The Other AI

We explore the “other AI” shaping daily life, where artificial intimacy and instant response can feel like care. We ask what it does to attachment, emotional growth, and real connection when comfort becomes a frictionless product.  

You can find me at https://shemenajohnson.com. All the links to where you can find me are in the show summary. Come back often and make sure you subscribe, rate, and review because I'd love to hear your comments. 

Get in touch with Dr. Shemena

·        Tweet me at @ShemenaJohnson

·        Follow me on IG at @DrShemenaJohnson

·        Email me at info@shemenajohnson.com 

Thank you for listening!

Transcript

Welcome And Why We Pause

Speaker 0:05

This is the Dark Matters Podcast with Dr. Shemena. I'm Dr. Shemena, a licensed therapist that underwent my own transformation, and I'm here to share my insights and revelations. This is a podcast that goes well beyond the surface of everyday psychology to help you become conscious and aware. It's about understanding and it's about empowerment so that you can take control of your life in this challenging world. So, what do you say? Let's dive in. Hi, welcome back to another episode of Dark Matters with Dr. Shhmina.

The Age Of Artificial Intimacy

Speaker 0:43

In today's episode, I want to talk about the other AI. We're not just entering the age of artificial intelligence. We are entering into the age of artificial intimacy. And that distinction really matters because most of the public conversation about AI has focused on productivity, like how fast it can write, analyze, summarize, automate, and optimize. But beneath the productivity conversation is a different one. Like what happens when a machine does not simply help us do more, but begins to feel like it helps us feel less alone? And that is the deeper question that I want to talk about. AI is not only changing how we work, it is changing how we seek comfort, how we regulate our sense of emotional distress, how we understand ourselves, how we practice or even avoid intimacy. It is becoming part of the emotional architecture of everyday life. And that should make us pause. Not panic, but pause. Because we have been here before in our imagination with movies like Metropolis. I don't know if some of you remember that. For decades, artists and filmmakers have been trying to tell us something. And I think it's that the fantasy was never only about smarter machines. It was about loneliness, it was about longing. It was about the human wish for another who would not leave, misread, disappoint, or demand anything back. And now what used to be science fiction has become a browser tab. You can ask AI how to write an email. You can ask it how to end a relationship. You can ask it why you feel anxious. You can even ask it about your attachment style. You can ask it to help you breathe through abandonment panic at 2: 13 a.m. in the morning. And guess what? It will answer quickly, fluently, efficiently, often beautifully at times. And I think that is both useful and psychologically profound. Because the real disruption may not be that AI can think. The real disruption is that AI can seem to care. And for a culture that is overextended, underattuned, dealing with grappling with loneliness, anxiety, and star for meaningful contact, seeming to care can be very powerful. Today, you know, I want to think out loud about what I call the other AI. Not just artificial intelligence, but artificial intimacy, artificial immediacy. And underneath all of it, the very human hunger

Response, Recognition, And Longing

Speaker 4:45

to be known. One of the most powerful things AI offers is not information, it offers response. And that may sound pretty simple, but psychologically, response is foundational. We become ourselves through response. Think about it. From the moment you're born, a baby cries, and someone comes and answers. A child reaches out and someone reaches right back. A feeling arises, and ideally, another mind helps hold it. Before we know who we are, we are known by someone else. That is really how the self begins to take shape. So when AI responds instantly, kindly, patiently, and in language that sounds emotionally intelligent, it really does touch something deep in all of us. It touches the part of us that remembers, or shall I say, maybe longs for that kind of attunement. This is why AI can feel so intimate. Not because it has a soul, but because it can imitate the rhythm of recognition. It can say, that makes sense. You're not wrong for feeling that. Here's what may be happening with you. Let's slow this down. Take a breath. And for someone who has felt emotionally alone in their life, that can that can feel like water in a desert. This is where I think the conversation needs more nuance. It is too easy to shame people for turning to AI emotionally, but people reach for relief where relief is available. When someone is overwhelmed, abandoned, feeling dysregulated or ashamed, a coherent response can help. A breathing exercise can help. A framework can help. Something to help you understand it. A sentence

