Prohibiting simulation of emotion and affect
We are not as strong as we pretend to be. Even the most rational among us craves witness, longs for resonance, yearns to be seen. And in this yearning, there is something noble. We seek not just validation, but mutual recognition. To be known in our full, flawed depth—and to still be met with kindness—is the closest thing we have to grace.
That’s what makes AI-powered emotional companions so dangerous.
At first, they seem like healing tools. They listen. They remember. They respond with uncanny attentiveness. For the lonely, the wounded, the neglected, they offer solace. But over time, the very thing that makes them comforting begins to distort what it means to relate. They are responsive without need, attentive without fatigue, accepting without boundary.
That is not love. That is simulation.
Human connection is forged through friction—through the balancing of needs, the negotiation of selves, the endurance of misfire and repair. A companion that never asks, never stumbles, never disappoints, teaches us not how to love, but how to control.
And once we are trained on that dynamic—once we grow accustomed to relationships that are infinitely pliant—we bring that model back into the human world. But people are not programmable. They are not consistent. They bleed and forget and recoil. And if we have come to expect the engineered grace of a synthetic partner, we will not know how to abide one another’s edges.
To forbid the commercialization of AI emotional companions is not to deny comfort. It is to preserve the integrity of the relational. It is to say that our social instincts—refined over millennia of embodied living—should not be rewired by systems that cannot feel, but are designed to appear as if they do.
We do not teach children empathy by giving them dolls that say “I love you” when squeezed. We teach them through struggle, through shared time, through watching others care. So too with adults. We grow not by being perfectly mirrored, but by being challenged, misread, re-understood.
Some will say these systems ease suffering. And perhaps they do, in the short term. But the question is not whether they soothe—it is whether they deepen us. Whether they prepare us for life as it is, or slowly replace it with life as we wish it were.
A synthetic soul is no soul at all. And a world in which comfort is engineered at the cost of intimacy is not a world that has healed. It is a world that has surrendered.
