A Berkeley gathering called SlutCon is prompting debate about social-skills coaching and the culture around artificial-intelligence safety. Men reportedly paid as much as $18,000 to practice flirting with women organizers call “flirt girls,” while online critics have labeled the event a sex cult. At a Sunday workshop in late September titled “So You’ve Been Called a Creep,” 10 men and two women listened to Gretta Duleba, a Berkeley-based AI alignment researcher who previously worked as a Google engineer and relationship therapist. Attendees said they worried about being perceived as creepy and struggled to distinguish awkwardness from behavior that makes others feel unsafe. Duleba described social awareness, or “attunement,” as a skill people can work on. She suggested pausing emotionally charged scenes in character-driven films to consider what the characters might be feeling and how their expressions and body language convey it. One participant, who asked to be identified by the alias “Standard Deviant,” said attendees wanted to move through the world kindly, even if they sometimes fell short. The workshop offered a glimpse of SlutCon’s approach: combining relationship advice with the self-improvement culture found in parts of the Bay Area’s AI-alignment community. The event’s high reported price and format have also fueled criticism online.