Artificial Companions Shape Embodied Desire and Human Attraction

Artificial companions offer a setting in which to examine how responsive technologies may shape embodied desire and human attraction. This theoretical article proposes that repeated interaction with such systems can influence what users come to experience as emotionally available and desirable. Drawing on embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition, it develops an account of artificial companions as affective infrastructures. On this account, conversational memory and adaptive responses may sustain affective looping, through which users come to rely on the system for recognition and emotional regulation. The analysis distinguishes text-based, multimodal, and physically embodied companions, whose different conditions of interaction may affect this process. It also distinguishes interpersonal friction, which such systems may partly reduce, from infrastructural friction arising from technical failures and platform governance. Artificial companions are examined as participants in human meaning-making whose responsiveness can acquire personal significance without establishing lived intentionality on the machine side. The resulting relation is described as asymmetrical or pseudo-enactive coupling. The article thus develops the hypothesis that artificial companions may educate desire by influencing expectations of intimacy. Whether this occurs, how it varies across users, and whether its effects extend to human relationships remain questions for comparative and longitudinal research. This framework contributes to machine cognition by examining the relational environments artificial systems make possible and the limits of their participation in human affective life.