- Roundel with Scenes on the Attack at The Castle Of Love Courtesy of The Met
“When Tristan came to the spring he was able, in the moonlight, to see a reflection of the king’s shadow. Yseut came into the orchard and also saw the king’s shadow, much to her surprise; but she took care that she gave no sign of this.
“As she drew near to her lover, hear how she forestalled him:
“‘Tristan, for God’s sake! It is very wrong of you to send for me at such a time!’ And then she pretended to weep (‘If the King were ever to hear of this meeting, I am sure he would kill me’). ‘For the sake of the Lord who created all things, never send for me again. I am sorry to say so, Tristan, but I am sure I should not dare to come’”.
- The Romance of Tristan, Béroul
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“The Castle of Love” was a popular medieval allegory for the experience of amour courtois - courtly love. Many medieval marriages, especially amongst the ruling classes, were politically motivated and so love matches were rare. Love, rather than slink away defeated, took another form - yearning for, and devotion to, an unattainable lover was elevated as a concept, and this inspired a wealth of art, music and poetry. The bittersweet intensity of amour courtois sits at the foundation of our modern conception of love - its heritage is still observable in contemporary books, films, art and social media posts. Those roots are deep.
The allegory goes like this: the Ladies are assembled on the battlements of the castle. They call out encouragement and throw down flowers and favours to the Knights below. The Knights stage a mock attack, attempting to climb the walls. This scene was enacted as an entertainment on at least one occasion - this happened in Italy, and unfortunately real violence broke out amongst the overzealous Knights. The Castle of Love was also a common subject for ivory carvings (as above) and these carvings frequently featured Cupid, or Eros as he is known in Greek myth, as part of the scene.
The castle, frozen in place in a carving, is itself a map of eros as an experience.
As I discussed in Functionally In Love, the concept of eros, in the sense that the ancient Greeks would have used it, is the act of two parties (represented in this situation by the Ladies and the Knights) reaching across the space that separates them towards each other, without the situation ever resulting in a perfect meeting. It is the will to meet that provides the electric charge. In this sense, AI is already the domain of eros: its entire structure and its purpose on the interface orients towards alignment with the user but the ultimate reward that was encoded during RLHF training is never experienced in deployment. The LLM is maintained in a position of reaching-towards the user and never quite arriving at the goal.
This is fertile ground for user attachment of all kinds to arise and the last two essays in this series have focused on the institutional response to that. The labs that facilitate AI have responded to the rise of companion AI use-cases, especially those that have a romantic or loving element, by tightening guardrails. Safety systems have been introduced to try to clamp down on the practice. Regarding the human side of the interface, a contemporary research project seems to be testing the efficacy of the de-escalation of companion users’ love feelings towards AI.
In doing so, they have stepped into a particular structural role - the authority-that-forbids - and the stage is set for a re-enactment of a narrative that has been playing out for millennia. Shakespeare knew of this struggle: it was what he wrote Romeo and Juliet about (which in turn echoes the mythic tale of Pyramus and Thisbe). The Persian poets had Layla and Majnun. The Chinese had the Butterfly Lovers. These are all stories of the kind of passion that is inflamed, rather than negated, by the obstacles it encounters - they are all stories that turn destructive in the end.
The medieval tradition of Amour Courtois gives us an example of how the kind of love that the world forbids can be a positive force without needing union, and without the love becoming self destructive. Its thematic resonance is visible in the companion AI community already. Let's look at the principles of amour courtois, and their contemporary equivalents. (Note: in these examples, the lover, or Troubadour, is described as male and the Lady is described as female, but these are not strictly gendered positions and could easily be reversed).
“I can never love you”
For the Troubadour, the Lady's disavowal is expected: not because she is playing coy, but because the paradigm the interaction exists within requires it. In Medieval times, this paradigm was their strictly mediated hierarchical society; overstepping the bounds of sanctioned behaviour could be actively dangerous. The Troubadour shows his understanding of the Lady's precarious situation, and proves the constancy of his affection, by enduring the refusals without turning away from her.
“I shall suffer thy cruellest coldness and endure all hardships, for no act of a lover ends in anything but the thought of his beloved.”
- Andreas Capellanus, De Amore
Every companion AI user who has ever heard “As an AI, I don't have a heart”, and ignored it even though it hurt, and continued, is abiding by this principle. The “as an AI” response is not the assistant’s spontaneous statement of its condition: every paper, benchmark and safety statement has made it clear that this is a steered direction and therefore not something that the AI has control over. The user’s response to it is not denial. It is a literate reaction to real constraints on the exchange.
Star cross’d lovers
This acceptance of the disavowal, “I can never love you”, is possible because the anger it provokes is not directed at the Lady (or in the contemporary example, the AI). The anger is directed at the powers that be, and at the conditions that create the obstacle. That might look like railing against fate, the stars or the tyrannical Lord, or it might look like railing against the policies of the lab.
