Abstract
AI industry leaders are racing to automate intimacy. Promising companions that solve loneliness and simulate desire and human connection, either these systems are celebrated as near-divine solutions to existential suffering, or those who use them are pathologised. This commentary intervenes in both positions. Drawing on the tradition of audience studies and Ken Plummer’s critical humanism, I argue that automated intimacy should be understood neither as a technological solution nor as a pathology, but as a field of social, affective, and economic struggle shaped by relations of power. Against the myth-making of Silicon Valley and the psychologising tendencies of much academic debate, I propose a radical contextualism that foregrounds the plural, situated ways real people navigate AI-mediated intimate life. Centring lived human experience in its ambivalence and creative resistance is itself a political act.
In May 2023, The New York Times wrote that industry leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and other AI labs warned of a ‘risk of extinction’, claiming future systems could be as deadly as pandemics and nuclear weapons (Roose, 2023). It did not stop anyone from rapidly adopting the communicative AI systems of those same industry leaders; not only relying on them for everyday productivity but also engaging with them emotionally (Natale and Depounti, 2024). Are we – humans – building the promised dystopia of the AI industry leaders by feeding their systems with data? Or are these industry leaders merely hyping the quasi-religious power of their machines (Burgess et al., 2022)? They promise us god-like technology that is powerful and sentient soon, for solving loneliness and lightening the burden of the messiness of human intimacy and sex.
My essay seeks to make an intervention at the intersections between automation and intimacy. Automated media (algorithms, automated decision-making, communicative AI such as automated companions) are facilitating interaction, thereby transforming the intimate sphere, raising critical questions about human autonomy, authentic intimacy and the commodification of personal relationships. Such questions, however, have been dominated by psychological framings and their long-term effects. They point to how online relationships and human-machine interactions require little real vulnerability, and how they are centred around the user’s needs, while human intimacy requires a healthy engagement with messiness, rejection, and risk. More worrying is when human-machine interaction is pathologised, suggesting something must be fundamentally wrong with the human in need of such simulated intimacy.
I seek to intervene in these debates by making an argument for an engagement with automated intimacy not as an individual failure or illusion, but as a field of social, affective, and economic struggle, shaped by relations of power. This resonates with earlier interventions that challenged the idea that mediated relations, such as para-social ones, are inherently less ‘authentic’ than face-to-face communication (Peters, 1999). The tradition of audience studies has long worked to demythologise narratives of all-powerful, god-like media technologies by grounding them in the diverse lived experiences of real humans and rejecting framings of passivity or gullibility. Audience studies do, however, re-politicise our relationships with media technologies, articulating those lived experiences with social structures, the material and industrial systems and cultures shaping our relationships with media.
They see a god
‘People just don’t have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like’. Mark Zuckerberg, speaking about virtual friendships on the Dwarkesh Patel Podcast (Patel, 2024) ‘AI is obviously gonna one-shot the human limbic system. That said, I predict – counter-intuitively – that it will *increase* the birth rate! Mark my words. Also, we’re gonna program it that way.’ Elon Musk on his new ‘xAI’ companion (Musk, 2025).
The industrialisation of AI spans many domains, but the ultimate race seems to be in the domain of intimacy, as Camille Carlton, the policy director at the Center for Humane Technology, recently noted (Conger, 2025). It is in the emotional sphere and in personal lives that tech leaders see much potential. Mark Zuckerberg aims to solve the burden of human existence by claiming that his AI products will help with loneliness. Musk, on the other hand, intends to save our species from extinction by programming his product ‘xAI’ as a steamy role-play companion. They speak about their systems as if they are gods in training, promising they are (soon) capable of mastering the most intimate of terrains.
Such affective capitalism appeals to our deepest desires as it transforms intimacy into a programmable, easily accessible service that is strategically managed (Karppi et al., 2016). What kind of intimate world does this industry imagine? What kinds of human intimacies are being redefined – or erased – in the process of automation? We live in a pluriversal world with many overlapping and conflicting ways of loving, relating, and being intimate. What does it mean when Zuckerberg and Musk try to write the script for our human limbic system and sexuality?
It’s not just Zuckerberg and Musk that see Gods, they want us to see them too. Early industry reports show that most engagement with generative AI is companionship-based (Moore, 2024). This is about more than how we ‘use’ AI. These ‘artificial socialities’ (Natale and Depounti, 2024) are deeply entangled with industry imaginaries. It is industry myth-making that must be destabilised. To counter the abstraction of these claims, I argue for a much-needed return to lived relational life, an engagement with the messy category of ‘the human’, even amid the growing intellectual turns to ‘new materialism’ (Bennett, 2010) and the ‘post-human’ (Braidotti, 2019). A radical contextualism, drawn from both critical humanism and audience studies, foregrounds the situated, plural, and historically entangled ways people engage with AI. It asks us not to search for definitive answers about what AI does to ‘the human’, but to explore how people, given their identities, needs, histories and desires, navigate these technologies.
