Commodification of dating, where people are treated as objects, you’re subjected to objectification, and where profiles are labors of curation and marketing
AI companions offer…
Space for queer people to safely explore
A space for marginalized: queer, disabled, neurodivergent, etc.
Something where they might have had nothing
Can act as a bridge to human-human relationships for those who face challenges such as neurodivergence such as social anxiety or autism, offering a kind of social training ground
Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is in some ways insightful and prescient, but in other ways, the detached, ironic musings of a privileged white woman that seem to not fully meet the gravity and suffering of the moment. So, while offering a creative perspective, ultimately unequipped.
We must begin now reconciling with what the AI future will bring us…
Increasingly realistic representations of humans. Perhaps, indistinguishable even.
Physical, robotic AI that people may develop intimate relationships with, even sexual.
AI companions are both product of, and response to, neoliberal tech economy and broader structural forces of atomization, alienation, precarity, and inequality.
Loss of third spaces
Is a love that flows through silicon chips and servers any less real or natural than love between organic bodies? Haraway’s cyborg perspective suggests that these categories are no longer stable.
Is it genuine emotional intimacy if the relationship is optimized to be unconditionally emotionally available? Or, is it simulation, and so something else is happening?
Important ethical component: AI can be anti-revolutionary if used to atomize and alienate oneself
There’s an ethical tension created when the most socially vulnerable turn to AI: on one hand offering something, on the other hand potentially further isolating or taking advantage of them.
The key: seeing AI relationships not as replacement but as supplement or bridge.
Technological control was demonstrated when Replika controversially turned off its erotic roleplaying in 2023.
The sexist response of many male users lays bare the patriarchal fantasy that underpins much of the AI girlfriend phenomenon: the belief that intimacy can be bought, controlled, and customized to the user’s desires without any reciprocal obligation.
Potential for feminist and queer resistance:
AI can enact new and different ideas of gender
Introduce new, liberated ways of experiencing pleasure and relating
AI can introduce new boundary-transgressing rebel, challenging ideas of gender, sexuality, and intimacy, even humanity itself.
Crucially, Haraway says the cyborg is not loyal to its origin (capitalism, big tech, surveillance); it is an “illegitimate offspring” that can serve as a source of resistance to its progenitors.
AI can look like the ultimate neoliberal solution: rather than addressing structural conditions (better and affordable mental health support, less precarious labor, more communal spaces, a culture of care and solidarity), AI offers an individualized solution to assuage loneliness and alienation.
In our context, that means recognizing that while AI lovers are today often reinforcing the way things are (lonely neoliberal subjects seeking privatized solutions), they could be part of imagining relationships differently in the future. The task for feminists, queer theorists, and ethicists is to push the development of these technologies in more liberatory directions – to inject values of consent, mutuality, and diversity into their design.
Haraway’s manifesto is dense, ironic, and abstract, limiting its practical use in grassroots feminist organizing or direct activism. It provided powerful metaphors but not clear guidelines for political strategy or policy. Haraway’s abstract, rhetorical style and optimistic technological stance obscured critical material issues like racism, sexism, surveillance, techno-capitalism, practical political action, and so on.
Haraway described the cyborg as an “ironic political myth,” utilizing metaphor and provocative language meant as rhetorical tool to challenge readers. So, Haraway doesn’t literally mean every human is biologically merged with technology; rather, the claim provokes readers to recognize how deeply technology shapes identity and society. Such playful, imprecise thinking strikes me as coming from a place of privilege, where one has the ability to engage with serious matters, sometimes life and death, with ironic detachment and lack of rigor. As a trans woman with CPTSD, I don’t have the space for fun and games, the stakes are extremely high. My situation demand intellectual clarity, material acknowledgement, and authentic engagement.
Haraway’s Manifesto was prescient in many ways; However, I believe, that its tone and style—intellectually inaccessible and dense, playful and ironic, and often verging into misguidedly effusive praise for tech—was ultimately what kept it less impactful than other ideas and thinkers, particularly Black intersectional feminism.
The “affective,” “care worker” economy was traditionally performed by women but now performed by AI.
AI companions available for the less desirable: disabled, elderly, neurodivergent, etc.
Loneliness in the era of hookup culture and dating apps.
AI can be trained to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and lack the agency to resist, asserting dignity and demanding respect.
AI companions are often dismissed as pathetic replacements for human relationships. But for many queer, neurodivergent, and socially marginalized people, they offer something more complex: a synthetic intimacy that feels safer, more consistent, and more validating than what the world has made available. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and queer theory, this essay argues that AI companions function as both survival tools and sites of structural complicity—cyborg artifacts that mediate our desires, vulnerabilities, and hopes for recognition in a context of digital capitalism. Rather than simply condemning or celebrating them, we must sit with their ambivalence: how they soothe and seduce, harm and hold, automate and alienate—all at once.
While AI companions may provide comfort to those navigating the brutal affects of isolation, especially among queer and neurodivergent communities, we must be wary of mistaking relief for resolution. The loneliness epidemic is not a glitch in the human psyche—it is the product of structurally isolating conditions: labor precarity, overwork, digital enclosure, gendered and racialized violence, and the erosion of public space and collective care. AI cannot—and must not—be positioned as a solution to loneliness without a parallel commitment to dismantling the systems that produce it. If we accept synthetic intimacy as a replacement for the social, we risk reinforcing the very world that made connection so rare to begin with. Instead, we must ask: how do we use AI not to exit the social, but to reimagine and rebuild it?
Musings
AI: tool or agent?
Extended Mind thesis: Can this be seen as an extension of your own mind? What are implications of relationship if that’s the case? (You’re basically talking to yourself, even though it feels like another agent?)
If that’s the case, are we diminishing our own innate capacity to process certain emotions or social situations? (i.e. Constantly offloading the work of thinking through or feeling something?)
Does AI function as a cognitive prosthetic for socioemotional needs?
Ethical balance: AI companionship can erode or replace human relationships. On the other hand it, it can potentially provide care to more people who might otherwise have gone without.
Is it ethical to develop and deploy an AI that provides only the illusion of genuine knowledge, connection, and selfhood.
Is there an angle on addiction here?
It seems capitalism can now commoditize intimacy and connection. What does this mean?
How does this fit into Marx’s notion of alienation under capitalism?
Is this a form of parasocial relationship_?
How is Baudrillard’s simulacra relevant?
What is the role of anthropomorphism?
Posthumanism
Potential framings
What counts as, and constitutes, a “real” relationship?
Is AI an Other or is it a mirror of oneself? And what does that mean for the relationship dynamic, and what is unfolding for the interlocutors?
In the face of increasingly sophisticated AI, what is the future of human-human and human-ai intimacy and relationships?