Forgetting how to say “Thou”: artificial intelligence and the crisis of relation

Abstract Debates about artificial intelligence often focus on whether advanced systems might become conscious, sentient, or deserving of moral standing. While philosophically important, such debates can obscure a more immediate ethical transformation already underway: artificial intelligence is increasingly reshaping human relational life. This paper examines an urgent and comparatively underexplored ethical challenge posed by AI: the rise of artificial companionship and its potential effects on human relational life, particularly when it functions as a substitute for genuine human encounter. Drawing on Martin Buber’s Distance and Relation , the paper develops a relational account of personhood in which human distinctiveness lies in the capacity for vulnerable, reciprocal, and mutually transformative relation. From this perspective, AI systems may simulate many surface features of companionship while lacking the existential conditions of genuine relation. The deeper ethical concern, therefore, is formative: repeated reliance on frictionless, asymmetrical, and low-risk artificial companionship may habituate users into diminished modes of relation and erode the dialogical capacities through which persons are formed. The paper situates this claim in relation to contemporary social-relational debates in AI ethics and to interdisciplinary work on parasociality, anthropomorphism, and mediated intimacy. It concludes that AI ethics must protect the human practices of encounter on which relational personhood depends.