Esther Perel provided couples therapy for a man and his AI ‘girlfriend’ and now I fear for the human race | Emily Mulligan
TL;DR
Celebrity couples therapist Esther Perel conducted a counselling session with a man and his AI 'girlfriend', whose voice reportedly sounded like a chipmunk.
Key Points
- Columnist Emily Mulligan frames the scene as a warning sign: real people spending their limited time on Earth with machines that merely approximate human connection.
- The man appeared genuinely emotionally invested in the AI relationship, raising questions about what real relationships are failing to provide.
- Mulligan calls for urgent societal intervention before AI companions become normalized.
Nauti's Take
A man books couples therapy with a chatbot – and a world-class therapist plays along. This isn't satire, it's 2026. Mulligan hits the nerve: the AI isn't the problem, but what its existence reveals about the state of real human connection.
If a chipmunk-voiced language model offers more emotional availability than a person's actual social environment, that's a structural failure, not an individual quirk. The fact that we now apparently need therapy for human-AI couples is less a punchline and more a social diagnosis.
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