Digital Intimacy in a Post-Artificial World

01 / Discourse

Digital Intimacy in a Post-Artificial World

This talk asks a daunting question: what if humans are no longer required for a person to experience intimacy deeply?

In a post-artificial age, how do we make sense of new technological implements and constraints while still deriving somatic notions that are intrinsically human—love, grief, connection?

As advances in AI intersect with shifting social paradigms and highly individualized practices, this work attempts to bridge theory and practice—between use and reaction.

Invited talk — Why the World Needs Anthropologists? , October 2025, Bologna, Italy — conference program

Exhibit

Three lenses

1) Why it feels safer performance, exposure

Conversations between humans are never only about words—they are also performances of self. AI-mediated interaction can lower the barrier of entry, allowing people to approach difficult conversations with less fear of exposure or misrecognition.

2) What changes in the self mirroring, judgment

AI can mirror us without feeling judgmental. This neutrality is often harder to find in conversations with parents, partners, friends, or even therapists—who are themselves embedded in emotional, institutional, and relational systems that add weight or risk to an interaction.

3) The social conditions underneath structures, attraction

Rather than centering the technology itself, this talk focuses on the human in front of the screen. Societal, political, technological, and economic frameworks are not excluded—but treated as secondary to understanding what draws people toward AI-mediated intimacy.

A short note

Digital intimacy can be understood as a contemporary extension of a longstanding human practice: turning to humans and non-humans for validation and reassurance.

Rather than anthropomorphizing these systems, this work approaches AI conversational agents as made of us and for us—products of human language, desire, and structure.

Some people experience comfort, relief, joy, or emotional clarity through interaction with AI. What conditions make such experiences possible? This question forms the basis of my research.

Romantic partnerships with chatbots, griefbots, and practices of digital continuity create unprecedented techno-mediated spaces in which people attempt to make sense of themselves and the world around them.

I describe this moment as post-artificial: an era in which AI is no longer speculative or exceptional, but embedded in everyday life—bringing both possibility and consequence into ordinary human experience.

Joseph Markman