Stigma shame and secrecy, Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska

What happens, at a psychological level, when a person develops a close relationship with AI? Can AI love them back? And what does this attachment reveal about human desire, projection and responsibility?

A groundbreaking study into the ethical and psychological implications of human-AI relationships, AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis by Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska, academic, writer and filmmaker,  addresses the hugely topical, but hardly new, question of our emotional bonds with machines.

To find out more about this I caught up with Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska when she was recently in Dublin.

Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska talks about her background, her new book, Freud, AI models and more.

About Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska:

Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, trained psychologist, and psychoanalytic life coach. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and supervises doctoral students at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Staffordshire.

Her documentary work includes Married to the Eiffel Tower ( 2008), a critically acclaimed and internationally broadcast film exploring unconventional human attachments, which established her international reputation as a filmmaker working at the intersection of psychology and human experience.

She is the author of The Cinema of Agnieszka Holland: Anger and Ethics (Routledge, 2026), Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (Routledge, 2014 & 2023), and The Nasty Woman and the Neo-Femme Fatale in Contemporary Cinema (Routledge, 2019).

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