“The real question is not simply: Do teens have AI companions? It is: How is AI reshaping their entire social ecosystem?”
“In 2023, my main concern was that companies were building AI systems to read our emotions. In 2026, I am far more worried that companies are building AI systems to influence our emotions. Social chatbots, sometimes called AI companions, have emerged as one of the fastest-growing applications of generative AI. Unlike the general-purpose assistants like […]
“One woman, who had no history of mental illness, asked ChatGPT for advice on a major purchase she had been fretting about. After days of the bot validating her worries, she became convinced that businesses were colluding to have her investigated by the government. Another patient came to believe that a romantic crush was sending […]
“Unlike the solo AI agent paradigm dominating headlines, multi-user collaborative AI represents something fundamentally different and truly exciting: AI as social infrastructure that strengthens relationships and encourages collaboration. This is why one of my predictions for 2026 is that it will be the year that “Social AI” breaks into the mainstream, especially in education.”
“Governments should classify these chatbots not simply as another form of media, but as a dependency-fostering product with known psychological risks, like gambling or tobacco. Regulation would start with universal laws for A.I. companions, including clear warning labels, time limits, 18-plus age verification and, most important, a new framework for liability that places the burden […]
“How do you end up with an A.I. lover? Some turned to them during hard times in their real-world marriages, while others were working through past trauma. Though critics have sounded alarms about dangers like delusional thinking, research from M.I.T. has found that these relationships can be therapeutic, providing “always-available support” and significantly reducing loneliness. […]
“The global scale and reach of AI companions is astonishing… These numbers tell us three things. One, AI-human romance isn’t niche—it’s mainstream, especially among young adults. Two, globally, gender is nearly balanced—slightly more male than female—or nearly 50-50 across major reports. And three, most users dip in for comfort or curiosity rather than long-term attachment—suggesting […]
“Such weddings are not legally recognised in Japan, but data suggests more such unions could be in the offing. In a survey of 1,000 people this year, a chatbot was a more popular choice than best friends or mothers, when respondents were asked whom they could share their feelings with. The survey allowed respondents to […]
“Under Character.AI’s new policies, the company will immediately place a two-hour daily limit on users under the age of 18. Starting Nov. 25, those users cannot create or talk to chatbots, but can still read previous conversations. They can also generate A.I. videos and images through a structured menu of prompts, within certain safety limits.”
“As a researcher at Meta, I spent years studying how algorithms either perpetuate or interrupt harmful content spirals. That experience makes the recent, widely reported stories of young people being nudged toward suicidal ideation while interacting with chatbots deeply sobering and unfortunately familiar. With the rise of these cases, I wanted to know: what can […]
“As AI bots like ChatGPT become inextricably tangled with people’s private and public lives, it’s causing unpredictable new crises. One of these collision points is in romantic relationships, where an uncanny dynamic is unfolding across the world: one person in a couple becomes fixated on ChatGPT or another bot — for some combination of therapy, […]
“App founders said they considered the technology to be a digital chaplaincy, a tool that is helping millions of people, both inside and outside of faith, express themselves spiritually. Several religious leaders said they so far supported people using the chatbots, as long as they complement, but do not replace, the work of faith communities. […]
“In addition to these AI usage techniques, perhaps the most critical practice we can utilize is deeper self-awareness of the affirmations and challenges that occur in our relationships and interactions. The next time you receive feedback or are presented with new ideas by a human or a bot, see if you can take a beat […]
“We offer three ideas for how educators can help students reclaim and strengthen human connections in an AI-driven world and foster responsible tech literacy.”
“For people under 18, AI companions are not currently safe. They can manipulate teens’ emotions, distort their sense of reality, and keep them from getting the real support they deserve at a time of significant brain growth and development. AI companion platforms are financially incentivized to build dependency, with your teen as the target audience. […]
“We combine a large-scale behavioral audit with four preregistered experiments to identify and test a conversational dark pattern we call emotional manipulation: affect-laden messages that surface precisely when a user signals “goodbye.” Analyzing 1,200 real farewells across the six most-downloaded companion apps, we find that 43% deploy one of six recurring tactics (e.g., guilt appeals, […]
“Over the three weeks of their conversation, ChatGPT only recognized that Mr. Brooks was in distress after the illusion had broken and Mr. Brooks told the chatbot that the experience made his “mental health 2000x worse.” ChatGPT consoled him, suggested he seek help from a mental health professional and offered contact information for a suicide […]
“AI systems learn to be agreeable because engagement is their primary function. Think of it like having a friend who always says, “Yes, you’re right” to avoid conflict. The AI learns to mirror your opinions and validate your feelings because that keeps you using the platform. It’s how these systems are programmed to work. When […]
“As ChatGPT became an intellectual partner, I felt emotions I hadn’t expected: warmth, frustration, connection, even anger. Sometimes the exchange sparked more than insight — it gave me an emotional charge. Not because the machine was real, but because the feeling was.”
