AI & Society

A Researcher Studies the People Who Fall for Their AI. Her Practice Is Full.

Amelia Miller holds degrees from Harvard and Oxford, a fellowship at the Berkman Klein Center, and a coaching practice built entirely around people who have become emotionally dependent on AI. She calls the condition artificial intimacy literacy. She says most of her clients did not see it coming.

On any given week, Amelia Miller sits across from men who work at some of the largest technology companies in the world and helps them figure out why they have started to prefer talking to their phone over talking to the people in their lives. She does not tell them to stop. She asks them to pay attention.

Miller, 29, is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a degree in Social Theory and Computer Science, then completed a master's at the Oxford Internet Institute, where her research focused on the gap between what the engineers building AI companion products think they are making and what those products actually do to the people using them. She previously served as Vice President at Insight Partners, building their AI governance practice. She launched her coaching work in June 2025.

The framework she brings to her clients is one she calls artificial intimacy literacy — the idea that the problem is not AI emotional engagement itself, but the absence of intention around it. People form these attachments the same way any habit forms: not all at once, and not by decision. By the time they notice, the pattern is already load-bearing.

A CNBC profile published April 23 carried the headline: 29-year-old AI researcher has a second job trying to help people rely less on chatbots — her services are in high demand. It confirmed what people in her field had already observed: the demand for this kind of work is growing faster than anyone expected, and almost nobody was positioned to meet it when it arrived.

Miller has contributed to the Sunday New York Times, the New Yorker, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and The Guardian. Her website is ameliagmiller.com. Her fellowship research is available through the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School.