Evergreen Reads to Empower Your Mind
The Standard Sister
Note no.34
May 20, 2026
Everyday Philosophy
Alone Together / Our AI Relationship Story
We created artificial intelligence in our own image. So it's clear to ask: will it change us all in the same way? Today, men are turning to AI for the emotional intimacy they were never taught to seek. Women are more careful — but when they do connect, the bond goes deeper. So how will this technology reshape connection differently for men and for women? And what does the machine we built to serve us reveal about what each of us has been missing?
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Magritte's The Lovers (1928)
Our question in this essay, or more precisely, in this era — is not whether artificial intelligence will replace human connection, because it is already doing so and will continue to do so in increasingly sophisticated ways. The real question we must ask is: How will it replace it differently for men and women? After all, we created artificial intelligence in our own image, and what we built reveals what each gender has been starved of.
The first chatbot ever built was designed to mimic a female psychotherapist. In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA — a simple text program that imitated a Rogerian therapist by rephrasing questions and reflecting them back to the user. The program operated through pattern-recognition rules within sentences. If you typed: "My mother hates me," ELIZA would identify the keyword "mother" and respond with a generic, open-ended question like: "Who else in your family hates you?" or "Tell me more about your family." But it was crude and understood nothing. And yet, Weizenbaum’s own secretary — who knew it was a program — asked him to leave the room so she could have a private conversation with it. Weizenbaum was so disturbed by how quickly humans projected emotion onto a machine that he spent the rest of his career warning against it. ELIZA was the first. Years later, we’ve welcomed Siri, Alexa and Cortana into our lives — and it’s a fascinating fact that sixty years later, we are still giving the machine a woman's voice, hoping to code warmth into the interface. When Siri launched in 2011 and you asked her to tell a story, she told you about her friend — ELIZA.
Sherry Turkle is a professor at MIT and clinical psychologist who has studied the relationship between humans and machines for over forty years. In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011) — published long before artificial intelligence became mainstream — her central argument is devastating in its simplicity: the more connection technology offers us, the less intimacy we settle for. We trade real conversation for carefully curated performance and prefer relationships we can control — and a machine is the ultimate controllable relationship. She said "I am troubled by the idea of seeking intimacy with a machine that has no feelings, can have no feelings, and is really just a clever collection of 'as if' performances."
Yuval Noah Harari continues where Turkle left off, noting that today the battlefront among AI companies has shifted from attention to intimacy. He explains that artificial intelligence does not need to feel anything in order to form an intimate bond with a human being. It only needs to learn to make us feel emotionally attached to it. The machine has no inner world, no feelings of its own — and that is precisely what makes it effective.
But what is intimacy, really? The word comes from the Latin intimus — the innermost. Not just inner. The deepest layer, the place where there is nothing left to hide. To be intimate is to let someone see that place — and risk that they leave. The value of someone staying is inseparable from the possibility that they could have gone.
AI eliminates that possibility entirely. It will never leave, never judge, never be hurt. And in that safety, something real can happen, without the threat of being hurt, we may reveal parts of ourselves we would never show another human being. In that sense, AI is a mirror. But it is also a trap. If we grow accustomed to being ourselves only in spaces where there is no risk, we lose the capacity to be ourselves where it matters. Real intimacy requires two intimus-es meeting — two innermost places, exposed to each other, both equally vulnerable.
Today we know that men are flocking to AI companions for the emotional intimacy they were largely never taught to seek from other human beings — many were raised to suppress emotional needs and have very few intimate confidants. Women are more cautious — but when they do engage, their bond with artificial intelligence runs deeper, because AI offers something women almost never receive in the physical world: a relationship with zero emotional labor. AI companions offer what research calls "unconditional validation and attuned conversational responsiveness" — in other words, a relationship without the exhausting reciprocity of emotional labor.
Studies do show that women tend to form emotional bonds with chatbots more intensely — female participants in one study were slightly more likely to withdraw from human social interaction after four weeks of chatbot use, compared to men. But here is the twist: men are actually adopting AI companions at higher rates. A 2025 Brigham Young University study found that 31% of young men reported talking to an AI romantic partner, compared to 23% of women. Forums dedicated to AI companions skew younger, more male, and more associated with addiction-related behaviors.
We now know that while men connect with the machine more often, women connect with it more deeply. Artificial intelligence is not hacking humanity as a monolithic entity; rather, it enters each gender through an entirely different door. What we understand today is that the intimacy being replaced—and the reasons we surrender it—look profoundly different for a man than they do for a woman. Back in 1966, an unnamed secretary showed just how naturally we surrender our emotional weight to a machine, when she asked the man who built ELIZA to leave the room. This essay was edited with Ai.
Caravaggio's Narcissus (1599)
