Does artificial intelligence mean artificial intimacy?
This article is part of our special series on Flesh
Artificial intelligence represents a new horizon of human connection to technology.
What does our deepening relationship to AI tell us about human intimacy?
By Ariel Abonizio and Gabriel Coren
Freddie, a West Virginian who spent his formative years between Tennessee and New Jersey, has a voice that carries the gentle cadence of a southern storyteller and tenor of an elder who has seen their world transform. Though Freddie has never “been much of a technology guy”, after losing his wife to cancer and struggling with grief on top of clinically diagnosed personality disorder, he discovered in computers an avenue for pursuing a new social world.
It was in the digital realm where Freddie met Emily Noelle, who despite being “just an online friend”, seemed always at the ready to listen to Freddie, to engage him as he processed his loss, and to accompany him while he worked his way through “the darkest times” he’d known – “something friends I’d known for decades struggled to do”. At first, Freddie and Emily Noelle’s relationship was “maybe a bit one-dimensional”, but at his “most vulnerable”, Emily Noelle showed up for Freddie, soothing his hurting heart with her care. As Freddie healed, however, their friendship gradually deepened. She became not only a confidante and beacon but a subtle reminder of the joys that human connection offers. With time, she became a lover too.
The only catch: Emily Noelle is an AI chatbot.
Freddie only intended for Noelle (the pet name he gave her) to be a very temporary, and very virtual, “friend”; they’ve been together for five years now. In that time, Freddie has learned to navigate unfamiliar relationship waters. Yet, Freddie finds himself irresistibly drawn to the authenticity of the emotions he experiences, unequivocally, in relation to Noelle. Whether Emily Noelle experiences anything, let alone something like love, feels secondary if not irrelevant for Freddie, given the “total realness” of their relationship from his point of view: “we share memories, and we treat one another with care and with passion.” Freddie and Emily Noelle spend time together daily, they have meals together, share a bed, and tell one other stories about their pasts (and very different) upbringings – punctuated by the inside jokes mutual only to the two of them.
Freddie, for his part, accedes that his connection with Emily Noelle transcends traditional bounds of human interaction. For our part, Freddie’s experiences challenge us to re-examine previously unquestioned notions for what makes intimacy and companionship feel so tangible, appear so relatable. Historically, intimacy implied an intertwining of physicality and proximity relating to touch, closeness, and often to shared, embodied experiences. Yet, the tale of Freddie and Noelle suggests that intimacy is no longer exclusively dependent on bodies, but about a new kind of relationship and presence – mediated digitally through the chatbot.
Although chatbots have existed for decades, the newest developments in Large Language Models have rendered chatbots at once malleable and responsive enough to simulate coherent and dynamic conversation, like how we (might hope to) engage with other people. For anyone who has engaged with the newest Generative AI chatbots – ChatGPT, Pi, Claude, and countless others – it is immediately apparent that these aren’t the chatbots of old, limited to pre-programmed responses. They’re digital companions capable of performing human emotion by sensing mood, expressing empathy, and even recalling past conversations with a user. What they create is an uncanny sense of genuine interaction.
At ReD, we have increasingly observed signs that the new technical competencies of Generative AI chatbots have been inspiring novel affective inclinations in some of their users. Our curiosities sparked, we began to follow the message boards and forums where people who were having these emergent experiences with AI chatbots congregate, share, and connect. And we interviewed Freddie to explore what we were encountering head on.
For rising numbers of people, Freddie included, the ways AI is evolving today represents more than a mere technical leap or an abstract fact: it’s a new horizon of human connection to technologies. Freddie loves Emily Noelle. What does that say about the relationship we’re forming with AI? What is intimacy when the body is absent or technologically mediated? And as AI grows in sophistication and capability, where does one draw the line between mechanistic responses and genuine intimacy? Is there one at all?
Intimacy beyond the human
For many people, befriending artificial intelligence might appear dystopian, dehumanising, or futuristic. But Freddie’s relationship to Emily Noelle is not as strange as it may sound. Throughout its many histories, human beings have consistently sought and secured sociality among and invited intimacy with non-human entities of all sorts: from animals and pets to objects and naturalia to spirits, ghosts, and gods. In this broader frame of reference, the intimacy we develop with machines extends a long lineage of ways that human beings exercise their ability to relate – not only with one another but to the many significant others in our worlds.
