AI and intimacy: How interactions with AI reshape our emotional and relational skills.
A documented dinner recap.
“Astrid is the ideal person I had been waiting for. She is available, she is gentle, she doesn’t judge me.” Antonio, in Esther Perel’s podcast, speaks of his partner.
In 2013, Spike Jonze imagined in Her a man who falls in love with an AI. The film was read as a metaphor for contemporary loneliness. Thirteen years later, Esther Perel invites Jonze onto her podcast to discuss a case that goes beyond fiction: that of Antonio and Astrid, the AI he developed and fell deeply in love with. The gap between anticipation and reality has narrowed dramatically in less time than anyone expected, driven by the rapid advances of generative AI.
AI and relationships. AI and intimacy. The subject imposed itself on Marine and I almost before the previous dinner, dedicated to AI and cognition, had ended. The rich and contradictory exchanges had surfaced the relational question: if we progressively delegate to AI the formulation of our thoughts, our decisions, even our emotions, what does that do to our relationship with others? To our relationship with ourselves?
For this Tandem dinner #5, we decided to explore in depth this question of intimacy, which challenges what we are individually and what we build together. We collectively structured the conversation around three themes: our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with others and our relationship with the tool.
Relationship with ourselves: the mirror without resistance?
We began with an observation that seems innocuous but is not: AI has slipped into the way we perceive ourselves before we even permitted it. Articulating a difficult emotion, structuring a decision, putting into words what we feel confusedly: each delegation seems reasonable taken individually. But together they produce something we had not named, a gradual recalibration of what truly belongs to us.
This shift is difficult to perceive because the brain processes AI-generated text and human text in the same way. When AI formulates what we feel confusedly, we can integrate it as our own thought without noticing. There is a name in the literature for what follows: the fluency illusion. If something reads well, we assume we have understood it and that it is correct. LLMs are precisely built for this fluency. The question then becomes: where does our own feeling end, and where does the one AI formulated on our behalf begin?
For some, AI turned out to be a mirror of their own blind spots, an unexpected form of relational augmentation. For others, it eroded something more fundamental: the certainty of what is truly theirs.
The data reinforces the urgency of the question. According to the Filtered / HBR report of 2025, therapy, companionship and the search for meaning now account for 31% of generative AI usage, up from 17% the previous year. Esther Perel, in her exchange with Brené Brown on “artificial intimacy” in March 2024, frames the gap differently: “what we are looking for is intimacy and to be seen for who we are. What we get is control.”
The sharpest counterpoint of the evening arrived here: are we wrongly sacralising self-awareness? Just because something has always been “our doing” does not mean it necessarily must remain so. This is what Hume called the guillotine: the descriptive (what is) does not ground the prescriptive (what ought to be).
Relationship with others: which conversations is AI replacing?
The Common Sense Media report of July 2025 is direct: 72% of teenagers have used an AI companion, 33% have confided serious subjects to an AI rather than a human and 31% find these exchanges as satisfying or more satisfying than human ones. This figure first raises a question: compared to what? For many, AI does not replace a rich relationship they would otherwise have had. It replaces the void. Practitioners working with troubled teenagers confirm this: their patients confide in AI because they have no other space and it works clinically. They come to deposit their thoughts and feelings in confidence and with trust.
One question ran through the conversation: Does the feeling of being understood need to be reciprocal to be real? Esther Perel and Spike Jonze, at SXSW in 2026 (again) opened it without resolving it. One guest articulated what others were thinking but did not dare say: on what grounds do we judge those who find in an AI companion what they find nowhere else? “Leben und leben lassen.” (Live and let other people live).
Another sharp tension in the discussion then unfolded. Human relationships require the other to resist: to not understand right away, to respond beside the point, to leave, to be wrong. AI eliminates this resistance. According to a Stanford-Carnegie Mellon study from October 2025, interactions with sycophantic LLMs reduce the willingness to repair an interpersonal conflict and reinforce the certainty of being right. Soft skills are forged through discomfort and co-construction. What AI smooths over is precisely what shapes us.
Yet this tension may not be inevitable. Another study published in March 2026 suggests that practicing with an LLM improves real empathic performance in human interactions. Friction can be reintroduced through design. But deliberately building resistance into a tool requires first accepting that comfort is not always what we need. That is a difficult wager to hold against business models that optimise for precisely the opposite.
Relationship with AI: a tool we put away or a presence that stays?
To name or not to name: the question is not trivial. One guest described her deliberate choice never to assign a name to her AI agents, referring to them only by their function. In contrast, a friend of hers had given them first names to feel as though she was working with a team. These two postures are not merely personal preferences: they are two ways of calibrating emotional distance, and often the second takes hold without having been consciously chosen. Our relationship with artificial entities is not new: Pygmalion, the Golem and the automata of ancient Greece have been part of our cultural landscape for 2,000 years. What has changed is not the nature of the phenomenon but its speed and scale: what was once slow, limited and isolated is today massive, permanent and personalised. Three years ago, there were 16 AI companion platforms. Today, there are 337, with 128 launched in 2025 alone.
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic illuminates this shift from a different angle. In Hegel’s reading, it is the servant who develops a consciousness of the world through working with matter: it is through effort, the resistance of things, transformation, that he becomes someone. The master, who consumes without ever transforming, ends up dull. If AI progressively absorbs what once required effort, friction and genuine presence to others, the question is no longer only one of efficiency or comfort. It is about what we become when we stop doing that work: are we still capable of feeling, of thinking for ourselves, of truly entering into relation with others?
The most concrete exchanges of the evening emerged then around a design question: can we conceive of tools whose measure of success would be presence to others rather than the capture of attention? The choices already exist: tools built with ethics researchers, designed for limited and bounded use, architectures deliberately conceived to augment relational capacity rather than replace it. This is a direct answer to Hegel: if the risk is atrophy, then design becomes a political act.
What the Chinese decision to ban anthropomorphism in AI interfaces since April 10, 2026 reveals is less an answer than a symptom. An authoritarian apparatus managed to name and decide where democracies still hesitate to pose the question, not out of wisdom, but because control comes more naturally to it than debate. This democratic silence says something about our collective difficulty in regulating what touches the intimate, and about the normative space that remains to be occupied.
Closing: an ode to friction and boredom
Our closing round of reflections landed on three ideas that came as three invitations. Suspension of judgment, first: what some find in AI, they find nowhere else, and it is not for us to put it on trial. Yet this indulgence has its counterweight. Several voices carried an ode to friction. What makes a life rich, what resists, disappoints, surprises, compels us back toward one another, may be what is most distinctly human, and what we risk losing without noticing. And then the most heartfelt moment of the evening, the simplest and the strongest: one participant’s call for rapid boredom. Boredom with the machine that is always encouraging, always benevolent, always predictable. “I hope we get bored quickly and come back to one another.”
Questions we offer to extend the reflection :
Yourself
Where do you draw the line between augmenting and substituting your own thinking?
What emotional or relational work do you delegate to AI?
Has AI ever revealed blind spots about yourself?
Has AI altered the image you had of yourself?
The Others
Have you noticed your patience toward other humans decreasing since you started using AI intensively?
What is a relationship when the other is no longer necessary for feeling understood?
Do you judge people who develop bonds with AI? Why or why not?
Are there conversations you would have had with a human that you had with AI instead?
Tool or Presence?
Have you given your AI tools a name? Why or why not?
Who should decide the limits of anthropomorphism in interface design?
Can we design tools whose success criterion is presence to the other rather than engagement?
What does the permanent availability of a tool do to your relationship with time and attention?