politics, society, and contemporary art. She regularly gives talks on AI ethics, law and regulation and in 2025 was recognised in the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” list.

No transcript currently available for this episode.

Episode host: Ben Byford

Ben Byford is a AI ethics consultant, code, design and data science teacher, freelance games designer with years of design and coding experience building websites, apps, and games.

In 2015 he began talking on AI ethics and started the Machine Ethics podcast. Since, Ben has talked with academics, developers, doctors, novelists and designers on AI, automation and society.

Through Ethical by Design Ben and the team help organisations make better AI decisions leveraging their experience in design, technology, business, data, sociology and philosophy.

@BenByford

Previous podcast: The AI Bubble with Tim El-Sheikh