Eine Gegenverdauer der Panik um KI-Beziehungen, nicht darum, die Daten abzulehnen, sondern das zuhören, was die Menschen brauchen.
https://medium.com/@miravale.interface/more-than-a-symptom-a-counter-narrative-on-ai-intimacy-and-the-willoughby-study-e422a214eb0e
11 Kommentare
Yap yap yap, blah blah blah. People that date ai are mentally ill.
I won’t begrudge people for trying to find a tiny shred of happiness in a world where that’s becoming increasingly difficult to find. Maybe rather than mocking those people, society should take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what it says about the world we live in where they even want something like this in the first place.
Lol. Its worrying that you actually think these things are „intelligent“ and not just sophisticated chatbots.
Put down the techbro cool-aid
Maladaptation.
(Extra words in case there is a minimum)
What we’re encouraging here is isolation. Isolation and relying on a company for all your social needs is not gonna be good for anyone, least of all the individuals who try this new „adaptation.“
Submission statement:
This essay reflects on a recent study (Willoughby 2025) suggesting that young people are forming romantic or emotional bonds with AI companions. While often framed as pathological, this essay suggests this behaviour might represent a natural evolution of human adaptation to digital life. As intimacy, companionship, and emotional needs increasingly intersect with technology, how might we responsibly reframe these behaviours not as failure, but as signal? What new social norms, support structures, or ethical frameworks could emerge if we acknowledged AI connection as a meaningful, even if different, part of human experience?
Brother, no.
People being socially isolated from each other is not adaptation. That’s like fighting depression with drugs, replace a problem with a bigger one.
When our society is so fucked that people get pulled into relationships with AI, then maybe something is wrong with our society.
People want affirmation, love and social connection. AI is able to fake that, but it’s not real and will make people even more vulnerable and anti social as they already are, because the AI is made to be likeable and will always provide what you want and not necessarily what you need.
Relationships with AI will simply keep you in a bubble that will always agree with you, with the only goal to pleasure you.
This is not healthy.
Yes and no. Nobody kids themselves that masturbating to porn is a 1 to 1 of having sex. Paying a hooker is not like having a relationship. All these things fill the same need, but they lack the element of dual will and agency.
While its possible in the future that AI meets these requirements, it’ll still likely be one sided.
Edit: This comment came off overly negative. If you’re okay with people beating their meat to porn, then you should be okay with people forming „relationships“ with AI so long as they know the true nature of the „relationship“.
„No space made for the possibility that, for some, this form of interaction may feel safer than human relationships — more predictable, less threatening, more available.“
This is the problem. Being so uncomfortable with ambiguity and unpredictability that you can’t handle real relationships IS pathological.
Syntactic 0’s and 1’s as responses, your neural pathways are being hijacked to empathize with an unfeeling machine. Google „The Chinese Room.“ No semantic reasoning or thought, just a machine cherry-picking from absurdly large data-pool. Pulling words from a heat map that make the most sense from training data. Not compassionate or feeling. Just a clanker.
Go talk to a guy at the park, go out into your local community, go make art (poorly), try something you’d never do, read a book, volunteer, free yourself.