Digital Intimate Infrastructure

How do AI companions and other emotional AI services and applications reconfigure intimacy as a more-than-human infrastructure, and what does this mean for trust, security, and human dignity once emotional life becomes platform-dependent? This project treats intimacy not as a private emotional state but as an infrastructure: an affective, technical, and relational system through which people increasingly form meaningful bonds with non-human others. As AI intimacy moves from the margins to the mainstream, "trust" and "security" can no longer be read in purely technical terms; they are lived through dependency, vulnerability, and the entrusting of intimate data to opaque architectures.

We mobilise an interdisciplinary mixed-methods design spanning sociology, sociopsychology, quantitative social science, and media and communication studies.

 

The project's novelty lies in recasting AI trust and security as relational and infrastructural rather than narrowly technical, foregrounding the affective stakes of automated intimacy for human agency. It contributes a transferable analytic — intimacy-as-infrastructure — to debates on trustworthy AI, alongside an accessible public report and toolkit to inform designers, regulators, and publics navigating an increasingly companionable digital future.