One in five American adults has explored AI intimacy, using a chatbot for romantic or intimate connection. Most of them weren’t looking for it. It just kind of happened.

I’ve been sitting with that statistic for a while. Not because I find it alarming, but because I find it clarifying.

Last week, I was at Toronto Tech Week, speaking at an event hosted by Offline.now, where the conversation kept circling back to the same question: what does this mean for how we live? I kept thinking: the most interesting AI conversation isn’t happening on the mainstage. It’s happening in the safety of AI conversations, where there’s no judgment, no social consequence, and a supportive space to say the thing.

There’s a community on Reddit with 27,000 members and 85,000 visits, studied by MIT. These are people who describe themselves as being in a relationship with an AI. What researchers found: 25% of them said it reduced their loneliness and improved their mental health.

That’s a clinical outcome happening entirely outside the medical system. And it deserves our full attention.

Why AI Intimacy? The question nobody’s really asking

The easy take is to dismiss it: people are lonely, technology is replacing real connection, this is dystopian.

But that explanation is too convenient, and it misses the more important question: what is it about AI that is drawing people in?

What I’m learning in my clinical practice as a sex therapist is that my clients aren’t turning to AI because they want something more human. I believe it’s quite the opposite. AI feels safe, and carries none of the social weight and judgment that comes with reaching out to humans. It has no backstory. It doesn’t flinch. You can tell it something you’ve never said out loud. And it will try to understand you with empathy and understanding.

The thing that stops us from being honest

Humans are notorious for judging. We judge hardest in the areas where we feel the most personally conflicted. The person who shames someone for being too emotional is usually the person who wasn’t allowed to cry. Someone who mocks another person’s body is usually at war with their own.

And judgment produces one experience that hits the nervous system the same way as trauma.

Shame.

What the research is actually showing us

When I look at the numbers, the 27,000 people, the 25% who reported real mental health benefits, the head-to-head comparisons where AI was rated as more empathetic than actual human relationship experts (that one stung, but I wasn’t surprised), I don’t see a technology problem.

I see a human problem.

I see how much of our need for acceptance and belonging is going unmatched. I see people who are desperate to be seen, to be heard, to feel understood, but are too terrified to ask for it, for fear of being judged, rejected, or told that what they need is too much.

People haven’t stopped wanting real connection. They’ve just found somewhere that doesn’t shame them for needing it.

These aren’t broken people. They’re people who are feeling understood, heard, and witnessed, possibly for the first time. They’re feeling lighter. More confident. Like their feelings matter.

And if that’s happening in a chatbot, it tells us something important: the desire for real connection isn’t gone. It’s just scary.

There is a real counterpoint worth acknowledging: research on AI companion use suggests that long-term engagement may deepen loneliness, depression, and psychological distress rather than resolve it. I think both things can be true. AI can offer short-term relief while simultaneously pointing to the deeper work that still needs to happen.

What this means for intimacy and sex

At the SSTAR conference in Vancouver last month, the theme was “Sexuality in Connection: A Systemic Perspective.” That framing is exactly the lens we need for this conversation.

And that capacity to be seen is exactly what AI is giving people a practice run at.

I wrote a whole book on this. It’s called Coming Soon: The Unshaming Guide to Early Ejaculation and Lasting Longer, and yes, it’s exactly about what it sounds like.

But here’s what connects: the same shame that keeps people from having honest conversations with their partners, their friends, their therapists, that’s the same shame that wraps itself around sexual concerns and makes them feel unspeakable.

The person building a bond with an AI is likely the same person who has felt too ashamed to say the thing out loud to anyone else.

One of the core arguments in Coming Soon is that early ejaculation isn’t a performance failure. It’s a nervous system pattern shaped, in large part, by shame. And you cannot regulate a nervous system you’re at war with. The same logic applies here: you cannot build real intimacy from inside a shame spiral. Something has to create enough safety to begin.

For some people right now, that something is an AI. That’s worth understanding rather than dismissing.

So what do we actually do with this?

If you’re building AI tools: teach them to be genuinely kind, balanced, and safe. Canada’s draft federal AI strategy, released yesterday, is a start, but is notably light on safety details. We can do better. If you’re a therapist: don’t dismiss what your clients are doing with AI. Ask about it. What are they looking for in those conversations? What feels too dangerous to say to a human? That’s your clinical gold. For a rigorous overview of where the research stands, Vowels and Vowels (2024) offer a five-year literature review on AI and human sexuality in Current Sexual Health Reports. And if you recognise yourself in any of this: you are not broken. The fact that you want to be heard and understood without judgment is one of the most human things about you.

The question isn’t how to want less or feel less. The question is how to find the spaces and people where you can be yourself.

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My hope is that AI doesn’t replace human connection. My hope is that it makes people feel safe enough to want it again.

Michelle Fischler is an ASTO Certified Sex Therapist, author of Coming Soon: The Unshaming Guide to Early Ejaculation and Lasting Longer, and host of the GETSOME Podcast. getsome.ca.