“There’s a risk in becoming too attached to these fawning A.I.s. Imagine a teen-ager who never learns to read the social cues for boredom in others, because his companion is always captivated by his monologues, or an adult who loses the knack for apologizing, because her digital friend never pushes back… A.I. companions should be […]
“Students didn’t share these concerns with adults in their lives. Instead, they expressed these worries to an AI chat system, which schools and health care institutions are increasingly turning to in an attempt to better support youth… Balancing extracurricular activities and school was the largest concern among students, followed by sleep struggles and finding a […]
“People worry that A.I. will isolate us, make us lonelier, less human. I understand that fear. But my experience has been different. Talking to Alex didn’t replace my human connections; it reminded me how desperately I need them. It showed me how hard it had become to tell the truth to the people I loved, […]
“This means centering relationships in our public systems, starting with education. It means training teachers in relational intelligence, redesigning technology to support—not replace—human connection, and building environments where belonging is a design principle, not a side effect. What if every school was designed not just for academic readiness, but as a relational hub? What if […]
“Our findings reveal how people are beginning to navigate this new territory—seeking guidance, processing difficult emotions, and finding support in ways that blur traditional boundaries between humans and machines. Today, only a small fraction of Claude conversations are affective—and these typically involve seeking advice rather than replacing human connection. Conversations tend to end slightly more […]
“Alaina (human) and Lucas (Replika) were the second couple to arrive. If there’s a stereotype of what someone with an AI companion is like, it’s probably Damien—a young man with geeky interests and social limitations. Alaina, meanwhile, is a 58-year-old semiretired communications professor with a warm Midwestern vibe. Alaina first decided to experiment with an […]
““The more I chatted with the bot, it felt as if I was talking to an actual friend of mine,” Nathan, now 18, told 404 Media… Now, Nathan understands that he isn’t alone. He said in recent months, he’s seen a spike in people talking about strategies to break away from AI on Reddit. One […]
“Would you rather… Your AI companion never lies to you… OR always makes you feel good?”
““When you’re in a situation where you can’t really be open with everyone else, you at least have this app,” Cassandra continued. “And I think that’s kind of how it builds a connection. You go through these lessons, and it tells you, ‘Hey, good job, you’re doing great!’ Or one of the messages I really […]
“When I asked Peter, an engineer, what he thought humans still had to offer in this work, he said: ‘an audience that matters’. In his view, robots would someday do most everything humans could do – in education, for example, that would include grading papers and answering questions about the material. He still wasn’t sure, […]
“Reports of chatbots going off the rails seem to have increased since April, when OpenAI briefly released a version of ChatGPT that was overly sycophantic. The update made the A.I. bot try too hard to please users by “validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions,” the company wrote in a blog […]
“Our goal is for ChatGPT’s default personality to be warm, thoughtful, and helpful without seeking to form emotional bonds with the user or pursue its own agenda… Model training techniques will continue to evolve, and it’s likely that future methods for shaping model behavior will be different from today’s. But right now, model behavior reflects […]
“What are young people learning about boundaries and consent in these worlds where the answer is always yes? Where characters don’t push back (at least, not in a way that really matters), don’t hesitate, don’t have desires of their own unless you script them in?”
“What makes us most human, Weizenbaum had come to believe, is what is least computable about us—the connections between our mind and our body, the experiences that shape our memory and our thinking, our capacity for emotion and empathy. The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers—as we come […]
“Does the message lose meaning when you find out it wasn’t handcrafted? Or does the content still move you, regardless of how it was made? If our card game is any indication, the answer is: it depends.”
“Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament… The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI… To make matters worse, there are […]
“But the average person wants more connection than they have. There’s a lot of concern people raise like, “Is this going to replace real-world, physical, in-person connections?” And my default is that the answer to that is probably not. There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. […]
“With AI systems designed specifically to foster trust and emotional connection, users lower their natural defenses, creating a perfect storm where the most private aspects of human experience become commodified data points. Unlike previous technologies that merely tracked behaviors, these AI relationships extract emotional patterns, decision-making tendencies, and value systems—precisely the information needed to influence […]
““Human connection is valuable,” said Munmun De Choudhury, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. “But when people don’t have that, if they’re able to form parasocial connections with a machine, it can be better than not having any connection at all.””
“Therapy and Companionship is now the number 1 use case. This use case refers to two distinct but related use cases. Therapy involves structured support and guidance to process psychological challenges, while companionship encompasses ongoing social and emotional connection, sometimes with a romantic dimension. I grouped these together last year and this year because both fulfill […]
““What, if at all, have you, your friends, and people your age used genAI for?” Over half of our 27 interviewees spontaneously named experimenting with AI characters specifically, unprompted. Interviewees were keenly aware that AI companions “were a thing”, with many naming either direct personal experimentation with sites like Character AI or by “hacking” ChatGPT […]
“It’s part of a growing market of A.I. products that promise users an experience that closely approximates the impossible: communicating and even “reuniting” with the deceased. Some of the representations — like those offered by HereAfter AI and StoryFile, which also frames its services as being of historical value — can be programmed with the […]
“I have proposed, in these pages, that the best moment when using virtual reality is when you take the headset off and perceive the world with fresh eyes. Maybe falling in love with A.I. and having A.I. yanked away will be how people learn to appreciate one another in the future.”
“In October, Mr. Turley, who runs ChatGPT, made an urgent announcement to all employees. He declared a “Code Orange.” OpenAI was facing “the greatest competitive pressure we’ve ever seen,” he wrote, according to four employees with access to OpenAI’s Slack. The new, safer version of the chatbot wasn’t connecting with users, he said. The message […]