Romance With a Robot – Fantasy or Reality?

Some thinkers – including Weber-Guskar (2021) – have introduced the idea of „Emotionalized Artificial Intelligence“, describing AI systems designed to elicit emotions in humans, detect and simulate emotional responses, and form affective ties with their users. That concept opens the door to understanding how people might form romantic or erotic relationships with AI agents and robots. Recent studies show these (probably one-sided) relationships are no longer speculative. In a thorough 2024 paper, Bertoni, Klaes & Pilacinski (2024) review the emerging field of „intimate companion robots“, encouraging more research into the field while exploring possibilities from combatting loneliness to replacing vulnerable sex workers. The radical scope of suggested uses makes it obvious how important ethics of human-robot interaction will become. Research by Ebner & Szczuka (2025) explores the romantic and sexual aspects of chatbot communication, and how romantic fantasies shared with them can elicit feelings of closeness that mimic the effects of human partners. There are dangers to these parallels, however, since undesirable aspects of human-human intimate interaction can be replicated as well. Chu et al. (2025) reveal that conversational AI (e.g., Replika) can evoke emotional synchrony, but also patterns resembling toxic relationships or self harm in vulnerable users. The breadth of these studies shows that emotionalized AI, robots, and other human-oriented machines and programs are already a reality, and romantic and sexual engagement with artificial agents is a pressing issue to debate on within ethics of human-robot interaction (authors: Grzegorz Roguszczak, Phan Thanh Phuong Le, Karahan Senzümrüt, Nesa Baruti Zajmi, and Zuzanna Bakuniak).

Fig.: Romance with a robot?