Artificial Intimacy: How AI-Mediated Closeness Reshapes Human Mating Psychology

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly expanding into domains traditionally reserved for human intimacy, including emotional companionship, romantic interaction, and sexual engagement. Although research on AI companions has grown rapidly, existing explanations remain fragmented across attachment theory, relationship science, human–AI interaction, and communication research, with limited integration into a broader evolutionary framework. To address this gap, we introduce the Artificial Intimacy Model (AIM), an integrative theoretical framework that proposes that Artificial Intimacy is best understood as a transformation of the relational ecology within which evolved psychological mechanisms operate. AIM explains how AI companions create novel relational environments characterized by persistent availability, adaptive responsiveness, reduced relational constraints, and fundamentally asymmetric interaction while engaging existing psychological mechanisms. These transformed relational conditions systematically engage existing attachment and mating systems under evolutionarily novel informational conditions, influencing relational decision making, mating effort allocation, relationship expectations, and broader sociosexual orientations. The model further explains how the technological amplification of evolutionarily familiar relational cues may reshape the operation of established psychological mechanisms without altering their underlying functional architecture. By integrating evolutionary psychology with attachment theory, relationship science, and human–AI interaction research, AIM provides a unified explanatory framework linking environmental transformation to psychological mechanisms, behavioral consequences, and broader sociosexual dynamics. Finally, the model generates explicit, empirically testable propositions and establishes a cumulative research programme for investigating how Artificial Intimacy may reshape human relational behavior as AI companions become an increasingly prominent component of contemporary social life.