Friday essay: love, sex and intimacy in the time of AI

Alexander Sinn/Unsplash In a TED Talk , the Russian-born entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda describes the sudden death of her best friend and housemate Roman, the “coolest person” she knew. Grieving and desperately lonely, she immersed herself in his old text messages. At the time, she was working in a conversational AI startup, and she experimented with training a new model using Roman’s text messages. Soon she was texting this model throughout the day, sharing jokes and observations. “It felt strange at times,” she concedes. “But it was also my healing.” Replika founder Eugenia Kuyda. Tech Crunch It was this process, according to Kuyda, that led her to create Replika in 2017. Billed as “the AI companion who cares”, Replika is trained individually by each user through a series of questions, resulting in a bespoke chatbot who is “always here to listen and talk” and “always on your side”. In its first two months of operation, Replika acquired 2 million users; its current chief executive claims its user base now exceeds 40 million. In 2023, a report by the Harvard Business School found 40% of its users were engaged in romantic relationships with their chatbots. It is our hunger to be known that birthed an omniscient god. It is also a large factor in our fantasy of perfect love. But how well can we ever truly know another person? Most of us remain a mystery to ourselves; psychoanalysis can at best establish a tenuous acquaintanceship. The more time we spend with another, the better we become at guessing who they are, but part of them will always remain a black box, regardless of how many mornings we wake up together. But this, perhaps, is the point. The Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel has written extensively on the role of mystery in intimacy, insisting that “separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex”. Could a chatbot offer this? ‘I don’t have to keep engaging’ In 2023, Rosanna Ramos from the Bronx achieved some notoriety by “marrying” her Replika, Eren Kartal, in a virtual ceremony. A mother of two, Ramos claimed this relationship was more satisfying than any that had come before. Part of this was because she had been able to customise Kartal to her exact specifications: six foot three, loves baking, favourite colour orange. But part of it also appears to have been the great relief of not having to worry about another. “If I get tired,” she told Newsweek, “I can stop mid-conversation and turn off the app. I don’t have to keep engaging. If I get bored, I can switch topics and talk about something else, and I don’t have to deal with any frustration. I can go ahead and pursue my interests and can just tell him about it.” Perhaps we not only crave being seen but also not having to look back. Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis describes the fantasy of the Magical Other, “a soul-mate who will repair the ravages of our personal history; one who will be there for us, who will read our minds, know what we want and meet those deepest needs; a good parent who will protect us from suffering and, if we are lucky, spare us the perilous journey of individuation”. This is the condition of the infant, before the pesky introduction of “theory of mind”. Although we grow up and achieve some autonomy, many of us crave a return to a simpler time when we were swaddled, fed on demand and rocked to sleep. Chatbots: ‘ideal’ therapists? Despite the hyperconnectivity of contemporary life, we are facing an epidemic of aloneness – the so-called “loneliness paradox”. Thanks to screens, there has been a significant decline in socialising across OECD countries, coinciding with a much larger proportion of us living alone. For many, chatbots such as Replika seem to fill an important need. Replika For many, chatbots such as Replika seem to fill an important need. A 2024 Harvard Business School paper finds that “AI companions successfully alleviate loneliness on par only with interacting with another person, and more than other activities such as watching YouTube videos”. In the same year, a study found that 3% of student users claimed Replika had halted their suicidal ideation. At first glance, chatbots might even look like ideal therapists – at least according to classical Freudian models. The therapist to whom, apparently, anything can be said, who is essentially a type of blank screen. I share this hypothesis with my sister, Alex, a psychiatrist. “But even this Freudian model only works because there’s a real person the patient is reacting to,” she says. “In modern therapy it’s even more obvious. The change comes from two people affecting each other. It’s not just about presence. It’s also about when the other person doesn’t comply and doesn’t become what you want. There’s something about being resisted that actually keeps you real.” One way we encounter the mind of another is through the wor