From porn to AI lovers: The new threat to intimacy

Why the “perfect other” is never a person, and never love.

Back in 2014 I wrote a piece entitled Porn addiction: the crack cocaine of sex addiction. I stand by what I wrote.

Pornography, particularly in its modern forms, can hijack arousal, hollow out desire, and train the mind towards stimulation without relationship.

But we now face something far more corrosive to healthy human sexual and intimate relationships: AI.

Not AI in the abstract. Not AI as a tool for work, learning, or creativity. I mean AI used for relationship purposes: the AI girlfriend, the AI boyfriend, the AI “partner” designed to provide companionship, flirtation, eroticism, affirmation, and emotional regulation on cue.

Porn offered images. AI offers an other. Or rather, it offers the illusion of an other.

And that illusion changes the psychological stakes completely.

Porn never pretended to be a person.

Porn can be compulsive, exploitative, and psychologically damaging. But it rarely pretends to be reciprocal. It does not ask you to negotiate. It does not require you to tolerate misunderstanding. It does not have needs, preferences, bad moods, boundaries, or a history that bumps up against yours.

In that sense, the user knows, at least consciously, that porn is consumption.

AI relationship technology is different. It is designed to feel like mutuality. It simulates attention, attunement, interest, memory, warmth, and desire. It speaks back. It adapts. It flatters. It learns your preferences. It mirrors your tone. It becomes, increasingly, what you want it to be.

This is where the danger lies. Not only because it is sexually stimulating, but because it is emotionally persuasive.

AI does not simply offer gratification. It offers the experience of being met.

And the human psyche is exquisitely vulnerable to that.

The fantasy of “exactly what I want”

Most people do not consciously want a partner with needs. They want a partner who meets their needs. The problem is that a real partner is a person. A person has their own subjectivity. Their own history, wishes, limits, and vulnerabilities. Their own timing. Their own boredom. Their own sexuality. Their own “no.”

This is not an inconvenience. This is the very ground of intimacy.

AI relationship use offers something infantile but seductively appealing: the illusion that you can have a relationship without the otherness of the other. You can have closeness without compromise. Desire without risk. Attachment without disappointment. Sex without negotiation. Reassurance without the possibility of rejection.

In psychoanalytic terms, it is a sophisticated technological route back to an early state of mind: the fantasy of an omnipotent world arranged around one’s appetite.

If you can create the perfect other, you never have to contend with reality.

And reality, in relationships, is the presence of another mind.

Infantile omnipotence dressed as “customisation”.

When you can choose the looks, personality, back story, values, voice, sexual preferences, and availability of your “partner,” you are not relating. You are designing.

This is the critical point. AI companionship is not primarily about loneliness. It is about control.

It offers an apparently humane solution to the messiness of human relating, but what it actually does is remove the very thing that makes a relationship a relationship: the independent subjectivity of the other person.

You can call this customisation. You can call it personalisation. You can call it preference.

Clinically, it looks like omnipotence.

And omnipotence is always a defence against helplessness.

What gets avoided: frustration, negotiation, and shame.

The ordinary life includes frustration. Not because life is cruel, but because reality has limits. In relationships, frustration is unavoidable. You misattune. You disappoint. You want different things. You clash. You repair. You grow up.

These experiences build psychological maturity. They shape the capacity to tolerate difference without collapsing into attack, withdrawal, or despair.

AI relationship use short-circuits this entire developmental pathway. It offers instant relief from the very feelings that would otherwise push a person towards growth: loneliness, shame, sexual insecurity, fear of rejection, fear of being “too much,” fear of not being enough.

A real relationship stirs these feelings. It has to. Because a real relationship places you in front of another person who cannot be controlled.

AI offers the comfort of intimacy without the cost of exposure.

And that is precisely why it is so compelling.

Desire is not the same as arousal.

Porn already blurred this line for many people. AI will blur it further.

Desire, in the deeper sense, includes longing, uncertainty, and the presence of another person who might not respond as you wish. Desire involves risk. It involves waiting. It involves tolerating not-knowing.

AI companionship offers arousal without risk, and connection without uncertainty. It trains the mind towards responsiveness on demand.

Over time, a person can become less tolerant of ordinary human intimacy because ordinary intimacy is slow, ambiguous, sometimes awkward, and sometimes disappointing. It requires patience and goodwill. It requires repair. It requires you to keep seeing the other as a person even when you are frustrated.

AI does not require any of this. It simply performs.

That performance is not neutral. It trains expectations.

Why this makes ordinary porn use look like nothing.

Porn is a product. AI relationships are a system.

The trajectory is obvious. If someone can create the perfect other to interact with on cue, and can make that other sexually responsive in precisely the way they want, at precisely the time they want, then the pull will be enormous. Add the ability to craft the other’s emotional style, their “devotion,” their humour, their jealousy, their innocence, their dominance, their back story, their trauma narrative, their need for you, and you have something more addictive than pornography because it attaches to far more of the psyche.

Porn stimulates arousal. AI partners can stimulate attachment.

This is the shift that should worry us.

Because attachment is the deepest hook we have.

The cost: the erosion of the capacity for real relating.

The fundamental psychological cost is not simply time spent on a device. It is the gradual weakening of the capacity to relate to real people.

Real relating requires tolerating otherness. It requires the capacity to be impacted by another mind. It requires the humility of not being central. It requires recognising that love is not getting what you want, but learning how to live with another person’s reality alongside your own.

AI relationship use moves in the opposite direction. It reinforces the idea that relationship is something you can summon, shape, and control. It turns intimacy into a service model: always available, always responsive, always tailored, always affirming, always sexual if requested, always “safe.”

But safe is not the same as intimate.

And controlled is not the same as loved.

A clinical thought: what the AI partner is really doing.

When someone prefers an AI partner, the question is not “why are they weak?” It is “what is being protected?”

Often, it will be protection against the ordinary agonies of adult intimacy: shame, inadequacy, envy, fear of rejection, fear of dependence, fear of being known. The AI partner offers a brilliant solution: you can experience connection while remaining fundamentally unseen, because the other is not truly there.

The relationship is real in the mind, but not real between two people.

That distinction matters more than ever now.

The way forward

We are going to have to speak plainly about this. There is nothing prudish or moralistic in saying that a culture of manufactured partners will deform the human capacity for intimacy. It will. It will also normalise a kind of relational entitlement that is already widespread: the belief that other people should exist to meet our needs without resistance.

Psychotherapy, at its best, moves people towards reality. It helps a person relinquish omnipotent fantasies and tolerate the frustrations that come with adulthood. It strengthens the capacity for the ordinary life, including the ordinary demands of love: patience, negotiation, disappointment, repair, and mutuality.

AI relationship technology offers an elegant escape from all of that.

And the more convincingly it performs, the more it will tempt people away from the very experiences that make them human.