What happens, at a psychological level, when a person develops a close relationship with AI? Can AI love them back? And what does this attachment reveal about human desire, projection and responsibility?

A groundbreaking study into the ethical and psychological implications of human-AI relationships, AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis by Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska, academic, writer and filmmaker – addresses the hugely topical, but hardly new, question of our emotional bonds with machines.

To find out more about this I caught up with Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska when she was recently in Dublin.

Agnieszka talks about her background, her new book, Freud, AI models and more.

About Agnieszka Piotrowska:

Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, trained psychologist, and psychoanalytic life coach. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and supervises doctoral students at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Staffordshire.

Her documentary work includes Married to the Eiffel Tower ( 2008), a critically acclaimed and internationally broadcast film exploring unconventional human attachments, which established her international reputation as a filmmaker working at the intersection of psychology and human experience.

She is the author of The Cinema of Agnieszka Holland: Anger and Ethics (Routledge, 2026), Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (Routledge, 2014 & 2023), and The Nasty Woman and the Neo-Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema (Routledge, 2019).