What did Yohan Lee argue in his lecture about AI and human connection?

Lee's central argument is that AI companionship removes friction, and friction is what genuine relationships require to produce growth. In My Holo Love, the heroine can switch off her holographic companion at the moment it might challenge or convict her. Lee argues that this capacity — to avoid accountability, conflict, and the hard work of forgiveness — is exactly what AI companionship cannot replicate from real human love or from a relationship with God.

What is My Holo Love and why did Lee choose it?

My Holo Love is a Netflix K-Drama about a woman with prosopagnosia, a face-recognition condition affecting 3% of the US population, who receives a holographic AI companion designed to be always present and incapable of leaving. Lee chose the drama because it portrays AI companionship not as a failure but as a success — the heroine forms a genuine emotional attachment — and because that success is precisely where the ethical question begins.

What does a Christian framework add to AI ethics that standard approaches miss?

Most AI ethics frameworks focus on harm at scale: algorithmic bias, surveillance, misinformation. These treat AI as a tool that might be misused. Lee argues that Christian theology asks a prior question: what is human longing for connection actually for? If people are made for genuine relationship — one that requires mutual accountability, embodied presence, and the capacity to be known — then a system that simulates connection without those properties occupies a space in someone's life that was designed for something different.

Yohan Lee: AI Can't Give You Ultimate Love

Dr. Yohan Lee, Biola's associate dean of technology, used My Holo Love to argue that AI companionship removes the friction that makes love real.

Darryl Jung
June 1, 2026
5 min read

Key Facts

Dr. Yohan Lee

Associate Dean for the Division of Technology; Associate Professor of Computer Science

Biola University, School of Science, Technology and Health (SSTH)

"Through the Lens of K-Drama" lecture series and in-person panel, Torrey Honors College

April 20, 2026, Andrews Banquet Room, Biola University campus

My Holo Love: How AI Reflects Our Need for Human Connection (9 min.)

My Holo Love — Netflix K-Drama about AI companionship and human loneliness

Dr. Jane E. Kim, associate professor of English, Torrey Honors College

13 scholars from across Biola University

https://youtube.com/watch?v=G0jcYosA80Q

"AI is here. It is impressive. But you can never have ultimate love and fulfillment from an AI."

Dr. Yohan Lee opens and closes his nine-minute lecture with the same sentence. The repetition is intentional. He is not delivering a warning. He is delivering a verdict, and he wants the audience to know where it is going before he takes them through the evidence.

The evidence is a Korean drama.

My Holo Love is a Netflix series about a woman with prosopagnosia, a condition that affects 3% of the US population and makes it impossible to recognize human faces. She receives a holographic AI companion, visible only through augmented reality glasses, designed to be always present, always attentive, and incapable of leaving. The show, as Lee describes it, "deeply explores love, loneliness, and the meaning of being human." Lee, associate dean for the Division of Technology in Biola University's School of Science, Technology and Health (SSTH) and an associate professor of computer science, chose the drama to examine what Christian faith reveals about AI ethics that technical and philosophical frameworks typically miss.

What the Companion Offers

Lee structures his lecture in three sections: AI and K-drama, AI and culture, AI and a biblical perspective. The first two establish the drama. The third is the argument.

On culture, he traces exactly how the heroine's attachment to the AI develops: "The woman starts asking her holo AI to be a non-judgmental drinking partner, so she doesn't have to drink alone after a particularly depressing day. She asks her holo AI for work advice, since she is too afraid to admit to her mom or boss that she is continuing to struggle in her job. And she starts to rely on the holo AI as she realizes how lonely she is as a working professional in a competitive work culture, where the economy is rough."

The attachment, Lee notes, is not naive. The heroine knows what the AI is. She uses it anyway because it meets real needs that nothing else in her life is meeting. That is what makes the drama's ethical territory interesting: it is not a story about delusion. It is a story about loneliness, and about a technology that works.

Lee identifies why AI companionship spreads beyond people with the heroine's specific isolation: "It's not because everyone is looking for a holo boyfriend or girlfriend, but because AI makes digital companions so easy and enticing to use, as opposed to the real friction and foibles endemic to becoming good boyfriends and girlfriends, and then husbands and wives."

What the Companion Can't Provide

The biblical section is where Lee's argument becomes specific. The AI companion, he notes, can be customized. The inventor built the hologram as "a perfect, more caring, more considerate, more romantic, and more handsome version of himself." The heroine can shape her AI boyfriend to match her preferences, her mood, her needs at any given moment. And she can turn him off.

