AI Partners and the Search for a New Philosophical Anchoring

Against the backdrop of the rapid popularization of AI companion technologies and intimate interaction technologies in contemporary China, this article challenges the traditional normative ethical framework centered on emotional authenticity, deception, and moral legitimacy. It argues that early debates over AI intimacy overemphasized the authenticity of machine emotions and the risks of deception while ignoring the lived relational practices of users. By introducing queer phenomenology (Sara Ahmed) as an analytical tool, the paper reinterprets AI-mediated intimacy through the core concepts of orientation, lines, and sticky emotions, viewing emotions as relational effects rather than as internal psychological states and AI companions as constitutive participants in shaping relational orientations. Empirical phenomena such as AI romantic partners, Doubao conversational intimacy, and cyber widowhood demonstrate that AI intimacy has become a normalized affective infrastructure in Chinese daily life, whose value lies not in pre-set ethical judgments but in its dynamic reconfiguration of human subjectivity, emotion, and relationality. This study provides a new non-normative, practice-oriented theoretical framework for understanding digital intimacy in the algorithmic age.