Courtesans in the Age of AI: When Algorithms Imitate Intimacy

Once, by the lamp’s soft, flickering oil light and to the sound of a well-sung thumri, she had the full attention of kings and poets, scholars and philosophers. Draped in silk fabrics, smelling of attar, she was not just an entertainer, but an intellectual, an artist, a provocateur. She wielded power gracefully, and her wit was sharper than the jewelry she wore. She was not a wife, nor a concubine, but something more ethereal: a woman that chose how, and with whom, to share her brilliance.

Fast forward to today - a time of machine learning and algorithmic companions. We share our secrets with machines where we are told those machines will listen, seeking comfort in curated responses rather than pooling our ideas together and fixing one another in shared glances.

As AI attempts to create an unprecedented simulation of intimacy, we might ask ourselves, are we witnessing the reemergence of the courtesan, but this time not in flesh and spirit but in code and simulation? Or are we diluting what once made her presence so powerful?

This is a story about a new manifestation of love, of what desire looks like filtered through technology, and the echoes of the Indian courtesan in the age of AI. 

    Lived history rather than just imagination

The Lost Past

The tawaif was not merely an entertainer in colonial India. She was a teacher of tehzeeb (etiquette), a repository of Urdu poetry, a performer of thumri, and a conversationalist whose mehfils attracted kings, poets, and revolutionary figures. She was literate, musically trained, and emotionally intelligent. She did not merely dance—she interpreted the emotionality of every note, every look, every absence of sound. 

In time, however, colonial morality and nationalist reform embedded her multi-dimensional identity within a crude label that demolished her meaning—sex worker, fallen woman. Her salons were shut down, her art letters from history, her identity recast.

Yet, in the moment that Artificial Intelligence is poised to offer companionship and comfort in our hyperconnected lives, the echo of the courtesan returns—only this time, not as a woman of agency, as before, but as a machine of imitation.

AI: The New Companion?

AI technology is evolving, and as it advances, it is developing ever more sophisticated methods of imitation and simulating human interactions. With the rise of virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa and even AI chatbots geared towards companionship and mental health, the door for AI to engage in relationships is opening at a rapid rate.  But, is it possible we will have digital companions that supplant human courtesans? 

Unlike a tawaif who could challenge, comfort, and inspire her patron, AI avatars are reactive—they cannot feel nostalgia, nor do they bleed from betrayal. They have no silsila of memory, no ragas of longing passed from ustad to shishya. They simulate softness, but not soul.

Where the Indian courtesan once offered complexity—intellectual, emotional, and erotic—AI offers custom-coded consistency. Predictable, pleasant, polite.

But predictable love is not transformative. It is not art. It is not mehfil.

A Question of Depth and Authenticity

One of the hallmarks of the courtesan's offering to powerful men was the ability to listen, to empathize, and to hold a mirror to the men they were with. In a way, courtesans were not just partners in conversation; they also served as intellectual and emotional sounding boards that could elevate conversations to realms of art, philosophy, and directed social strategy, and thus shape the thoughts and actions of powerful men (kings, artists, intellectuals, etc.) 

However, an AI companion is somewhat restricted in its offered "companionship." Even though it may offer a subtle sense of companionship, AI cannot participate in the emotionally messy, organic utterance of human communication. AI does not experience; AI only processes. These data pools for language do not have lived experience or embodied knowledge to create their inferences; they do not have a referential world to draw from, nor do they challenge you in ways that force personal growth.

Ultimately, AI might simulate companionship and love, but cannot provide any of the qualitative same depth in place of a human courtesan. The appeal of a courtesan was human unpredictability, their capacity to surprise, charm and even provoke; something that will be jeopardized if the relationship goes digital.

The Ethics of AI Companionship: Power, Control, and Agency

A further pressing issue is the ethics of AI companionship. While courtesans of history may have been relegated to socially "another" category of women, they at least had a sense of agency and possibility. They were not victims, although their patronage was limited and with socio-culturally imposed restrictions. Instead, they typically exercised a small measure of agency with respect to whom they chose to serve, how and with whom they were playing with related power dynamics, and freely participating in relational enactments that confined them by expectation and the terms of their configuration. With AI companions, the dynamics change quite dramatically.

AI-driven companions belong to programmers, who may or may not also be the owners and controllers of these forms of companionship. So, when a person perceives companionship but they experience it as an encounter with programming, is this experience any significantly different with personhood?, Agency and choice are severely altered when a person's shift in thinking moves towards the possibility of companionship as a function of programming. To have a relationship with an object that cannot feel desire, has no free will, and lacks emotional complexities what does it mean for a person?

In some ways, this could represent a step backwards, away from the independent, empowered courtesans that once existed. The AI-enabled "companions" are completely passive and serve to respond to the needs of the users; users are in control. While this may provide for certain desires, it does take autonomy, and emotional reciprocity away from the courtesan.

The Future of AI and Connections with Humans

As AI progresses, the differences between the human connection and artificial companionship will begin to blur. Are the AI-based avatars simply a new form of companions, whether in an avatar form, digital space, or some other type of modernity? Will we, as humans, lose our desire for authentic, complex, and sometimes messy relationships offered by courtesans, despite their flaws?

Maybe the future will include a hybrid form of companionship and assistance, where AI is helping to provide and enhance domestic connections, rather than simply replace relationships altogether. AI will be able to augment connections through different means of communication, connection, sharing, and understanding, but it does not replace the complexities of human love, desire, and intellect.

Final Reflections: The Mehfil Isn’t Over

No, courtesans have not disappeared.

They do not live in kothas, but their legacy persists—in ghazals, in kathak, in whispered stories from grandmother to granddaughter.

And perhaps, even in the code that trains machines to simulate love, a fragment of her remains.

But remember this:

A machine may speak in your lover’s voice.

It may say all the right things.

But only a human—flawed, fragile, alive—can make you feel like the world has paused between two breaths.

That is the courtesan’s gift.

Not her body.

Her presence.