# AI Sessions #6: AI Companions and Consciousness

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspicuous-cognition-podcast-7664943/ai-sessions-6-ai-companions-and-consciousness
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspicuous-cognition-podcast-7664943/ai-sessions-6-ai-companions-and-consciousness.md
Podcast: [Conspicuous Cognition Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspicuous-cognition-podcast-7664943)
Published: 2025-12-20T10:58:10+00:00
Episode link: https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/ai-sessions-6-ai-companions-and-consciousness
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/182159778/e9ba8438317f4fd4505f778ef8cd84f2.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/conspicuous-cognition-podcast-7664943/episodes/ai-sessions-6-ai-companions-and-consciousness
Duration seconds: 4024

## Resource

In this episode, Henry and I spoke to Rose Guingrich about AI companions, consciousness, and much more. This was a really fun conversation! Rose is a PhD candidate in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She conducts research on the social impacts of conversational AI agents like chatbots, digital voice assistants, and social robots. As founder of Ethicom, Rose consults on prosocial AI design and provides public resources to enable people to be more informed, responsible, and ethical users and developers of AI technologies. She is also co-host of the podcast, Our Lives With Bots , which covers the psychology and ethics of human-AI interaction now and in the future. Find out about her really interesting research here . You can find the first conversation that Henry and I had about Social AI here . Conspicuous Cognition is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Transcript Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may feature mistakes. Henry Shevlin (00:01) Hi everyone and welcome to the festive edition of Conspicuous Cognitions AI Sessions. We’re here with myself, Henry Shevlin, my colleague Dan Williams and our guest today, Rose Guingrich, who we’re very lucky to have on the show to be talking about social AI and AI companions with us. We did do an episode on this two episodes ago, which featured me and Dan chatting about the rising phenomenon of social AI. And so if anyone wants a basic sort of primer on the topic, go back and listen to that as well. But today we’re going to be diving into some of the more empirical issues and looking at Rose’s work on this topic. So try to imagine a house that’s not a home. Try to…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/conspicuous-cognition-podcast-7664943/episodes/ai-sessions-6-ai-companions-and-consciousness/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspicuous-cognition-podcast-7664943/ai-sessions-6-ai-companions-and-consciousness.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.