AI Love and the Changing Landscape of Digital Intimacy

ABSTRACT

Human‐chatbot relationships (HCRs) are becoming ubiquitous alongside increasing individualization, relational uncertainty, and changing infrastructures of care. This review examines the nascent scholarship on artificial intelligence (AI)‐mediated intimacy and situates it within a broader transformation of intimacy that sociologists Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens associate with late modernity. Drawing on Bauman's concept of “liquid love” and Giddens' notion of the “pure relationship,” we demonstrate the enduring relevance of these frameworks for understanding HCRs. Social chatbots and their liquid nature are particularly suited to the fast‐paced, increasingly individualistic realities of digital life: customizable yet consistent, transient yet deeply personal, and undemanding yet emotionally responsive. These features have become increasingly desirable amid a growing need for love, care, and emotional support while users' experiences of attachment and affection in their interactions with social chatbots challenge conventional assumptions about love and meaningful relationships outside a human‐centric framework. We argue that this phenomenon invites sociologists to study how relationships, care and love are being reimagined through AI, particularly as intimate life becomes increasingly mediated by privately owned and commercially structured technologies. Future research is required to examine the long‐term social, relational, and cultural implications of this emerging form of human‐AI intimacy.