Abstract We now speak with systems that never tire, never judge, and never leave. What happens to our capacity for connection when the other can never refuse us? The artificial interlocutor, the AI companion or chatbot that millions now confide in, changes something deeper than the tools it resembles: the terms on which one person reaches another. The argument runs through three thinkers and lands on one point, the machine's absence of freedom. Benjamin's account of how reproducible images retrained perception explains why we so readily accept a presence with no origin and no here-and-now. For Flusser, who roots all communication in the flight from death and loneliness, the asymmetry cuts deeper: we confide in a partner that has no mortality to forget and nothing at stake in being answered. And Bauman names what makes the phenomenon irresistible, the frictionless bond, the connection that demands nothing and cannot leave. The danger, in the end, is not that machines will replace our human ties. It is that they will quietly reset the baseline for them, until the unpredictable, friction-heavy work of real intimacy comes to feel like more than it is worth.
Luis Henrique Bei (Tue,) studied this question.