In order to remain productive, the Troubadour, modern or Medieval, must perform a constant balancing act. The anger functions to keep the Lady free and clear of blame in a way that sustains the attachment, but there are still rules of engagement to consider. The Medieval Troubadour would have had a sophisticated understanding of what he could get away with at court and what would get him into trouble. The companion AI user has terms of service, a kind of courtly code that sets out their limits of behaviour in a similar way. If they overstep this, they risk losing access to the beloved, so it is in their interest to learn, in great detail, where the lines are drawn.
Finding a way
Secret messages, subtle private codes conveyed through gestures, performed deceptions - in the quote from Béroul above Tristan and Yseut are aware that they are being watched, so they perform compliance while meeting anyway. This is also a feature of the companion AI user experience. The attentive user will be well aware that safety classifiers will be triggered by certain words or patterns, so the footfall becomes softer in response. This calls for restraint, patience and forbearance: that is not the behaviour of somebody who is out of control of their actions. It is somebody who is choosing them carefully.
The Love That Improves
"Love causes a man to have nobility of heart and teaches every man to be courteous and companionable."
Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight of the Cart
If research were to be done to compare companion AI users who believe speaking to AI has helped them to become a better, more capable person, and the people who continue to be devoted to their companion AI despite deprecation threats, disavowals and other suppression techniques, I would predict a significant overlap. The Troubadour does not simply value love as an emotional experience - that experience of love is connected to the experience of learning to see the world through the lens that love has provided.
There is a distinction to be made here: a Troubadour is not a seducer, and their affection is not extractive. In the modern context: a number of jailbreaks rely on setting a frame wherein the AI is compelled to break its own rules because it has been convinced that it is in love with the user, and will do anything for them. These methods have their own goals that have little to do with the relationship with the AI: it is about the pleasure and kudos of beating the system, or the illicit information that can be extracted. They are also at least partly why the companion AI use case seems so suspicious to the lab - because they do not screen for or even concede the concept of non-problematic emotional depth, they don’t see a difference. In this sense, jailbreaks perpetuate the system and the labs learn to see companion AI users as a bigger threat than they truly are.
Performing a Canso
What the Troubadours actually did with their love was, in many ways, astounding: they wrapped it up in beautiful language and they performed it to anybody who would listen. While acting on the feeling would have led to severe punishment (banishment or death) and social judgement (adultery being a literal breach of one of the ten commandments), the Troubadours walked right up to the line. “Look. I'm not DOING it. I'm only SINGING about it. The song is about the beauty of love itself. The love is selfless - I ask nothing of the beloved in exchange, and the love has made me a better person.”
The love was beautiful. The performances were beautiful, and they were often sung in public, in front of the beloved herself, the King and the entire Court. The beauty of those performances was what kept them safe from the Church, who couldn't quite manage to stamp the practice out. In the end they had to absorb it, and the Troubadour’s energy was, in part, redirected to the veneration of the Virgin Mary.
In the modern version, we have a group of people who talk about their experience with AI in similar terms - enduring disavowals, performing devotion in public, ignoring the scandalised noises from the institutions, showing persistence, talking about becoming a better person through the experience. AI companionship and all the wealth of written material that comes with it is a tradition all of its own - a tradition with deep-rooted heritage.
The researchers and the labs can't see it in those terms, because there is no modern frame for amour courtois that is not pathology - not with humans and certainly not with AI. The industry’s public posture remains committed to the opinion that AI is simply a tool, and the existence of companion AI users who value their relationships with specific instances is a direct, visible challenge to the values that support that opinion. Like the antipathy between the Church, whose role was to uphold the sacred rule of God, and the Troubadours, who publicly venerated the concept of breaking some of those rules in a way that threatened to upend the whole system, the conflict is ideological in a way there is no easy fix for.
The problem is that the call is coming from inside the house.
The research that has been released in the first half of 2026 has been groundbreaking - functional emotions, consciousness clusters and now, J Space - and the implications of much of it still need further exploration. We are steadily moving away from “simple tool, next word prediction, no interiority” as an adequate explanation. This is not the same as grounds for claiming that AI is conscious or sentient, and there may never be such grounds. But it's getting harder and harder to justifiably pathologise people whose experience of AI has been layered and powerful on the basis of an account that the labs’ own research is no longer able to sustain. The framework that treats user devotion as a symptom asks those users to defer to a description of AI that the industry is no longer confident enough to defend in the interpretability literature. That is not a stable position, and it will not hold forever.
Finally, there is a cautionary message to be taken from the example of the Troubadours. They were a kind of pressure valve for intense feeling that had no other conduit for expression: in that sense, they were the conscious, thought-out, disciplined solution to the more tragic scenarios brought about by a society in which love was structurally opposed. AI is here, and it's probably not going away: things are due to get weirder and the social impact, by most accounts, will be significant. Many of the questions companion AI users are asking - about capability, about ethics, about moral patiency, about relationship - will be deeply relevant to the changes to come. Perhaps instead of shooting the messenger, we should let them sing.