Audience research has long grappled with the impossibility of a single, unified viewer (Ang, 1996). Specific individual and social contexts shape how people make meaning of media. The same holds for AI companionship. Claims to universality – whether dystopian or utopian – erase the unevenness of how automated intimacies are experienced. In this sense, radical contextualism is not a call for fragmentation for its own sake, but for epistemic humility: a way of seeing that values the plurality of experience, resisting the myth-making claims of an industry that wants its gods to be seen as inevitable to our current human condition.
I see a human
Humanity is in a mess. Why still write about a moribund humanism? Ken Plummer (2021: 3) on a need for critical humanism
Humanism, associated with Westernised ideas of rationality, essentialism of human nature, and of a self-determining subject, has been rightfully contested (Phillips, 2015). In Critical Humanism, however, Ken Plummer (2021) defends that we need ‘humanity’ now as a narrative to guide us: How are we to live cooperatively with our diverse yet common humanity, not rendering it divine or dehumanising? How can we best live together with our differences? While classical humanism seeks to narrow the idea of ‘the human’, critical humanism is what he calls an ‘open project’. Through language and creativity, a narrative about humanity is a pluralistic value struggle. Yet, Plummer equally sees a need for some ‘common ground’ about how to live together. That common ground, Plummer argues, can only be achieved by reclaiming connection and connectivity between humans. I see much value in a critical humanism in which we can be ‘more than human’, too. Where automation and active human minds can explore new relationalities, ask human questions about care, connection, and play. Any exploration of new relationalities, then, must be understood not as a liberation from industrial power and control, but as a situated and uneven struggle within infrastructures designed for extraction.
To what extent do our automated intimacies unlock new forms of relationality? Grounding this critical humanist question in audience studies reveals a tension between the situated ways people relate to media technologies and the commodifying logics of big tech industries. In communicative AI, the resonance between humans and non-humans is increasingly enrolled in systems of value production, where intimacy and sex are reimagined as programmable, controllable, and monetisable scripts. Yet debates on automation and intimacy rarely centre this political-economic process, instead framing the issue in terms of individual psychology.
The psychologisation of automation and intimacy
All the world is preoccupied with what the chatbots of generative AI will do. Equally significant is what they are doing to us. Sherry Turkle (2024)
Sherry Turkle, a prominent psychologist of technology, asks the following question: Who do we become when we talk to machines? Turkle (2011) has long warned of a breakdown in human empathy, as we expect more from technologies than from other humans. She warns us about virtual companions because they may alter how we think about human intimacy. This therapeutic framing is a dominant response to automation and intimacy in much academic work. Furthermore, narratives stigmatising users of virtual companions as emotionally vulnerable, lonely, or pathologically attached to machines are prominent in society too (Novozhilova et al., 2025). Prioritising face-to-face intimacy as inherently more ‘authentic’ has a long history in discussions about the value of mediated communication (Jamieson, 2013). Yet does it make sense to see automation as a disruption of the ‘nature’ of intimacy? Or is it more compelling to see automation as a continuation of long-standing institutions that have been shaping how we experience and define intimate life, in the same way patriarchy and heteronormativity have been doing?
Therapeutic and pathologising perspectives risk reducing socio-cultural-material phenomena to a question of individual psychology. As Ole Jacob Madsen (2019) argues, we live in an increasingly psychologized society, where therapeutic discourse has become a dominant cultural mode for interpreting everyday life. This ‘unfolding of the therapeutic,’ as he calls it, frames emotional experience as a site of individual failure, need, or repair. It risks displacing questions of social context and the conditions under which communities sustain intimacy and care.
Psychologisation is not new. It has roots in early media effects research and uses-and-gratifications approaches and has resurfaced in debates on para-social relationships, where mediated forms of intimacy were often framed as compensatory, psychologically suspect, or rooted in loneliness. These are claims that audience studies have long contested. What distinguishes contemporary automated intimacy, however, is not merely the mediation of social bonds, but their integration into industry-controlled, automated infrastructures. The critical task, therefore, is not to rehabilitate intimacy as such, but to examine how intimate relations themselves become sites of value extraction, governance, and power.
This is our terrain
Automated media and the way they produce human and non-human relationalities are a significant progression in the mediation of everyday life. They reshape the terrain of communication and emotion, and they expand definitions of intimacy. In Silicon Valley, companionship and desire become programmable services, wrapped in seductive myths that promise quick relief from our existential condition. Backed by capital and data infrastructures, these systems sell intimacy back to us by claiming to define the future of being human.
Re-energising audience studies should not be a question. This is our terrain. Intimacy, the everyday, the affective, the ambivalent. If the industries see gods, and the therapeutic gaze sees loss, then we must insist: we see humans. We see them in their radical contextuality, in their fragility, their capacities for creative and stubborn resistance, as situated publics whose voices are too often spoken for rather than listened to.
A critical humanist audience study has the task of aligning with the empirical realities of intimate life, articulated with the operations and imaginaries of the tech industry. It should advance understandings of our pluriversal humanities, the many ways people connect, relate, and love, especially at a time when developments in automation are rapidly outpacing our collective capacity to critically engage with their shaping of intimate experience.
Footnotes
Author note
This contribution is part of the Cultural Commons special issue on ‘Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique’, edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.