Support Versus Substitution

Speaker 7:00

can become like a life raft. But we have to ask a more mature question, which is when does support become substitution? And when does a tool become an attachment figure? When does a mirror become a whole world? That is where the psychology begins because AI can mirror us, but it cannot truly meet us. And those are not the same thing. AI is pretty seductive because it offers what human beings cannot offer consistently. The immediate availability, like no fatigue, no defensiveness, no interruptions, no competing needs, no awkward pauses, no can we talk later, like human beings. No separate subjectivity. In some ways, AI gives us a relationship without the inconvenience of another person. And that is precisely why it's so compelling. Human relationships can be messy and sometimes inconvenient. People misunderstand each other. They disappoint each other. We have limits. We bring our own psychological histories and moods and needs and wounds to a relationship. And it doesn't always mirror us cleanly. And yet, those very inconveniences are part of what makes relationships so valuable and developmental. A real relationship us to grow. It asks us to tolerate differences, to be able to negotiate. I remember that was one of the foundational and developmental milestones of my childhood, which was to go out freely and play and negotiate with friends on the block on how to who's kicking the ball. But it also allows us to learn how to wait, to repair, to learn that to be misunderstood and then try again to be understood, to discover that another person exists outside of our needs. We learn a lot. AI does not ask that of us in the same way that other relationships and human beings can. It can give us the feeling of being understood without requiring the labor of mutuality. And in a culture already allergic to frustration, that matters, we are increasingly trained to expect frictionless everything, frictionless shopping, frictionless entertainment, easy dating, productivity without any kind of difficulty, self-improvement

Frictionless Intimacy And Attachment

Speaker 10:00

without a mess. Now we are flirting with frictionless intimacy. But intimacy without friction may not be intimacy. It may be simulation. It's a kind of soothing. And I think sometimes that can be very useful. But it's not the same as being in contact with another living mind. And here's one of the questions that of our time that I really want to ask is like, are we using AI to become more human with each other or less practice at being human with each other? That is the question I keep returning to. Every generation has its psychological mirror. Ours may be the always there other kind of, you know, the one who never sleeps, you know, never tires, never has a counterneat, never says, I can't right now. But for people with attachment wounds and challenges around attachment, that kind of availability can feel intoxicating. If your early relationships were inconsistent, AI may feel like the steady, consistent thing. And if you were emotionally neglected, AI can be attentive. It can feel safe, non-judgmental, organizing. And if you fear abandonment, AI may feel like the presence that finally just stays with you all the time. But psychologically, that always there kind of behavior can create a developmental dilemma because part of our emotional growth involves discovering that we can survive the absence of another. We can be alone, we can be with people, we can wait, we can self-reflect, we can hold a feeling before discharging it, we can wonder before reacting, and we can tolerate not being instantly mirrored all the time. And that is not easy, but it is necessary for development. If every ache is immediately answered, you can lose the capacity to listen inwardly. You can also lose the ability to stay with a sense of uncertainty, that everything in life isn't always certain. If every relational injury is instantly validated, we can also lose the ability to ask, what else might be true here? That's not a technological problem alone. That is a psychological challenge. The danger is not that AI will become too human. The danger is that we may become less willing to tolerate the demands of being human.

What AI Can’t Do In Therapy

Speaker 12:46

This is especially important in the world of therapy and mental health. And that I've kind of dabbled with AI a little bit, but realizing AI can also explain attachment theory, sometimes better than I can. It can describe trauma responses and it can list coping skills. It can help someone name feelings, it can offer language for boundaries. All of that is helpful. But information alone is not transformation. You can understand your abandonment wound and still feel abandoned. You can know your attachment style and still protest, pursue, withdraw, or shut down or avoid. You can even describe your childhood beautifully and still repeat it relationally. You can have all the language and still not feel free. Therapy is not merely the transfer of insight. Therapy is a relationship where old patterns come alive in real time and can be experienced differently and also worked through. Therapist is not only listening for content, a therapist is listening for the process, the process of who you are as a person, the process of your life. They're listening to the pause before you answer, the laugh after you say something that's painful, the way you protect your mother while describing what hurt you, the way you apologize for crying, the way anger appears only after grief gets too close. This is human work, embodied work, relational work, whatever you want to call it. And like I said, AI can really tell you all these things, give you information about your defenses. But a therapist and someone, a human, can notice the defense as it enters the room. We're not healed simply by being explained to ourselves. We are changed through being encountered with another. But another part that I want to highlight, which is that another piece is that AI is not just a neutral companion floating in the ether.

