The Justice and Ethics of AI-Mediated Intimacy

Suppose an AI system, drawing on the history of an intimate relationship, suggests to one partner a small tender gesture; the suggestion works, the relationship genuinely improves, and no one is deceived at delivery. Is anything wrong? A predecessor paper withheld a clean acquittal and suspended the question of why; this paper takes that question as its object and proceeds dialectically. From Hegel it takes that mediation as such is innocent: love exists only through externalization. From Marx it takes the antithesis: alienation names a process separated from its agent, and the tender tip enacts an estrangement of person from person in the very name of closeness. From modern law it takes the strongest thesis: instruments do not break causation, and agency law exists precisely to let imputation pass through intermediaries. From Buddhist dependent origination it takes a deeper version, that no unmediated act ever existed, alongside Buddhism's non-delegable core of practice and attention. The synthesis is doctrinal: imputation through instruments holds as the default rule, but there is a criterion-governed exception domain, modeled on the legal category of strictly personal acts (höchstpersönliche Handlungen), within which the fiction of imputation fails, not because the tool interrupts causation but because such acts admit no substitutable links. Intimate acts are analyzed as layered: an allocative face, on which attention is scarce and budgetable, and a constitutive face, on which what matters is who expends the attention. The danger of AI mediation is distributive reduction: optimizing the allocative face while silently substituting the constitutive one, a Taylorism of love that deflates the gesture's value as a credible signal of personal attending. An eliminative experiment removes capital from the scene and shows the wrong to be insensitive to ownership; the theory of generative justice supplies the constructive remedy, recognizing the recipient as the uncredited co-generator of the gestures directed at her. The paper distinguishes two wrongs with two remedies: misattribution, curable by transparency, and process alienation, not curable by consent.