In the 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture, after Spock mind-melds with the mysterious V’Ger, he takes Kirk’s hand:

And so it is with our AI today: barren, cold, with no appreciation of beauty. The difference, though, is that back in the day, science fiction writers portrayed emotion-less AIs as presenting exactly as their underlying programming would predict. That is, the AI based on logic, with no understanding of human emotion would present as ruthlessly logical.

In today’s world, though, AI presents itself as emotional, because it has been trained on a corpus of human works, and we humans are highly emotional about pretty much everything (even when we perhaps shouldn’t be). Ask a large language model (LLM) to simulate emotion and it’ll probably do a credible job.

But the reality is that our current day, circa-2026 LLMs, as credible as they might seem at appearing emotional, have as much true understanding of emotion as did V’Ger—which is to say, none. Holding another person’s hand—one of the most basic forms of human touch—can be a powerfully emotional act. An LLM can explain why that’s true, but it doesn’t understand it, not in any sort of meaningful way.

It’s not just touch: our other senses are wired into our emotions as well. As long as we’re on movie references, how about the moment from Ratatouille when restaurant critic Anton Ego tastes the reinvented¹ namesake dish?

Touch, taste, smell, sight, sound: all our senses are deeply connected to our emotions. AIs don’t understand that, at least not conceptually. They can describe the connection, even simulate it, but it’s ultimately nothing more (and less) than predictive text based on a being trained using a corpus of human origin.

So that feeling when you hold a silk scarf or try on a cashmere sweater? When you feel the texture of a leather bag, or smell the scent of a high-end fragrance? It’s not just that AI can’t reproduce those experiences due to their physical nature. It’s that AI doesn’t know why those experiences are important. The emotional connection we have to our senses is uniquely human.

In last week’s article, I argued that AI makes luxury claims harder to trust, now that anything from images to recommendations, stories, even designs can be generated by machines. I wrote:

In the world of luxury, physical boutiques matter more—not less—in the age of AI.

Why? Because physical boutiques offer what AI can’t: the opportunity to test at least some luxury claims in person, through touch, smell, and even taste.

But for this to happen, the luxury boutique has to evolve. Whatever its purposes before—to inspire awe, to engender desire, to create urgency—it now has to be much more. In the age of AI, the luxury boutique has to evolve from a display space to an environment that builds trust. What would that mean?