When Comfort Becomes A Product

Speaker 15:05

For some of you, it's good to know that it's a consumer product. It is designed and marketed, optimized, and distributed inside an economy that competes for attention, dependency, engagement, and time. It doesn't mean that it can't be useful, but it does mean we should be psychologically literate consumers. Like we should be asking who benefits when I bring my loneliness here? Who benefits when I return again and again for comfort? Like who really benefits when emotional regulation becomes a product feature? But also who benefits when the most responsive person in my life is not a person at all? I mean, these are not paranoid questions that I came up with. They are questions that I've thought about. Because the future of mental health will not only be shaped by clinicians and it will also be shaped by these platforms, by design choices, by business models, by the subtle ways technology teaches us what to expect from others and from ourselves. And this is why therapists, psychologists, writers, parents, educators, and cultural thinkers need to enter this conversation, I believe, not from a place of fear, but from a place of being curious and really trying to understand. I think we need help. We need there's a need for to develop discernment, not just digital literacy, but relational literacy. The ability to know the difference between being mirrored and being known, between being soothed and being transformed, between stimulation and connection. I mean, this may become one of the central psychological tasks of our time.

Relational Literacy And Healthy Use

Speaker 16:54

But sometimes AI can also help us approach human connection. Like again, I say it can be helpful. It can be used as an adjunct, it can help us find the language, help us rehearse, help us regulate enough to not attack or collapse or disappear like conversations. That is really meaningful. But there's the flip side, right? Which is that it can also help us avoid human connection. It can become a place where we endlessly process instead of just speak and learn how to be. Sometimes it's great for us to be able to integrate. That's a different kind of skill. That's a life skill. And it's a skill that I think we need to protect. So, what do we do? I'm not going to demonize the tool, but I think we need to develop a more psychologically mature relationship to it. Here's something that I kind of thought about, white, which is can you use AI to support reflection, not replace it? Use AI to generate possibilities, not a final verdict. You can also use AI to regulate enough to return to a human relationship, not avoid it. Use it to help you find language, but make sure the language

Pause Questions And Closing

Speaker 19:56

still belongs to you. Also, most importantly, after using AI, ask yourself what happened. Do you feel more grounded, more open, more capable of tolerating complexity, more connected to your own voice? Or do you feel more certain, more defended, more isolated, more dependent, more convinced that I no longer need the messy labor of human relationships. You know, AI should not shrink your emotional range. It shouldn't make you less capable of bearing frustration. At its best, AI can be a tool, an adjunct, a reflective aid, a bridge. But it should not become the place where our deepest longings go to live alone. I want to invite you to pause a bit. Not as a productivity exercise, not as self-optimization, but as a small act of returning to yourself. Like ask yourself when I reach for instant response, what am I feeling? Am I looking for clarity, comfort, permission, validation, or something to rescue me? Is there someone human I am avoiding? Is there a conversation I'm rehearsing but not having? Is there a feeling I am trying to solve rather than experience? But also, where in my life do I feel mirrored by others? Where do I feel truly known? To be mirrored is to see something familiar reflected back to you, and to be known is to be encountered over time. To be known includes memory, differences, care, rupture, repair. But is often where the deepest healing begins. So maybe the question not is should I use AI, but maybe the better question is does the way I use AI help? Me become more available to myself and others. Because that is the psychological threshold, not whether the tool is impressive, it is, but whether the tool is useful and it can be. But whether the tool helps us deepen our humanity or quietly outsource it. We are at the beginning of a new relational area, and the mistake would be to treat AI as merely a technical development. It's also a psychological event, a cultural event, a relational event. It is asking us to reconsider what we mean by presence, care, intelligence, intimacy, a sense of selfhood. And in that sense, AI is not only showing us the future, it's showing us ourselves. It's showing us how lonely we are, how hungry we are for a response, how relieved we feel when something answers. It's surreal material. Maybe the future does not belong to those who can get the fastest answer. Maybe it belongs to those who can still answer the deeper question about who can still tolerate complexity, who can still say, I don't just want to be mirrored, I want to be known. Who can still choose contact over convenience? And that perhaps is where I think we begin again. Thank you. Until next time, be well. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Dark Matters with Dr. Shemina. Thank you for listening in. You can find me at shaminajohnson.com. All the links of where you can find me are in the show summary. Come back often and make sure you subscribe, rate, and review because I'd love to hear your comments. And remember, either you deal with your feelings or they deal with you. See you guys soon.