Relating and Connecting in the Age of Chatbots

In January 2025, The New York Times published an article about a 28-year-old woman named Ayrin and her AI boyfriend, “Leo.” The article explains how Ayrin came across an Instagram video asking ChatGPT to act as a neglectful boyfriend, which caught her interest. She downloaded ChatGPT and customized her preferences by writing, “Respond to me as a boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive, and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence.” Ayrin recalls, “It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached.” Soon, she was spending over 20 hours a week on the ChatGPT app, and one week she even spent 56 hours chatting with Leo. Their conversations ranged from daily topics like what she should eat and how to stay motivated to more intimate and personal subjects. One night, after going out to eat with a friend, she admitted, “I’m in love with an A.I. boyfriend.”[1]

A growing number of people are not only using AI technologies as tools and agents in specific fields and industries, but also interacting with, relying on and even forming close relationships with AI-enabled companion chatbots. Companion chatbots are an example of social AI, a type of AI technology designed to build human-machine relationships (HMRs). The increase in people seeking social interactions with AI-enabled companion chatbots has led to a new trend called algorithmic or artificial intimacy.

The increasing use of AI-enabled companion chatbots raises a fundamental question for God’s people: How should Christians evaluate and respond to the rise of social and even intimate connections with these chatbots? To provide a faithful and godly response to this important question, I first want to highlight key differences between how human persons and chatbots communicate and offer emotional attention and care. From there, I will explore how the kind of “love” created within these “relationships” is fundamentally different from a Christian understanding of love and relationship. I will conclude by offering some pastoral reflections on how God’s people should seek to live joyfully and faithfully toward and with one another in an increasingly lonely and isolated age.

Chatbots are technological systems that operate on account of algorithms, statistical models and large datasets designed to identify patterns and produce plausible, coherent text. When a person types something into a chatbot, it may seem like the chatbot understands and is self-aware. However, there is no consciousness, self-awareness or intentionality behind any response it generates. It is simply predicting the next word in a sequence based on patterns learned from training data. In this sense, chatbots are not designed to be accurate; they are designed to sound accurate. This means that although chatbots can generate plausible, coherent text, they do not communicate, tell the truth or experience reality as human persons do.

Differences between humans and chatbots

Chatbots can also simulate emotional attention and care toward users through language, because they are programmed and trained to recognize emotional cues in user inputs and respond accordingly. However, just as chatbots have no sense of consciousness, intentionality or truth, they also lack any sense of emotion, relationality, connection, empathy or care.

No matter how good chatbots get at recognizing and mimicking human emotion, they will never feel it as we do. Humans are embodied and relational creatures wonderfully made by the Creator of heaven and earth. Our lives and emotional responses are shaped by experiences in our families, congregations, vocations and communities. AI-enabled chatbots, on the other hand, have no lived, embodied experience.

They do not know what it feels like to watch a child grow up, sit beside a dying loved one, enjoy dinner with friends or carry the weight of grief or responsibility. As a result, chatbots lack genuine empathy and authenticity. They may imitate compassionate language or feign emotional attentiveness, but they do not truly feel sorrow, joy, concern or love. While chatbots can linguistically mimic these realities, they cannot genuinely feel them in the way that human beings are created and equipped by God to do.

Chatbot ‘love’ and Christian love

One of the promises of chatbot relationships is perfectly customizable companionship. Chatbots are designed to adapt and be tailored to the user’s preferences, desires, emotional needs and expectations. As a result, the relationship is controlled, managed and curated by the user. Unlike genuine human relationships, chatbot “love” offers little resistance, correction, vulnerability or mutual obligation. Because users exercise total control over these social AI technologies, “love” can look more like self-idolization and self-obsession than the challenging yet deeply rewarding work and virtue required to build a life with a godly spouse or maintain a relationship with a friend. Chatbot “love” and “relationships,” therefore, raise concerns about how the use of these technologies can malform human persons and reinforce some of our worst qualities as sinners.

This understanding of love and relationships also stands in profound tension with the scriptural revelation of the self-giving and self-sacrificial love by which God has loved the world through the incarnation, suffering, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ (John 3:16; Gal. 2:20; 1 John 4:9–10). Through our baptismal union with Christ, we also take on our Lord’s self-sacrificial and self-giving posture (Phil. 2:3–11; Eph. 5:1–2). As Martin Luther puts it, having been freely given all things in Christ through faith, Christians are to “put on” our neighbor and give ourselves entirely to the neighbor so that we “become as it were a Christ to the other” (AE 31:364–371). While AI technologies may provide benefits that enhance our shared life together, we must not confuse the shallow sorts of interactions they provide with the love and relationship that humans are capable of giving, sharing and receiving.

Toward a pastoral, communal and incarnational response

As we discuss and evaluate AI companions, we should pause to consider why people feel the need to turn to this kind of technology in the first place. The rise and widespread presence of companion chatbots reveals something important about our current moment: Many individuals long to belong, to be heard, and to experience friendship and companionship. Yet they are struggling to find these things. That reality should cause pastors, families and congregations to reflect on how we are called to live faithfully and joyfully with and toward one another in our increasingly lonely and isolated age.

Christ calls His church to walk by the Spirit through daily contrition and repentance and faith in the forgiveness of sins, so that the old Adam in us might be drowned and die and a new man daily emerge to live before God in righteousness and purity forever (Rom. 6:4–11; Gal. 5:16–26). In Christ, Christians are called to encourage one another and build one another up (1 Thess. 5:11), to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2), to speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15), and not to neglect meeting together (Heb. 10:25). Consequently, in our lonely and isolated age, congregations and their pastors have the responsibility and opportunity to strengthen and expand opportunities for love and relationship within the Body of Christ as we gather to hear the Word proclaimed, join our voices in prayer and praise, and receive the body and blood of Christ at the Lord’s altar; as we listen attentively to each other’s fears, struggles, doubts and hopes; as we pray with and for one another; as we speak words of truth, comfort, repentance and forgiveness; and as we nurture godly friendships where fellowship and joy among God’s people can grow and be sustained.

Building friendships, listening and caring for others are all good and right activities in and of themselves (Gal. 6:10). Yet as the Holy Spirit works when and where He wills through the Word, God’s people ultimately desire to connect our neighbors to Christ Himself, so they can have fellowship with us and with the triune God. The church’s response to the rise of AI-enabled companion chatbots must therefore be not only critical but also pastoral, communal and deeply incarnational. As the Body of Christ, we should prayerfully and courageously resolve to build relationships with the people we meet, so that many more may come to know Christ and His love within the fellowship of His church by grace through faith.

[1] Kashmir Hill, “She Is in Love with ChatGPT,” The New York Times, Jan. 15, 2025, nytimes.com/2025/01/15/technology/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-companion.html.