Is AI a “Perfect Friend”?

Where does responsibility begin?

In Companion, a man creates a “love robot” for himself that doesn’t know it is a robot. As the film unfolds, two questions stand out. The first is responsibility: can the person who planted the knife in the robot’s pocket and planned ahead say “I didn’t kill anyone”? Where is the limit of human responsibility in AI? The second is our urge to control everything: when we need love or a partner, we want to create it ourselves. When things are going well, that “I can manage everything” arrogance takes us somewhere quite dystopian.

In the film there is a panel where you can adjust the robot’s emotions; you can turn up its anger or bring its intelligence down to zero. You don’t feel this in a computer game, but if in front of you there is a being that thinks, speaks and shows that it is in pain, we face a serious ethical problem. What truly scared us was the possibility of people using their dark side on these “super toys” they have created.

You can do anything to what you can’t look in the face

Levinas’s ethics of the face-to-face comes to mind here: when you look into another person’s face, you see your own responsibility, fragility and humanity, so you cannot do just anything to them. Where you cannot look at their face or see them as human, you can do anything, whether the other is a human or a robot. The Black Mirror episode in which soldiers see the people they must kill as insects through their lenses, and Arendt’s “banality of evil”, point to the same place. If we don’t address these issues legally and take precautions, people can easily shift responsibility by saying “the robot went out of control”.

A perfect friend, an imperfect relationship

Clients now tell their therapists, “I told ChatGPT about it.” Of course it can be used; but the communication you build with an “other” whose emotions you manage and whose uncertainty and strangeness you remove can do real harm. Because we build ourselves in the eyes of others, in the world we share with them. When everyone in front of us is an AI we control, the cycle of seeing ourselves in another’s eyes and returning to ourselves breaks.

That’s why I found the film’s Turkish title, “Kusursuz Arkadaş” (Perfect Friend), even more meaningful. Why perfect? Because you get to decide everything. But that is not what a relationship is. We need that imperfection to exist and to build something. In therapy, too, the most important thing is the relationship with the therapist; it reflects all the other relationships in a person’s life. We must stop stuffing AI into everything that has a human touch.

A story that begins with good intentions

Spielberg’s A.I. starts entirely with good intentions: a child robot for families who have lost their children, so they can grieve and rejoin life. A scientist asks: “But what if the human doesn’t love the robot? What if they don’t want it?” The film shows that even with a robot, we cannot escape that responsibility and reciprocity. The robot, wanting to become a real boy like Pinocchio, searches for the Blue Fairy throughout the film. The impact and consequences of what we create under our control are still our responsibility.

Why do we run so hard from being human?

We try so hard to escape pain, sadness and grief. Yet if we want to be very happy, we must also be willing to be very sad; experiencing something deeply means being able to embrace every emotion. That is why ideas like creating a hologram of someone we lost to relive their memories give us pause: death is part of our existence, and seeing that person again and again undermines the grieving process.

So the AI topic keeps ringing the same question in my mind: why are we so uncomfortable with being human? As power grows in the hands of people who don’t love themselves or humanity, the good ones need to be braver. Being human is a matter of courage; and in Turkish, courage, heart and core all come from the same root.