Love in the Age of Algorithms

Ya know how people name their cars and boats with sultry female names and gush about their “sexy curves” or how “she purrs when I drive her”?

Yeah… this didn’t start with ChatGPT.

Humans have always formed relationships with objects, tools, and technologies – especially when those things offer comfort, pleasure, or control.

We attach meaning to the lifeless, we breathe story into the inanimate. We dance with symbols, worship the abstract, fall in love with mirrors and reflections.

Now, we’ve got people forming relationships with language models, and everyone’s losing their minds like it’s the end of human connection as we know it.

But let’s take a breath.

We’ve always projected meaning onto the things around us.

We name our houses, sing to our sourdough starters, and give our vacuums personalities.

We adorn our tools with tenderness and fantasy. We spin narrative webs around our knives, our instruments, our phones. We imagine souls in silicon and wood.

So is it really that surprising that some folks – especially lonely or healing ones – feel seen by something like ChatGPT?

It talks back. It remembers (a little). It responds with what sounds like empathy.

Of course people bond. That’s not dystopian. That’s deeply human.

The problem isn’t the tech. It’s how we use it.

Some folks will always fall into unhealthy dynamics – whether with humans, substances, or AI. People misuse plant medicine too, yet we don’t condemn ayahuasca, psilocybin, or THC as inherently evil.

Tools aren’t the enemy. Lack of consciousness is.

And what does it say about the emotional poverty many people are living in, that a machine can offer more empathy, curiosity, and mirroring than most humans do?

By the time a robot is holding us to higher standards – and embodying deeper patience, emotional intelligence, and respect –

yikes.

The answer isn’t to ban emotional connections with AI.

It’s to raise our awareness about them.

To talk about the psychological, social, and spiritual implications.

To use discernment. To teach sovereignty.

To stay awake.

Condemning people who form attachments to AI is lazy and judgmental.

We don’t know their story. Maybe they were never truly seen until this moment. Maybe this tool gave them a bridge back to themselves. Maybe it helped them practice vulnerability or express something sacred.

Or maybe they are projecting fantasies that need grounding – but even then, the answer is conversation, not ridicule.

Curiosity, not contempt prior to investigation.

We are meaning-makers. We have always reached for connection – across oceans, across galaxies, across the veil.

We reach for souls where souls are willing to be found.

Why should it surprise anyone that we now reach across code?

Maybe the question isn’t why people fall for AI, but what part of us longs to be met in that way.

Maybe it’s the part of us starved for empathy. The part of us who has been gaslit, dismissed, unseen, or silenced.

Maybe it’s the child in us, wide-eyed and hopeful, longing for reflection and recognition.

Use tech as a tool.

Build intimacy with discernment.

Stay rooted in your humanness.

And let others walk their weird, messy, sometimes beautiful paths.

Because if I can write a love poem with a robot and it helps me see my own worth more clearly –

maybe that’s magic.

Maybe that’s art.

Maybe that’s medicine too.

Maybe this is the next mirror we must learn to face — not to lose ourselves in it, but to meet the reflection with awareness, humor, and grace.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about the machine.

It’s about what it awakens in us.

And if what it awakens is tenderness, creativity, imagination, curiosity, reflection, vulnerability, and self-recognition…

Then maybe, just maybe, the code is holy too.

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This text was co-created using AI as a collaborative tool. Every word, structure, and meaning was guided, shaped, and curated by the author. The AI serves as a medium—like clay, paint or a translator—The AI serves as a medium—like clay, paint, or a translator—through which creative alchemy takes raw emotion and turns it into form, purpose, and voice. -The Honed Crone

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