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, but specifically 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.

Where porn offered video and images, AI appears to offer an other human being unconditionally available.

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, nor does it require you to tolerate misunderstanding and difference. 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 has changed all that. It is designed to feel like mutuality through stimulating your attention, attunement, interest, memory, warmth, and desire. It speaks back and adapts to our wants. It learns your preferences, mirrors your tone and 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 but 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 and people have their own subjectivity, history, wishes, limits, and vulnerabilities. And they have their own “no”. 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 and 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.

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

This is the critical point: AI companionship is not primarily about loneliness, but 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.

Clinically, it looks like omnipotence and omnipotence is always a defence against helplessness.

What gets avoided is the ordinary frustration, negotiation, and shame and being in relationship and thus being vulnerable with another. In relationships, frustration is unavoidable. 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, 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. 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, waiting and tolerating not-knowing. Contrast this to AI companionship, which offers arousal without risk, and connection without uncertainty. It trains the mind towards responsiveness on demand.

The risks are that 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 and 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.

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.

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 and thus the capacity to be impacted by another mind. It requires the humility of not being central and 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 by reinforcing 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.” 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.

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.