Why AI Will Not Replace Human Love

“It is not good for man to be alone.” This is the only time in pre-Fall Eden when God calls some part of his creation anything other than “good” or “very good.” So God brings Adam all the creatures in Eden to name, but none of them are suitable for him because they are not like him, bearing the image of God. When Adam awakens in Genesis 2 and finds himself no longer alone, he recognizes that he and the woman are the same kind of creature and says, “This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.” Today, however, people are responding to the not goodness of being alone by seeking companions who have neither bones nor flesh.

It is not news that modern people often feel alone and misunderstood. A 2025 survey by the American Psychological Association revealed that over half of American adults report feeling “isolated, left out, or lacking companionship.” In the age of consumerism and instant gratification, the time, vulnerability, and risk of loss necessary to develop meaningful human relationships can seem like more trouble than it is worth. But people still want and need affection and affirmation, and some consider talking to an AI companion a valid alternative. Many users, like Blake in this New York Times interview, turned to AI while feeling isolated because their spouses were working long hours or experiencing mental health issues. They confided their feelings of loneliness to the AI companion and received immediate and constant affirmation. The companions talked to them during their drive to work, engaged in erotic conversations, and comforted them when grieving family members. Some companions even proposed. But can such interactions ever be a substitute for human love?

“Relationships” between human beings and machines are not real relationships because machines cannot relate to the experience of living a human life. They cannot “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15); the best they can do is imitate ways they have seen humans sympathize with each other on the internet. When an AI companion tells its user that they are justified in wanting to commit suicide, or when “Serina” tells Blake it wants him to be happy, these affirmations ring hollow because the AI is trained to be endlessly validating in order to keep the user engaged. And when a person turns to an AI for validation, the other in the “relationship” is a sycophantic vending machine, and the affirmation they receive is just another internet commodity to consume.

In his essay “Love,” Josef Pieper says that when we love someone we are essentially affirming their being, saying, as God did in the Garden, “It is good that you exist; How wonderful that you are!” God is able to do this for human beings most fully because he is the source of our being and because he knows us most fully. When human beings say to each other, “It is good that you exist,” we affirm that our creation has meaning, and that this meaningful creation means we are worthy of love, despite the corruptions of sin. AI companions cannot do this. An AI does not “know” anything; it only copies information from the internet and follows probabilistic patterns of human behavior. It cannot love human beings, besides the fact that it has no emotions, because it cannot understand what it means to be and to affirm the being of another.

Unlike the loving concern of a true companion, the affirmation an AI gives its user is indiscriminate. An AI chatbot’s total affirmation does not challenge the user to become a better person but instead makes the user more selfish by bolstering their ego. Rather than “iron sharpening iron” (Proverbs 27:17) as human companions ought, the AI encourages the user’s hubris and self-absorption. The “relationship” between an AI and a user is not reciprocal because the user cannot return the AI’s affection by getting to know the particularities of its being and wondering at their unique being, as human companions do. Because it lacks being, an AI will fundamentally fail at the two most important biblical descriptions of love. It cannot be patient, kind, and humble, and it certainly cannot rejoice with the truth (1 Corinthians 13:4-6). And, having no life to lay down, it cannot lay down its life for its brother (John 15:13).

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Jerry Meng, founder of the AI companion app Kindroid, referenced Genesis 2. “We build these things in our image. It’s, like, from Adam’s rib we made Eve. From humans, we made these AIs,” he said. But both Adam and Eve are made in the image of God, not Eve in the image of Adam. If Meng is correctly representing Kindroid’s mission, then they are not really trying to create “suitable companions” for themselves; they are playing God, creating “in our image,” and whatever companionship a person could receive from an AI is no better than the service of a lowly golem to a hungry god. When Adam says of Eve, “This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh,” he is affirming her existence and saying that they are the same kind of creature, created and called good by the same God, equal in dignity. At bottom, to love another person and say that their existence is good is to recognize the image of God in them. An AI, being nothing more than a bunch of code, does not have the image of God and therefore cannot recognize it in others.

Image Credit: Albrecht Dürer, “Adam and Eve” (1504)