There’s a scene playing out in bedrooms around the world that feels like it belongs on an episode of Black Mirror: a person, alone, emotionally intimate with an AI. Not just chatting but confiding, flirting, seeking comfort. Sometimes more. AI sex robots and companion apps are booming, but what are they doing to us and our human relationships?
“The question isn’t whether people will use these, because they already are,” says Sheena Simpson, LMFT and clinical director at Kodo Couples Therapy. “The question is what it does to our capacity for the messy, mutual work of human connection.”
The appeal is real, which is exactly the problem
To understand why AI intimacy tech is resonating, you need to understand what it offers. An AI partner is infinitely patient. It’s never distracted, never in a bad mood, never too tired and never has a headache. For someone carrying attachment wounds or struggling with social anxiety, that kind of consistency can be comforting.
“It lands as relief to their nervous system,” Simpson explains. “The AI relationship feels like a safe place.” The problem is what that safety costs you in the long run. Real intimacy, Simpson argues, demands that you sit with another person’s full humanity: their needs, their moods, their inconvenient opinions. AI strips all of that away. “In AI intimacy, you don’t learn how to love,” she says. “You learn how to be served.”
Xanet Pailet, sex and intimacy coach and founder of Passionate Intimacy Retreats, frames it similarly. With over 15 years of experience working with individuals and couples, she sees the proliferation of AI companions as a mirror held up to what’s already missing. “True intimacy requires vulnerability and emotional connection,” she says. “Robots offer pleasure and sexual fulfilment without vulnerability – but that’s exactly what doesn’t deepen relationships.” The technology, she warns, risks reinforcing avoidant behaviour, making it easier to sidestep the very skills that build real connection.
Training wheels, or a crutch?
Not everyone writes off AI sex tech entirely, though. Jordan Schieber, head matchmaker at Matchmaking for Me – a service specialising in clients who struggle with traditional forms of connection – sees potential in the right context.
“For people with social anxiety, physical disabilities, cultural hang-ups around intimacy, or limited experience, there’s genuine potential for liberation,” he says, “especially if applied in a guided, therapeutic context.” He’s quick to tell us that this is unlikely to be the norm, but the possibility exists.
Sex coach and podcast host Annette Benedetti (Talk Sex With Annette) makes a compelling case for the technology’s upsides, too. “If someone discovers what actually turns them on through a non-judgmental interaction with a robot, and then brings that self-knowledge into a human relationship,” she says, “that’s a net win for intimacy.”
Benedetti also pushes back on what she calls the “very heteronormative, very coupled lens” through which most of these conversations happen. “For people who are neurodivergent, physically disabled, socially isolated, or navigating late-life loneliness, AI companionship can be genuinely life-changing. The ‘won’t someone think of the marriage’ framing ignores entire populations for whom human sexual connection isn’t accessible or safe.”
She also challenges the idea that desire is a finite resource and that pleasure spent on an AI is somehow stolen from a partner. “Sexual energy isn’t a bank account. For many people, more stimulation, whatever the source, means more desire overall, not less.”
Who is really at risk?
Sari Cooper, sex therapist and president of Centre for Love and Sex, is watching a generation of younger clients already struggling with something AI may worsen. “Gen Z clients are challenged in their ability to communicate their desires and needs to a person they’re dating,” she tells us. Handing them a frictionless digital companion who never pushes back could significantly compound that problem.
Cooper does see limited therapeutic value, however, particularly for people with relational wiring differences, such as those on the autism spectrum, who might use AI interactions to practise social and emotional skills. But she’s concerned about the commercial incentive baked into the technology.
“Unlike a therapist, who has ethics embedded in their licence to help a client and not get involved personally or romantically, AI robots don’t have those agreements,” she says. “They also have an incentive to keep a person dependent on them in order for the company that owns the robot to continue earning money.” Without regulation, she argues, compulsive and destructive dependence becomes a real risk.
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Schieber echoes this unease, comparing AI sex tech to a more sophisticated form of pornography – one that “trains people away from the tolerance for ambiguity, rejection, and the labour of being truly seen that real relationships require.” The worry isn’t that it will create antisocial tendencies, he says, but that it will exacerbate them in people who already have them.
What it all means for human relationships
Suzannah Weiss, sex therapist and resident sexologist for Fleshy, urges users to maintain a clear distinction between fantasy and reality and to seek human connection alongside, not instead of, digital engagement. Used thoughtfully, she notes, AI chatbots can help people explore kinks and desires in a lower-stakes environment before bringing them into partnerships. “They can provide a model for what healthy sexual communication looks like,” she says.
But the experts we spoke to largely agree on one thing: the relationships most threatened by AI intimacy technology aren’t necessarily those where someone has bought a robot. They’re the ones where two people have already stopped being curious about each other.
As Benedetti puts it: “An AI sex robot didn’t create that distance. It just moved into the vacancy.”
The harder conversation – the one this technology is forcing us to have – isn’t really about robots at all. It’s about what we want from each other, what we’re willing to give, and whether we’ve forgotten how to ask.
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