Strangely my thinking about AI is being shaped by a romance scam.
More precisely:
encountering counterfeit connection sharpened my understanding of genuine human connection.
That matters, because one of the biggest questions AI is forcing on the helping professions is this:
what can only a human being do?
I had been thinking about that through work with a founder-led start-up living under existential threat:
possible bankruptcy,
possible job losses,
money running out,
the fear of not being paid for work already done.
What the founder needed from me was not more information.
Not another framework.
Not a sharper prompt.
Not better bullet points about resilience.
What he needed was for another human being to look him in the eyes and see his terror.
To help him stay with it.
To help him feel it without being destroyed.
To help him discover, through co-regulation, he could experience fear, shame, and despair and still remain himself.
That one human nervous system can help another bear what feels unbearable until a new capacity comes online.
Then something else happened.
I found myself on the receiving end of a romance scam.
And strange as it may sound, that clarified something for me too.
What a scam reveals is not only deception.
It reveals how connection can be imitated.
Warmth can be imitated.
Attentiveness can be imitated.
Validation can be imitated.
Even intimacy can be imitated, at least for a while.
Alan Turing famously asked whether a machine could imitate a human convincingly enough that we could not reliably tell the difference.
I found myself wondering about a relational version of that question:
can someone imitate human connection convincingly enough that we feel met, even when something essential is missing?
Both AI and romance scams raise a similar question:
what is the difference between something that feels supportive, warm, or intimate…
and something that is actually relationally real?
One of the things I noticed in the scam exchange was not only what was there, but what was missing.
There was warmth.
Responsiveness.
A kind of facilitation.
But very little spontaneous selfhood.
Very little ordinary life.
Very little mutuality.
Very little initiative.
Very little practical reality.
And that led me to a thought I have not been able to shake:
pseudo-connection is often much better at facilitating depth than generating it.
It can draw you out.
Mirror you.
Reward your vulnerability.
But it struggles to create the textured, specific, reality-based presence of a real person with a self, a history, values, contradictions, and the capacity to meet you from within all that.
AI does many marvellous things.
It helps us think, structure, reflect, draft, and rehearse.
But some of the deepest human changes still happen in relationship.
That is why I think the future will belong not to those who vaguely defend “human touch”, but to those who can clearly say what a real human being can help another human being do.