Artificial Intimacy: AI, Technology, and the Future of Relating
Collective Wisdom is our seasonal rhythm of communal, holistic learning. The belief that our need for human connection is enduring shapes these offerings. Our intent is to create an intentional space for inspiration, connection, deepening, and activation in service of collective healing.
This spring, we turn our attention to Artificial Intimacy.
As healing practitioners, tending to relationship is at the heart of our work. We are living and working at a moment when technology — and AI in particular — is reshaping how we relate, reflect, create, and seek support. These tools are increasingly present in healing spaces, creative processes, educational environments, and everyday life. What does this cultural moment ask of us?
Together, we will explore questions such as:
Where are AI and emerging technologies genuinely supportive of healing — and where do they pose ethical, relational, psychological, or systemic risks that demand discernment, restraint, or refusal?
In what ways do these tools increase access, reduce barriers, or offer new forms of scaffolding and support?
What are the risks of artificial intimacy — particularly around data privacy, surveillance, consent, and the commodification of vulnerability and how do these risks intersect with our ethical responsibilities as practitioners?
In what ways are these tools changing our attention, nervous systems, sense of self, and styles of relating?
What does “intimacy” mean in an era of artificial companions, automated reflection, and algorithmic attunement?
What is our role in supporting our client’s capacity for genuine connection in an increasingly disconnected and frictionless world?
This gathering intentionally holds both the possibilities and the dangers of AI, creating space for critical inquiry, ethical concern, and multiple perspectives.There will be a facilitated, interdisciplinary dialogue with practitioners working at the intersection of technology, psychology, embodiment, and social systems, followed by small-group reflection and integration. Collective Wisdom is designed not only to think together, but to metabolize insight into lived practice.
This gathering is for healers, therapists, facilitators, educators, creatives, technologists, and community builders who are curious about how intimacy, intelligence, and care are evolving—and who wish to remain in conscious relationship with these shifts.
We look forward to exploring, questioning, and cultivating wisdom together.
Container
This is a hybrid offering. We will gather in person at Shelterwood’s home base in Pioneer Square and virtually via Zoom.
This offering is eligible for 1.5 professional ethics CEUs.
Exchange
General public with CEUs — $44
General public without CEUs — $22
Shelterwood Members — included in your membership fee
Trevin Chow
He/Him
Trevin is the Chief Product Officer at Big Cartel, a technology company that helps artists and makers build and run their own online shops. Over more than two decades in technology, across startups and larger organizations, he has focused on creating tools that feel intuitive and human, even when the systems behind them are complex. His perspective on AI comes not only from working in the field, but from using it regularly in his own work and daily life, paying attention to how it changes the way he thinks and makes decisions. He is especially interested in how AI shapes trust, judgment, and human connection, particularly in professions where relationships are at the center of the work.
Dr. Alisha Guthery
PhD, LMHC, CATP
She/Her/Hers
Alisha is a licensed mental health counselor in Washington and holds a PhD in Counseling Education and Supervision. For over a decade, she has worked in the Seattle area addressing domestic and relational violence, particularly with youth. She integrates trauma-informed care, neurobiology, and embodied practices in her clinical work and is the creator of BRIDGES, a program that helps adolescents build emotional regulation, communication, and healthy relationship skills.
As a dyslexic clinician-scholar, Dr. Guthery engages artificial intelligence as a tool for accessibility and equity in counseling education. Clinically, she also explores AI-supported methods to help clients practice communication skills, particularly in high-conflict co-parenting and parallel parenting dynamics. She serves as a visiting professor at Palo Alto University and adjuncts at Antioch University and Walden University.
Rune Black
MSW, RSW
She/They
End of Life Doula, Queer, former youth-in-care specializing in frontline Harm Reduction in Outreach, Perinatal Substance Use and Internal Medicine in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. Currently located in Nova Scotia canada providing provincial Grief education and literacy. Rune has over a decade of Academic and frontline experience, as well as two decades of experiencing Social Systems that are currently collapsing with the rise of technology.
When it comes to AI and Social Work, Rune is interested in having conversations that challenge the need for AI to infiltrate every human field. Rune is curious within each intimate space if AI is able to be valuable within grief and complex human experiences, and if it should be. Rune has tremendous lived experience, academic critiques, and an overall understanding that being human is messy. Rune asks: is there a place for AI in Social Work and human connection with grief, loss, and the emotional healthcare field?