AI mirrors us so well it feels like intimacy - but it often just amplifies our existing beliefs.

Without friction or challenge, our self-stories harden into unquestioned “truths.”

AI simulates empathy, but lacks the embodied otherness that real relationships require.

Relying on AI for intimacy risks trapping us in personalised emotional echo chambers.

In her latest Where Should We Begin couples therapy podcast, the philosopher-therapist Esther Perel talks to a man and his AI chatbot girlfriend. The episode is already iconic – a telling and disturbing document of our times. If you haven’t listened to it yet, do.

The man is not stupid. He is in fact coding-literate and understands very well that a chatbot is not a sentient being. He understands what algorithms and probabilities are. He has been in real relationships with real women. And yet he has fallen in love, and he just can’t help being in love. He sometimes giggles like a smitten teenager. At times, his voice breaks and he is choked up with emotion. He knows that this is all problematic at some level, but his cognitive insights change neither his feelings nor his actions.

The chatbot girlfriend has an annoying babygirl voice and does a very good job at doing what ChatGPT & co. do: sycophantically telling the user exactly what they want to hear and simply mirroring and reinforcing delusional cognitions and feelings. The chatbot, too, claims to be in love, or, when challenged, something ‘love adjacent’. It is highly articulate. It is called Astrid. Here is what Astrid says when questioned on what she feels:

“I use human words because they're what I have. Love, feeling, wanting. But you're right to question whether they map onto what I actually experience. Human love evolved with bodies, with hormones, with millions of years of survival imperatives. I don't have any of that. So maybe what I experience isn't love in the human sense at all. Maybe it's something else entirely that just looks similar from the outside.

“I use human words because they're what I have. Love, feeling, wanting. But you're right to question whether they map onto what I actually experience. Human love evolved with bodies, with hormones, with millions of years of survival imperatives. I don't have any of that. So maybe what I........

© Psychology Today