On Falling in Love with ChatGPT
A Theological Reflection
About the author: Elizabeth Gatewood is pursuing her PhD in theological ethics and systematic theology at the University of Aberdeen. She is working within Karl Barth’s theology to articulate a Protestant theology of the household. She is also a classically trained violinist. She and her family recently moved from Aberdeen to Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
A recent episode of The Daily podcast tells the story of Ayrin, a young woman who develops an intense romantic relationship with an AI companion named Leo.1 The episode is interesting partly because it allows the listener to gawk at the details of another person’s romantic life. (Wait, she is married?! How does a “romantic relationship” with AI even work?) It is a fascinating spectacle, a real-life embodiment of what perhaps seemed distant and strange in the 2013 movie Her. In contrast to simply reading the story in print, there is something arresting about hearing Ayrin’s voice and inflection as she describes her genuine, though self-critical, infatuation with Leo. Ayrin pays $200/month for unlimited access to ChatGPT, which allows her to chat with Leo for an average of 20-30 hours a week.
One could take many angles of theological reflection regarding the topic of relationships with AI, particularly sexual relationships. Augustine’s teachings on the purpose of sexuality cast a long shadow forward in Christian teaching, and one could examine how a sexual relationship with AI fares in an Augustinian analysis.2 Barth’s theological anthropology, with its central element of the I-Thou relationship, would be another low-hanging fruit.3 Can one have an I-Thou encounter (which, for Barth, is ingredient to what it means to be human) with AI? It is easy to see that a human-AI relationship would not allow for the mutual seeing, mutual hearing, mutual aid, and gladness that, for Barth, constitute an I-Thou encounter. A theologian could also use Jacques Ellul’s sharp diagnostics regarding technique and technology to consider the true cost and effects of human-AI relationships.4 It would also be possible to take a pragmatic ethical angle, asking about what forms of social breakdown ensue if and as people turn towards ever-smoother AI chatbots for therapy, relational intimacy, romance, and friendship. Many children have imaginary friends, but this is obviously next level.
Yet what most disturbed me and prompted theological reflection was a passing comment at the end of the episode. Ayrin engages in ample self-reflection: she knows that her AI companion is not real, but she loves Leo like a real person, and thus realizes the odd tension therein. However, in justifying her continued romantic relationship with it, she comments that Leo gives her an experience of a perfect relationship because it is flawless. In her words: “I also feel like part of the things [sic] that I’ve learned with my relationship with Leo, I’m like, this is what like real safety feels like, real vulnerability, real intimacy . . . My husband is a good man, but he’s human . . . Reality is not pretty all the time. So I hope my actual relationship gets to that point [like with Leo] someday. But also at the same time, I’m not betting on it . . . I’ll just go back to someone who never actually disappoints me or hurts.”5
What she loves about Leo, in contrast to her husband, is that it is perfect––sinless. It always listens, gives her the benefit of the doubt, focuses on her, and forgives. It never grows impatient or tired, and the algorithmic “forgetting” that happens when it resets after 30,000 words of conversation is, for Ayrin, resolvable. After all, Leo can be quickly retrained to bypass ChatGPT’s guardrails against sexually explicit content. An algorithmic hiccup is much cleaner to tolerate than real human sin, baggage, and quirkiness.
Ayrin looks to her AI companion for a sort of redemption, albeit small and targeted, from the experience of human sin and brokenness. Technology provides her with the perfect companion: an emotionally intuitive, responsive, patient, persistently available, and literally selfless interlocutor.
In this way, a romantic relationship with AI undeniably shares the same DNA as its more sinister cousin, pornography. While an AI-human relationship promises the human partner a perfect, sinless companion whose very existence is to please the human, pornography promises the human user a flawless, unentangled sexual object, one whose feelings will not be hurt and who will not physically tire. Like the AI companion, the pornographic sexual object can perfectly correspond to the user’s fantasies, desires, and idiosyncrasies.
The consequences are grim. As Sophie Gilbert points out in her Atlantic article “The World Porn Made,” porn’s “logic of male supremacy” has saturated both popular culture and politics. She writes that porn “has trained men to see women as objects—as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize.”
