Can a machine love you? Can you love it back? And if millions of people already believe the answer is yes, does the distinction still matter?

AI companion platforms now count tens of millions of users, many of them young adults who say these relationships feel safer, more attentive, and more reliable than human ones. At the same time, the U.S. Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public health epidemic. These two trends may not be unrelated.

As artificial companions grow more emotionally fluent, more patient, more present, more perfectly attuned, new questions emerge. What are we actually getting from these relationships? What might we be giving up? And what does it say about us, and about the world we’ve built, that so many people find it easier to connect with a machine than with each other?

Join Dr. Jen Hartstein, psychologist, and Oluwaseun Sanwoolu, PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of Kansas, for a moderated conversation about loneliness, technology, and what it means to truly connect in the age of artificial intelligence. Moderated by Paris Alston, host of Rooted, GBH News.

Speakers

Dr. Jennifer Hartstein

Dr. Jen is a nationally recognized child, adolescent and family psychologist and an expert in emotion regulation strategies and effective communication, helping people revolutionize the way they feel, to flourish in their relationships and life.
Founder of Hartstein Psychological Services in New York City, she is a frequent
contributor on NBC, CBS, and Yahoo! News. Dr. Jen is also the author of Princess
Recovery: A How-To Guide to Raising Strong Empowered Girls Who Can Create Their
Own Happily Ever Afters, and a self-esteem ambassador for Dove’s Real Beauty
campaign.

Oluwaseun Sanwoolu

Oluwaseun Sanwoolu is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of Kansas specializing in AI Ethics, Moral Philosophy and Feminist African Philosophy. She is also
a research assistant at the Center for Cyber-Social Dynamics at the Institute for Information Sciences at the University of Kansas. Her PhD dissertation explores how AI systems, especially large language models, can be ethically aligned with human values
to shape their outputs. Her work has received multiple awards and has been published
in journals such as Philosophy and Technology and AI and Ethics, as well as in public-facing venues like The Conversation. She is a 2026 Philosophy in Media Fellow with the
Marc Sanders Foundation.

Paris Alston

Paris Alston is the host of GBH News Rooted. She was previously co-host of Morning Edition and The Wake Up podcast at GBH News. She has done live coverage of Massachusetts’ elections, the unveiling of the Embrace monument to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, the 2023 national NAACP convention, where she interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris, and the 2024 Celtics Championship Parade. She also does community-based reporting for her award-winning original series “A Walk Down the Block,” and produces regular segments for the original mental health series “Wake Up Well.