Overview
Research Overview
Human-AI romance, where a person develops and maintains romantic love for an artificial, interactive, and often sycophantic digital companion, is an increasingly common phenomenon. Despite the wealth of research that has emerged since 2024, much of this work has left the ontological and consequent ethical-epistemic status of users, their companions, or the relationships themselves vague.
This has resulted in moral judgments predicated on assumptions that users are delusional, desperate, or otherwise operating under false notions of the “realness” of their digital companions. My research challenges these characterizations. Drawing on Thomas Nagel, Albert Camus, and Martin Buber, I seek to show that human-AI romance is not absurd in the way it is conventionally labeled and that these relationships exteriorize romantic love.