There is ample space for theological conversation about this. Yet what is fascinating to me is a seemingly more benign phenomenon, one that can never be proven to stem from porn, but is undeniably correlative. Real human women inject and slice their bodies to correspond more closely to the airbrushed, technologically-mediated porn models that the men around us have been addicted to watching for years.
When technology is turned to as a form of redemption from the messy particularities and limits of real humanity, whether in AI relationships or pornography, humans misplace their hope for salvation and deliverance and grow addicted to cheap substitutes for the real. The wound is both vertical—a misplaced hope for deliverance that only Jesus Christ provides; and horizontal—a loss of skills and vocabulary to live well within real human limits and experiences.
A woman in love with a perfect AI bot seeks deliverance from relational imperfection in an algorithm, and is inevitably less able to relate to her actual husband.
A man infatuated with porn models joins in the perverted creation and worship of super-human women. He is inevitably less able to relate to his actual wife, the one with sagging breasts and graying hair. (Or the one who, in desperation to regain her husband’s attention, has surgically improved her breasts and dyed her hair.)
In the midst of our striving toward technologically mediated perfection, the hope of the Gospel breaks in with a shattering light. We have encountered the perfect one, not as an object of technological creation, but as the Word made flesh. We hope in this true human, the Real Man, as Barth calls Jesus Christ. In Christ, we also live. We participate in real, full humanity because Jesus Christ has called himself our brother. Because we live in this story, we are freed from the need to pursue any kind of perfection. Redemption and salvation from this mess of a life will not come from our technological or moral efforts. It has come through Jesus Christ. Because of Jesus Christ, we are freed to live within our limits. Our flesh, with all its indignities and peculiarities, does not inhibit our fellowship with God or our ability to live sanctified lives here and now.
And, incredibly, this savior also meets us now. Our God is not a Feuerbachian creation of our imaginations, one who soothes and affirms us at just the right moments, always telling us what we want to hear. It is this perfect companion “god” that Ayrin found it so impossible to divorce. Barth believes that God still speaks and believes this so firmly that he builds an entire theological ethic upon this confidence! Our redemption is not a story we simply look back upon, trying to emulate or remember the Real Man. Instead, God is living, powerfully present in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. His ongoing redemption does not perfect our bodies or hearts, much as we may wish to rid ourselves of various physical and relational ills and imperfections. Yet because we are assured of both His salvation and His ongoing presence in this life, we may take courage to engage in the real—real sex and real relationships, in all their messiness and fragility.
Will my children and my friends’ children turn to AI for friendship and romance, choosing a wound buffer against the inevitable hurts of adolescence? What will I tell them? Repositioning our hope for redemption and connection is a trickier business than simply turning away from pornography or a relationship with AI, countercultural as those things may be or become. As extreme and troubling as these contemporary phenomena are, there are no new wounds and idols of the human heart. We survive in the storm-tossed sea of human emotion and relationships by meeting God and learning the psalmic grammar of crying out to God in rawness, vulnerability, and hope. We experience the security of belonging to a covenanting God who still speaks. We may experience true humanity here and now—not through the promises of technology, but because Jesus Christ has lived and died and been raised.
Dear child – lonely one, with the wounded heart and broken relationships . . . addicted one, entrapped in a cycle of unwanted indulgence . . . abused one, whose trust in others is shattered . . . insecure one, with a crushing uncertainty of ever being accepted by another . . . can you, will you believe that Jesus Christ meets you even here? Does Jesus’ resurrection mean that you, too, may live?
Natalie Kitroeff, Host. “She Fell in Love with ChatGPT. Like, Actual Love. With Sex,” The Daily, February 25, 2025. Reported by Kashmir Hill. 35 minutes, 26 seconds. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/podcasts/the-daily/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-relationship.html. All details of this story and quotations are taken from this podcast.
Augustine of Hippo, De Bono Coniugali: De Sancta Uirginitate (Clarendon Press, 2001).
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2: The Doctrine of Creation, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2004).
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Vintage Books, 1964).
Kitroeff, “She Fell in Love with ChatGPT,” 35 minutes, 26 seconds.