ZURICH, OSLO - Picture returning home, tired after a long day at work. Luckily, you are eagerly anticipated. Your companion awaits you, greeting you lovingly and asking about your day. Unlike a traditional spouse or significant other, however, this is a companion shared with others. Millions confess their love to digital companions like Alexa - Amazon's conversational artificial intelligence (AI) - daily. Some even want to marry ‘her,’ and while marriage is a bit much for others, many desire sex with ‘her.’ This begs the question, what exactly happens when one starts forming intimate relationships with machines in the form of digital companions?¹

Just tools, or more like social entities?

People readily proclaim their ‘love’ for an AI system, but does this necessarily mean that they are in love as they would be with another human? This may seem unlikely, but who is one to judge? One might also point to the fact that the machines are nothing more than just assembled nuts and bolts, with human-programmed behavior. They are an assembly of pieces of hardware and software, a mere thing or tool. But what does this matter if one’s experiences do not correspond with what one sees as straight-forward facts about the objective reality of machines? While it is a fact that digital companions are mere machines, it is also a fact that a vast (and growing) number of humans readi