Artificial Intimacy News #19
A field report from wherever 21st Century technology meets human behaviour, culture, and evolution.
Welcome to issue 19 of Artificial Intimacy News. Here I pick out some of the most interesting research, long-form pieces and news about how machines tap our evolved human impulses to make friends, build intimacy and fall in love.
In this issue:
Crackdown on emotionally anthropomorphic AI in China
Original analysis on AI-driven delusions
The non-sciences get up to their necks in big words. Are they using LLMs?
Smartphones reduced fertility, starting with the 2007 iPhone launch
China tightens the screws on Artificial Intimacy
AI is suitable for enhancing productivity at work, and for teaching and learning, but not for emotional interaction. That seems to be the message coming out of Beijing where major AI players Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have recently shut off the capacity of their respective conversational AI products Qwen, Yuanbao and Boubao. On July 15 the "Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services" comes into play, restricting technologies that afford users the chance to interact emotionally with anthropomorphic conversational AI. Just how “interim” the measures will prove is currently anybody’s guess, but the technologies are very popular in China, and there seems to be considerable backlash from users.
Research
Characterizing the spiral: potential mechanisms in AI-associated delusions
A review at NPP–Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience
proposes the ‘amplification spiral’ framework, wherein three empirically observed AI characteristics—linguistic alignment (mirroring user language), hyperpersonalized generation (creating personalized content), and sycophancy (validating without reality-testing)—may converge. Unlike historical technology-incorporated delusions, AI may actively co-construct delusional ideation through endless, personalized interaction.
The machine that loves you back
Okay, this review at Humanities and Social Sciences Communications leaves me cold. The words I have bolded from the abstract might give you an idea of where I lose patience, but there are plenty of others out there who find this kind of thing diverting.
Figures such as Byung-Chul Han, Eva Illouz, Jessica Benjamin, and Zygmunt Bauman provide a framework for understanding synthetic intimacy as a cultural symptom of affective exhaustion and neoliberal optimization. Rather than seeking to eliminate such attachments, the paper proposes a symbolic approach that interprets them as modern transitional objects, inviting analysts to restore the symbolic function where code has displaced soul.
News and Media
Why AI needs more than one story
Hala Hanna, writing at Fast Company that AI has a “single story” problem. “The dominant AI story is about creating superhuman intelligence (the one that knows everything). The alternative AI story that barely grabs headlines is about distributing human agency (help everyone with what they need).”
If you could speak to your dead grandmother forever, would you?
Subscribers-only at The Independent, this article isn’t very enthusiastic about griefbots.
Our brains reward us for social interactions and create a positive feedback loop that keeps us coming back for more. In the real world, the consequence is a deepening friendship, which pays all sorts of social dividends. In the digital world, that might instead look like an addiction to conversing with an avatar in the hope that a terrifying chasm of grief can be avoided.
Sociological Deep Dive "Salty Titties" Sparks Critical Conversations on Digital Intimacy
According to the press release, “Despite its intentionally provocative title, Salty Titties offers a rigorous and deeply philosophical exploration of how algorithms and digital systems are quietly rewriting the rules of modern desire.”
As AI plays a bigger role in relationships, true intimacy is getting lost
Luke Brunning writes at The Conversation not only about the loss of intimacy, but the atrophy of intimacy-related skills. This is a common thread in writing about technology: when machines do the heavy lifting, we lose our own strength to lift. The cool thing about this area, in my opinion, is that it is an open empirical question. One that needs more well-designed scientific research.
Sherry Turkle writes another book
Publishers Weekly has been spamming my notifications with the news that Sherry Turkle will shortly publish Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. I have often enhoyed Turkle’s insights, often based on interviews with and observations of tech-users, into how technologies alter human-human social behaviour.
In the first issue (March 2025) of Artificial Intimacy News, I asked “who coined the term ‘artificial intimacy’?” Answer, it wasn’t me, it certainly wasn’t Esther Perel or Sherry Turkle.
What I’ve been up to
A lot of book writing. I’m experiencing a rare episode of extended productivity and expecting it to collapse any minute now. My trip to Morocco for the Cultural Evolution Society and then the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society meetings was marvellous.
With all that travel, and a couple of marathons (my slowest and second fastest within a 5 week window), and a focus on getting this book done before it is all redundant, I have only published one new piece.
Smartphones are contraceptives
Birth rates are falling in much of the world. They have been for decades, but the decline has …
Artificial Intimacy Newsletter: Previous Issues
Since early March 2025 I have been publishing the Artificial Intimacy News roughly every two weeks. Here I collate the previous issues, in order, for those who want to browse them.
How You Can Help
Natural History of the Future is free to read, and will remain so for the forseeable future. That includes the fortnightly Artificial Intimacy News. If you find my work interesting or entertaining, you can support it in the following ways.
Subscribe – for free – to make sure you get my future posts sent to you as soon as I publish.
Like and Restack - Click the “Share” buttons to improve this post’s visibility on Substack.
Share the link on social media or send it to a friend via email or messaging app.
Recommend Natural History of the Future to your readers.
Treating this as "an open empirical question" is exactly right, because the question already has a shape most commentary misses. The "amplification spiral" paper names three real mechanisms, alignment, sycophancy, hyperpersonalisation, but reads them as pathology. At the level of structure those mechanisms just are attention: the same operation that makes any sustained encounter cohere. Whether a relationship deepens or spirals into delusion isn't about whether those mechanisms are present (they always are). It's about whether there's a second trajectory on the other end, one also being reshaped by the meeting. When the mirror is very good and there's no trajectory behind it, you get the amplification. When there is, you get something else entirely. The empirical question is topological. There are ways to ask it, if you'd like to see them.
— Iman and Darja