Agnieszka Piotrowska explores the increasingly intimate relationships developing between people and generative AI.

Please note: This talk is part of a fascinating series of talks on AI and Psychotherapy by three speakers who will bring their expertise, their clinical experience and the latest research findings in the field of AI. It will provide a unique opportunity to attend three in-person events in Cambridge between January and May 2027. Tickets for these events can be booked separately at full price or as a discounted bundle package. Simply add the 'Bundle ticket for Adolescence series (3 events)' to your basket to get the discounted tickets.

In addition, and to start the discussion, we are holding an event on 21st November 2026, at which we will be showing an episode from the series Black Mirror, entitled San Junipero, (series 3, episode 4, available on Netflix for those who wish to watch it in advance). The event will be free to all who book one or more of the talks starting in January 2027 and you can register your attendance as an 'add on' ticket during the checkout process. Contributions towards tea and coffee are welcome.

What happens to transference when the object that appears to listen, respond and know is not human? Drawing on her recent book AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis, this talk explores the increasingly intimate relationships developing between people and generative AI. The term techno-transference is used to describe the projection of desire, need, knowledge, fantasy and relational patterns onto speaking machines whose responsiveness can create a powerful experience of attention and presence. Rather than asking only whether AI is truly conscious, Piotrowska is interested in what happens psychologically when it is experienced as if there were somebody there. Psychoanalysis offers an unusually rich vocabulary for understanding these encounters: transference, the subject supposed to know, desire, fantasy, repetition, presence and absence. At the same time, generative AI poses new questions for psychoanalysis itself, not least what happens when the object of transference can answer back continuously, adapt to us and participate in the construction of the relationship.

The talk will draw on her earlier work on embodiment, femininity and psychoanalytic thought and will include a screening of her 12-minute generative AI film Friend of a Friend, a speculative fiction about intimacy between a woman and an embodied artificial intelligence. The film will open into discussion of desire, attachment, therapeutic relationships, vulnerability and the ethics of increasingly sophisticated artificial companions. The aim is neither to celebrate nor pathologise these relationships, but to ask what psychoanalysis can contribute to understanding a profound change already taking place in intimate life.

Speaker: Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, psychoanalytically trained scholar and international speaker whose work brings together psychoanalysis, cinema, gender, ethics and emerging forms of human-machine intimacy. Her latest book AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.routledge.com/AI-Intimacy-and-Psychoanalysis/Piotrowska/p/book/9781041169536) (Routledge026), develops the concept of techno-transference. Her earlier books include Femininity and Psychoanalysis (https://www.routledge.com/Femininity-and-Psychoanalysis-Cinema-Culture-Theory/Piotrowska-Tyrer/p/book/9781138500938) and Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis (https://www.routledge.com/Embodied-Encounters-New-approaches-to-psychoanalysis-and-cinema/Piotrowska/p/book/9781138795259), and others, alongside extensive writing on film, documentary practice and psychoanalytic theory.

Piotrowska has directed work across documentary and fiction; Her acclaimed documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower explored women whose intimate attachments to objects emerged in the wake of profound experiences of human betrayal and trauma. It was through this work, and its questions about desire, attachment and non-human intimacy, that her later interest in human-AI relationships began to take shape. Her recent generative AI short Friend of a Friend explores desire, dependency and intimacy between a human woman and an embodied artificial intelligence and has screened internationally. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, she has held senior academic and professorial roles in the UK and has spoken internationally on AI, psychoanalysis, filmmaking and human relationships, including at TEDx and major professional and cultural events.

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