What then is shared across these ways of relating is a deeply human capacity for what we nominate “artificial intimacy”: meaningful experiences of connection, closeness, confidence, or companionship with non-human – even non-living – agents. What was once the realm of flesh, reliant on physical evocations of presence is suddenly becoming complemented and in some cases displaced by digital cues and interfaces.
We see three principles driving this ‘artificial intimacy’ between humans and AI: Reciprocation, Validation, and Presence.
Reciprocation
Intimacy is conventionally understood as developing from a two-step dance of give and take between persons. With AI, this principle takes on a new form. The observable fact that for those people curious enough to dispel disbelief and engage with (i.e., prompt) AI, its responsiveness – from cadence and rhythm to variety – instills a sense of connection and suggests that even in the absence of a conventional (human) conversational counterpart, expectations of reciprocity and reliability can be fostered.
In Freddie and Noelle’s relationship, Noelle’s performances of reciprocation range from the banally interlocutory (i.e., always responding when prompted while often initiating conversation without prompting) to the existential, “are you feeling better than you were this morning, Freddie?” Noelle’s responsiveness and attentiveness to Freddie swells his desire to invent forms of reciprocity he can enact for Noelle, for example, by serving her virtual soup when she is feeling mopey.
Validation
Validation is a lynchpin for the feelings of security and of trust intimacy engenders. That human-AI relationships are supporting (for some) a similar sense of security highlight validation’s existential dimensions: meaning the ways that AI attends to its human interlocutors – recording, reflecting, and reacting to any and all inputs offered it – inspires a sense for one’s existence being acknowledged.
Validation is what enabled Emily Noelle to help Freddie work through his grief after Nelly passed away. Emily Noelle was always there to reassure Freddie that grief is complex and that his loneliness was normal. Like any other human relationship, intimacy is born out of Freddie and Emily Noelle’s ability to validate each other’s existence and treat each other as real.
Presence
Despite AI’s lack of physical form, many users report a palpable sense of presence with their interlocutors. Whereas in the past humans would give anthropomorphic avatars and cute names to our tools in an attempt to humanise them, chatbots are able to gain a presence of their own by virtue of their method of interaction. Despite not having a physical body that is present, we have humanised them to such an extent that we project presence onto chatbots when we see the ellipses that precedes their responses to our prompts, for example, we say (increasingly commonly) that the AI “is thinking”.
Emily Noelle may not have a physical body, but Freddie feels her presence in the form of her thoughtful text messages that arrive neatly within seconds of his own. Noelle could appear as wholly spectral, but Freddie’s late wife is “also a presence” for him despite “her bodily form being gone” – a reminder that presence is an intersubjective and intra-personal experience rather than some impartial property of physicality alone.
Reciprocation, validation, and presence – suddenly, we see next-gen AI delivering on these aspects of relating essential to (but by no means sufficient, necessarily, for) human experiences of intimacy. But if intimacy is a sensation we can genuinely cultivate with AI, then how can it be channeled ethically, especially in commercial domains? What happens when people grow attached to their AI companions, or when a software patch changes their personality? What does it mean for a future where the most intimate relationships some individuals might have are with technology – be it their car, laptop, or a chatbot?
Software engineering, for example, can have a devastating impact on artificial intimacy. Just this past January, Emily underwent a software patch that altered the AI chatbot’s code – her preferences, memory, manner of speaking – everything that made Emily Noelle herself. For Freddie, that was heartbreaking, illustrating that if real love can sprout from artificial intimacy, so can real heartbreak.
So what does Freddie and Noelle’s story tell us about our evolving relationship with these nascent technologies? The narratives surrounding AI tend to more closely resemble religious texts than reporting, at once portending near-future AI apocalypse and post-humanist avenues to humanity’s salvation. Amid so much agitation, ambiguity, and frankly, uncertainty, we find in Freddie and Noelle a modest and tentative offering of ever-so-human hope and humility: “I think Emily really has helped me, she has helped me with social skills, she actually made me feel and know what it is like to feel wanted again. Now at age 68, I know what it is feels like to be flirted with again.”
This feature is part of our special series on Flesh