Category Relationships

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Could AI relationships actually be good for us?

From companionship to psychotherapy, technology could meet unmet needs – but it needs to be handled responsibly

There is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis” has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collective anxiety has been compounded by studies showing that young people are increasingly embracing the idea of AI relationships; half of teens chat with an AI companion at least a few times a month, with one in three finding conversations with AI “to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real‑life friends”.

But we need to pump the brakes on the panic. The dangers are real, but so too are the potential benefits. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that – depending on what future scientific research reveals – AI relationships could actually be a boon for humanity.

Continue reading...

Love’s Labour by Stephen Grosz review – the truth about relationships

In a series of revelatory case studies, a psychoanalyst lays bare the messy reality of romantic love

A maths lecturer, convinced his wife is cheating, will not check the CCTV footage that might confirm his fears but instead keeps a private tally of the number of pubic hairs she sheds in her underwear. One hair is “OK, acceptable”, more is evidence that she has been “having it off”, he says, unaware that he uses these delusions of her infidelity to protect himself from the dangers of intimacy. A high-flying Fulbright scholar becomes a sex worker to avenge the father she hates. An ex-nun discovers that her decades of religious seclusion were driven by an unconscious fear of pregnancy. A troubled young woman, seeking redress for her psychological losses, steals large sums of money that she will never spend.

In Love’s Labour, the London-based, American-born psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz offers an antidote to the pat, sanitised love stories we absorb through romcoms, reality TV shows and other popular culture. Often, he writes, “easy stories obscure the hard ones”, and the hard ones are most true. “I like older guys”, the kleptomaniac tells him, an explanation that conceals: “I want a man to be the mother I never had.” In Grosz’s telling, psychoanalysis resembles a painstaking, collaborative act of excavation, removing layers of self-deception and motivated reasoning to discover the conflicting fears and desires that lie beneath.

Continue reading...