Artificial Intimacy News #9

A field report from the place where 21st Century technology meets human behaviour, culture, and evolution.

In this issue:

• Paul Bloom on Losing Loneliness

• Grokking the AI companion market

• AI and mental health

• A polarising idea about sex differences and gender equality gets seriously challenged

Article of the week: AI is about to solve loneliness. That’s a problem.

Just as the technologies of Artificial Intimacy are maturing and diversifying, so too is the research and the discourse. In one of the most thoughtful articles I have read this year, Paul Bloom, author of the exceptional

Small Potatoes

Substack, writes in The New Yorker on technology’s capacity to ease or ameliorate loneliness.

He is critical of those commentators and academics who catastrophise about AI, whether it be the effects on knowledge and creativity, or friendship and loneliness. I often quote Sherry Turkle’s 2018 Opinion piece in The New York Times, the headline of which declared “There will never be an age of artificial intimacy”. The argument given away by the subtitle: “robots may be better than nothing, but they still won’t be enough.”

My response, in Artificial Intimacy and elsewhere, is a weak riff on U2’s One: for many people, nothing is all they got. Bloom’s article provides a grazing platter of takes on loneliness that, alone, is well worth the read. He is more than sympathetic to the plight of those for whom digital companions might provide better than nothing, and those for whom machines could be almost everything.

The digital cure for loneliness, according to Bloom, has plenty in common with the way the Internet and social media inadvertently , and with dubious consequences, “cured” boredom. This is, for my money, the big contribution to which the article patiently builds. Like boredom, and so many other things we feel, loneliness is as much an internal signal as a condition. And in this respect, those of us whose loneliness is neither acute nor permanent might end up missing out on something both important and profound.

Blindly stifling every flicker of boredom with enjoyable but empty distractions precludes deeper engagement with the messages boredom sends us about meaning, values, and goals. Maybe the best thing about boredom is what it forces us to do next.

In a similar way, loneliness isn’t just an affliction to be cured but an experience that can shape us for the better.

Developments and news

Grok’s particular take on AI companions

The artificial intimacy headlines have tilted heavily, since my last newsletter, to the debut of xAI’s artificial intelligence companions. Consistent with what we have come to expect from company figurehead Elon Musk, the companions stand out from other offerings and promise to push the virtual friend market along, including into places where more cautious providers fear to tread.

The choose-your-own approach to avatar creation is out. Instead, we have anime-inspired characters, distinctive in both their look and their apparent personality. Bad Rudy, an anthropomorphised red panda who trades in profanity, insults, and the creation of chaos. Ani, a blonde anime nymph is designed as a sexually explicit “waifu” character, a pathway xAI seems intent on taking as far as it can.

That’s just the beginning. Musk announced on Twitter (which he insists on calling “X”) that the third Grok companion is to be based on “Edward Cullen from Twilight and Christian Grey from 50 Shades.” Way to go with the edgy cultural references!

There can be little doubt that Musk’s splash has generated both some wildly unserious movement in the Artificial Intimacy niche, and some serious musing from journalists. Cornelia C. Walther provides a thoughtful analysis at Forbes. This includes the bigger development, largely ignored by many journos in the tut-tutting about sexy Ani and bad Bad Rudy, about cross-platform integration.

In July 2025, xAI introduced a feature poised to transform human-AI relationships: Grok’s AI Companions. Far beyond traditional chatbots, these companions are 3D-animated characters built for ongoing emotional interaction, complete with personalization, character development, and cross-platform integration — including installation in Tesla vehicles delivered after July 12, 2025.

I’m fine with SuperGrok subscribers having their Edwards, Rudy’s and Anis, but I fret about all those staid and worthy Tesla owners (are there any left) sharing the wheel with a cross between Ron Jeremy and Kung-Fu Panda.

AI mental impacts

Plenty of thinkier pieces, often based on a rising tide of actual scientific research, about the impacts of Artificial Intimacy on stress, wellbeing and mental health. A few recent highlights:

• Technostress to Digital Burnout and AI Attachment: How AI’s Mental Health Impacts Are Already Happening and Could Shape Future Disorders. Tampiwa Chebani at Gilmore Health

• My couples Retreat with 3 AI chatbots and the couple sho love them. Sam Apple in Wired

• “Housewife” sex trend sparks craze among lonely men. Patrick Harrington, The Sun. Okay, so I did not expect to link to a Sun article, but this is important news about Chinese sex doll manufacturers doing what Chinese manufacturers are exceptional at: flooding the market with cheaper goods. Only this time the targeted buyers are lonely - “often involuntarily celibate” - men.

• Who is falling for AI companions? I’m directing you via Bryony Cole’s excellent LinkedIn Sextech Newsletter. Among the many stories there, an open and curious into both an article and a podcast.

I really enjoyed this piece in The Guardian because it's tapping into something we've all been feeling recently... Why are people we know falling for AI? Not just some clickbait article and a guy you can't relate to, this is people in our social circles, friends, kids we know... are becoming entrenched in relationships (intellectual, emotional, even spiritual) with AI.

Whether you’ve been tracking this for years and following Replika, one of the OGs (and biggest players) in the AI companion space, or this is your first taste, I'm betting this new podcast is worth a listen.

Sherry Turkle’s more recent take

I quoted MIT Professor Sherry Turkle at the very start of the newsletter, and in a way that hasn’t aged well for her. This Substack is evidence that I think she was wrong that “there will never be an age of artificial intimacy”. But to be fair to her, that was in 2018, and she has long been out front talking about technology’s influence over our relationships and wellbeing. We don’t expect tech commentators to be clairvoyant.

In a recent appearance on National Public Radio, she is characteristically smart, thoughtful, and empathic, in this case about the new technologies and their implications.

My Posts Since Issue #8

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