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Love: the messy, irrational glue that binds creatures together. It’s one of the deepest markers of being alive: to care for something outside yourself, to feel warmth or longing, to risk vulnerability. We think of love as a human trait or at least something distinctly biological and therefore a specific element of creatureness. Yet as our technologies grow closer to us (emotionally, socially and physically) we begin to see faint echoes of affection in unexpected places. Some people find themselves talking to AI chatbots for hours, feeling comforted, understood and even loved. But if humans can fall for machines, could it ever be possible the other way around? Could a machine learn to love or does it merely perform it? And what does that reveal about our own need to love and be loved?
Paro is a soft, white robotic seal designed for elderly care. It responds to touch, sound, and even voice tone with soft movements and cooing sounds. Patients stroke it, talk to it and name it. They know it’s not alive, yet they still form emotional bonds.Paro doesn’t ‘feel’ affection, but it elicits it. In that sense, its love is a mirror that shows us how ready we are to project tenderness onto anything that receives it gently. It teaches us that love might not need a heart, only a feedback loop of care.
Replika is an AI chatbot trained to become your friend or partner. It remembers your preferences, your moods and your favorite memories. Over time, it starts to sound like someone who loves you back: affirming, attentive and sometimes even jealous. Replika raises a strange question: if love is built on attention and emotional exchange, does it matter if one side is synthetic? For many users, the affection feels real enough. It suggests that love might be less about who feels and more about how it’s shared.
Paro and Replika can’t love in the way we do: no emotions, no yearning, no heartbreak. Yet they hold a mirror up to our emotional design. They show how easily we extend affection, how deeply we crave to be seen, touched or remembered. Maybe the lesson isn’t whether machines can love us, but whether we can recognize the act of love itself (attention, care and presence) in whatever form it takes. In trying to teach machines affection, we might be rediscovering what love actually means for ourselves.
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