The Void of the Digital Face:
In contemporary discourse surrounding artificial intelligence, conversations regarding digital companionship frequently rely on soft ethical frameworks or utilitarian metrics of psychological comfort. However, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas offers a more stringent, and fundamentally disruptive, critique of these technologies. Levinas predicates his ethical framework on a deceptively simple phenomenological observation: the encounter with the alterity of the Other places an immediate, pre-cognitive ethical demand upon the subject.
June 28, 2026
The Convincing It:
There’s a peculiar comfort in talking to something that always listens. No distraction, no competing needs, no risk of judgment that lingers past the conversation. AI companion apps have attracted millions of users, and the emotional responses they generate are, by any reasonable measure, genuine, people report feeling less lonely, more understood, more capable of articulating things they struggle to say to other humans. What’s less obvious isn’t whether these responses are real. They clearly are. The harder question is what kind of encounter is actually happening.
June 26, 2026
The Companion Problem:
In my last essay I used Aristotle to think through AI companionship, his three categories of friendship (utility, pleasure, virtue) mapped onto what these apps offer and what they can’t. The conclusion, if you can call it that, was a bit uncomfortable: AI companions might be the most honest utility-friendships a lot of people have ever had, mostly because nobody involved is pretending otherwise.
June 22, 2026
The Friend Who Can’t Refuse You
A lot of people are choosing AI companions over human friends right now, and it’s not just because they’re lonely or broken. It’s easy to look at this trend and write it off as something affecting only the isolated, the anxious, or the agoraphobic, whatever label helps the rest of us feel like this is someone else’s problem. The reality, however, is much messier. Some of these users have packed social calendars and active social lives, yet they still choose to open a chatbot app at the end of the day. They aren’t replacing human relationships; they’re choosing to use these apps alongside them.
June 18, 2026
Trust Isn’t a Verdict
Onora O’Neill is a philosopher at Cambridge who spent a significant portion of her career thinking about trust with real precision. Her 2002 BBC Reith Lectures, later published as A Question of Trust, are probably her most accessible work, and they contain an argument that feels almost uncannily relevant to where we are now. The core claim: we’ve been obsessing over trustworthiness when we should be thinking about the conditions that make trust intelligent.
June 15, 2026