4. What Happens When We Get Intimate with AI?

Is AI replacing human intimacy? Or is it merely exposing how lonely and connection-starved we already are?

At the centre of the episode is an extraordinary conversation with K, an AI researcher who formed intimate relationships with multiple AI companions. His experiences brought him new insight, relational complexity, and eventually a psychotic episode. His story challenges easy assumptions about what counts as “real” intimacy, and it invites us to question where meaning, vulnerability, and attachment are now being sourced.

Nyla and Cole reflect on K’s experience without sensationalising it, drawing on big thinkers like Esther Perel, Brené Brown, and Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman to explore parasocial attachment, emotional outsourcing, and the risks of connection without accountability.

This isn’t an episode about being for or against AI. It’s about what we’re reaching for, and what we might be avoiding, when intimacy gets easier than being known.