"You see, the heroine can make her holo boyfriend look a certain way, talk a certain way, satiate her fantasies, never convict her, nor force her to forgive, reconcile, and restore the relationships of the people around her. It becomes too easy for her to cook with her AI boyfriend, fall asleep talking to her AI boyfriend, and then take off the holo glasses when he starts convicting her of her own morally dubious choices."

That last detail carries the argument. The AI companion can be switched off at the moment it might produce growth. Real relationships cannot. "She continues to get disappointed because her holo AI cannot fulfill the embodied reality of a human being," Lee says, "and the inventor does not mature into an admirable person because both of them need friction in life to truly grow up and enjoy what real life has to offer."

The two main characters share the same problem. The heroine cannot recognize faces; the inventor built an AI rather than develop his interpersonal skills. Each has found a way to avoid the friction that genuine relationship requires, and neither grows.

The Biblical Answer

Lee closes the lecture by quoting 1 Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." Then he delivers the line directly: "In Jesus we have God himself, not a hologram."

The distinction matters for how Lee frames what AI companionship cannot do. An AI companion can simulate presence, attention, and responsiveness. It cannot know a person — not in the sense the verse describes, the full knowing and being known that is the condition of genuine love. That kind of knowing requires a subject on the other side: something that can bear responsibility, that cannot be switched off, that pushes back.

For those in human relationships, Lee points to the Song of Solomon, which he calls "the greatest of all songs," as scripture's fullest account of love between two people. For those without, he argues that a life "directly with the Lord" offers the same quality of being fully known. Either way, his answer to the drama's central question is the same: what the AI companion offers is not what the loneliness is asking for.

"AI is here. It is impressive. But you can never have ultimate love and fulfillment from an AI."

The Torrey Context

Lee's lecture was part of "Through the Lens of K-Drama: How Korean Stories Reflect Our World," organized by Dr. Jane E. Kim, associate professor of English in the Torrey Honors College. The project, funded by a Biola University grant, brought together 13 scholars from across the university, each using a different K-Drama as a lens for questions in their own discipline. Other faculty contributors examined K-Pop fandom, the psychological impact of on-screen violence in Squid Game, Korea's culture of academic achievement, and the tradition of Korean romance.

"This public humanities project has been an amazing opportunity to collaborate with my brilliant students and with dear colleagues across the university with whom I don't usually get the chance to work together," said Kim. "My hope is that viewers of our project will also gain a deeper appreciation for the beauty and power of stories to translate the human experience, and that the project will also lead viewers to deeper cultural conversations and connections with family, friends and neighbors."

The series culminated in an in-person panel on April 20, 2026, at the Andrews Banquet Room on Biola's campus. The lectures are available on the "Through the Lens of K-Drama" YouTube channel with English and Korean subtitles.

Watch the full lecture | Read about SSTH

Quick Answers

What did Yohan Lee argue in his lecture about AI and human connection?
Lee's central argument is that AI companionship removes friction, and friction is what genuine relationships require to produce growth. In My Holo Love, the heroine can switch off her holographic companion at the moment it might challenge or convict her. Lee argues that this capacity — to avoid accountability, conflict, and the hard work of forgiveness — is exactly what AI companionship cannot replicate from real human love or from a relationship with God.
What is the "Through the Lens of K-Drama" series at Biola?
"Through the Lens of K-Drama: How Korean Stories Reflect Our World" is a cross-disciplinary lecture series organized by Dr. Jane E. Kim, associate professor of English in the Torrey Honors College. Funded by a Biola University grant, the series brought together 13 scholars from across the university to use Korean dramas as a lens for questions in their own fields, including psychology, theology, education, and computer science. It culminated in an in-person panel and Korean literature exhibit on April 20, 2026, on Biola's campus.
What is My Holo Love and why did Lee choose it?
My Holo Love is a Netflix K-Drama about a woman with prosopagnosia, a face-recognition condition affecting 3% of the US population, who receives a holographic AI companion designed to be always present and incapable of leaving. Lee chose the drama because it portrays AI companionship not as a failure but as a success — the heroine forms a genuine emotional attachment — and because that success is precisely where the ethical question begins.
What does a Christian framework add to AI ethics that standard approaches miss?
Most AI ethics frameworks focus on harm at scale: algorithmic bias, surveillance, misinformation. These treat AI as a tool that might be misused. Lee argues that Christian theology asks a prior question: what is human longing for connection actually for? If people are made for genuine relationship — one that requires mutual accountability, embodied presence, and the capacity to be known — then a system that simulates connection without those properties occupies a space in someone's life that was designed for something different.
Where can I watch Dr. Lee's full lecture?
The lecture "My Holo Love: How AI Reflects Our Need for Human Connection" is available on the Through the Lens of K-Drama YouTube channel. The video is 9 minutes and 15 seconds and includes English and Korean subtitles.