Love in the time of AI

We have all heard of young, happily married couples who met online. In a way, this is the digital equivalent of what once seemed adventurous enough: finding a pen pal and maybe a lifelong partner through the classified ads of newspapers and magazines. Those small notices usually offered little more than age, occupation, hobbies, and a mailing address. Much was left to the imagination. Those ads are now long gone, but the search for human connection remains.

Today, dating platforms offer access to a far wider pool of potential partners. Artificial intelligence (AI) now helps narrow the field according to personal preferences, habits, and declared values. Algorithms have become modern matchmakers. At least in theory, they are better than humans at estimating compatibility.

Their appeal is obvious. The possibility of finding a suitable partner, combined with the excitement of the search itself, keeps users engaged. Technology promises efficiency in what has always been uncertain terrain.

Yet the risks have not disappeared. Indeed, they may have multiplied. One may encounter a fraudster posing as a devoted suitor, intent only on extracting money. Romance scams are not new. What is new is the scale and sophistication enabled by AI.

A recent Inquirer report, timed for Valentine’s Day (see “AI spews ‘dark age’ of love scams,” 2/14/26), cited a warning from a US-based cybersecurity firm that AI tools now allow predators to generate linguistically perfect and emotionally resonant messages at minimal cost. In the United States, losses from romance-related investment scams reportedly reached $5.7 billion in 2024, the highest among all fraud categories. In the Philippines, police recorded 75 love scam cases in 2024 and 54 in 2025—figures that likely understate the problem, given the embarrassment many victims may feel.

As troubling as these numbers are, what struck me most as a sociologist was the observation that AI is now widely used to simulate the language of intimacy. It can produce messages that sound attentive, vulnerable, and deeply personal. I suppose this should not surprise us. If AI can draft business letters, legal complaints, political speeches, and even condolence notes, why not declarations of love?

To understand what is at stake, it may help to see love not only as a feeling but also as a form of communication. Love has its own language—a way of addressing another person as uniquely significant, as someone whose inner world matters above all others. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once argued, in his book “Love as Passion” (1982), that romantic love developed historically as a special code for communicating intimacy. It allowed two individuals to speak to each other not merely as husband and wife, but as lovers mutually sharing their inner lives.

Over time, this language of intimacy was popularized through novels, poems, and songs. It became familiar, even expected. Romantic love came to justify marriage itself, just as prearranged marriages and marital unions forged out of economic need began to fall out of favor.

AI has now entered this deeply personal space. By drawing on vast stores of text, it can imitate the rhythms and sentiments of romantic language with astonishing fluency. It can feign awkwardness, simulate vulnerability, even clone voices and manipulate images to evade verification. In doing so, it exposes a fragile truth: much of what we take as signs of sincerity lies in patterns of language that can be learned and reproduced.

Does this mean technology has replaced love? Certainly not. But it does remind us that intimacy ultimately depends on trust, and trust cannot be fully automated. No algorithm can guarantee that the person behind the screen is who they claim to be, or that the emotions expressed are genuinely felt.

Perhaps the real lesson is not to retreat from online courtship, but to remember that love has always involved risk. What digital technology has done is to amplify both the reach of that risk and the ease with which intimacy can be simulated. In a time when machines can generate perfectly phrased messages of devotion, the most reliable signs of love may once again be the imperfect ones—the hesitations, inconsistencies, and small vulnerabilities that no digital script can fully anticipate.