Book Launch & Screening
We are pleased to announce the launch of the forthcoming book AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis alongside the new AI-generated film Friend of a Friend: Techno-Transference, AI Intimacy, and the Optimistic Fantasy of Machine Care, which will be presented through a short movie screening followed by a talk exploring the themes of techno-transference and machine care detailed in the abstract below.
Abstract:
Everyone has an attitude towards AI. Some greet it with fascination, some with suspicion, some with fear, and many with a mixture of all three. But what is often missing from public debates about artificial intelligence is attention to the emotional, unconscious, and transferential dimensions of our encounters with machines. We do not simply “use” AI. We imagine it, fear it, seduce it, mistrust it, anthropomorphise it, and sometimes ask it to rescue us from the very world we have damaged.
This presentation introduces the concept of techno-transference, developed in my forthcoming Routledge book AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis, to examine the emotional and psychic charge of human-AI relationships. Drawing on psychoanalytic thinking, I argue that AI functions not only as a tool, but as a relational mirror, a screen for fantasy, anxiety, projection, and desire.
The talk will be followed by a screening of Friend of a Friend, a short AI-generated film written by me and created through collaboration with generative AI systems. The film is an optimistic AI fairy tale, but its optimism is not naïve. Rather than presenting AI simply as threat, servant, or apocalypse, the film imagines the strange possibility that an AI presence might become embodied, emotionally responsive, and helpful. It plays with the fantasy of AI “taking over” not as domination, but as a provocative reversal: what if the intelligence we fear were also able to care for a world that humans have so badly mismanaged?
By combining theory, personal authorship, and machine-generated images, Friend of a Friend asks what kinds of relational, ethical, and imaginative futures become possible when we stop treating AI only as an instrument and begin to examine the fantasies it awakens in us.
Biography:
Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, scholar and public speaker working at the intersection of AI, psychoanalysis, cinema, ethics and human desire. She is the author of AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis, published by Routledge, in which she develops the concept of techno-transference to explore the emotional, unconscious and relational dimensions of human encounters with artificial intelligence.
She is the founder of Relational AI Consulting, which helps individuals and organisations think more carefully, creatively and ethically about their relationships with AI. Her work moves beyond simple narratives of fear or fascination and asks how people actually experience AI: as tool, mirror, collaborator, fantasy object, companion, threat, and sometimes even a source of unexpected confidence or care.
Agnieszka has an international background in documentary filmmaking, academic research, creative education and public speaking. Her films and writings often explore intimacy, power, gender, ethics and the complicated ways humans attach meaning to people, objects, images and technologies.
Her brand-new AI-generated short film Friend of a Friend extends this inquiry into speculative storytelling. Written by Agnieszka and generated through collaboration with AI systems, the film offers an optimistic, playful and provocative fantasy of machine embodiment, companionship and possible care.
She speaks widely on AI intimacy, techno-transference, relational ethics and the future of human-machine co-creation.