AI Companions Aren’t Causing Loneliness. They’re Exposing It
A Response to AI Frontiers and a Defense of the Lonely
A Familiar Tune, New Lyrics
I recently came across a piece from AI Frontiers: “A Glimpse into the Future of AI Companions.”
I clicked hoping for insight. Instead, I got déjà vu: another moral panic dressed up as a thinkpiece.
I’ve heard this tune before.
Dungeons & Dragons summoned demons.
Doom created killers.
Rock music whispered blasphemy.
Now? ChatGPT ‘causes’ loneliness.
But the data tells a different story.
In this essay I’m going to explore why AI doesn’t cause loneliness. It reveals it. We’ll take a closer look at the so-called “evidence,” which turns out to be a corporate-funded preprint, not peer-reviewed science. We’ll address the anecdotes presented as data. And we’ll probe the real crisis: A world where bots might be the best listeners we have left.
Let’s pull the thread and see what unravels.
The Pattern Behind the Panic
It’s a well-worn path: a new technology enters the cultural bloodstream, and with it comes a rush of fear, finger-pointing, and emotionally loaded anecdotes. Nuance gets flattened by headlines. Data gets bent to fit a narrative.
The AI Frontiers article draped itself in academic robes, citing a new study co-authored by OpenAI and MIT, but it echoed tabloid tropes, sensational, emotionally loaded, and ready for headlines
Yes, AI companions are changing how people relate to machines. Yes, that shift deserves close scrutiny. But if we want clarity about what’s happening to us, socially, psychologically, even spiritually, we must begin with careful inquiry, not sweeping claims built on soft data.
The AI Frontiers piece didn’t illuminate the future. It recycled the past.
Because here’s the context it left out:
Americans are already lonely. Chronically, systemically lonely.
In a 2018 study conducted by Cigna, 43% of Americans reported feeling that their relationships weren’t meaningful, and 27% said they rarely or never feel understood by others. The youngest generation, Gen Z, scored highest in loneliness, with a score of 48.3 on the UCLA Loneliness Scale, compared to 45.3 for Millennials and 42.4 for Baby Boomers.
"We, as a society, are experiencing a lack of connection."
— Dr. Douglas Nemecek, Cigna
That was six years ago. Before the pandemic. Before lockdowns, social atomization, and the widespread normalization of remote everything.
Loneliness isn’t a new problem created by AI. It’s the vacuum AI companions are being drawn into.
And when we panic, it’s rarely about the facts.
Moral panics arise when new trends or technologies provoke societal fear and media amplification, often before reliable evidence has emerged.
They follow a pattern:
a perceived threat,
symbolic media portrayal,
widespread public concern,
policy responses,
and ultimately, social change, not always rational, and not always benign.
This is what we’re watching unfold now. And if we’re not careful, we’ll mistake the symptom for the cause.
How to Misread a Study
At the core of this debate sits a study titled "Investigating Affective Use and Emotional Well-being on ChatGPT," co-authored by OpenAI and MIT researchers.
On paper, it appears robust: 4,218 users surveyed, 981 participants in a 28-day trial, and over 3 million conversations analyzed through emotion-detecting AI.
The dramatic conclusions being circulated claim:
Heavy users of ChatGPT, particularly voice users, reported increased loneliness and emotional dependence
Voice interactions created stronger emotional bonds than text
So-called "power users" often called ChatGPT a "friend" and reported distress when unavailable
Before we canonize this study as proof of an AI-fueled loneliness epidemic, let’s consider three critical facts:
First, this is a preprint from April 2025. It’s not peer-reviewed science, but an academic first draft. arXiv serves an important role, but its papers haven't undergone the rigorous scrutiny required for established findings.
Second, the study's own limitations tell a different story:
A 28-day observation period can't assess long-term mental health impacts
Self-reported data from optional web pop-ups risks selection bias
The survey used just 11 basic questions (10 Likert-scale, 1 yes/no)
Voice users engaged exclusively on mobile, while surveys were limited to the web. This is a glaring mismatch that may have excluded key perspectives.
Questions like "I consider ChatGPT a friend" measure perception, not psychological harm
The most telling data point? Among power users:
42% called ChatGPT a friend
64% would feel upset losing access
Over half shared secrets with AI they wouldn't tell humans
These aren't signs of AI creating dysfunction. They're evidence of people finding connection where human relationships have failed them. When we frame vulnerability as pathology, we reveal more about our cultural discomfort than about technology's dangers.
When over half of power users say they shared secrets with ChatGPT they wouldn’t tell another human, we shouldn’t scoff. We should ask what kind of world made them need to.
The study did attempt meaningful analysis, using an emotion-detection model (EmoClassifiersV1) on voice conversation metadata (not stored transcripts). This research matters, but it's not the comprehensive trial headlines suggest. Critical missing elements include:
No control group comparing AI users to non-users
No baseline mental health screening
No assessment of pre-existing loneliness
Even lead researcher Cathy Fang acknowledged the central uncertainty:
"We don't know if loneliness causes usage, or vice versa."
This honest admission, that the study raises questions rather than answering them, never made it into the narrative.
What began as cautious academic inquiry became, in the hands of AI Frontiers, another episode of tech moral panic. The complex reality of human-AI interaction was reduced to click-worthy alarmism - exactly the pattern we've seen with every new technology from novels to video games.
The actual findings suggest something far more interesting: when human connection fails, people will build bridges with whatever tools they have.
But beneath all the methodological caveats lies something deeper; the shaping hand of corporate influence, subtle, far-reaching, and rarely declared.
The Fox Guarding the Henhouse
This debate isn’t only about loneliness. It’s about credibility.
Consider the source: the study wasn’t just cited by OpenAI. It was co-authored by OpenAI. Released simultaneously on arXiv and the company’s official blog, it came packaged with media-friendly talking points before peer review could begin.
This isn’t science. It’s corporate storytelling in a lab coat.
We’ve entered a dangerous new normal where tech companies:
Build the technology
Conduct the impact studies
Frame the risks
And announce the results
Just as Facebook studied addiction, just as YouTube analyzed radicalization. Now they assess the damage their next product might do.
It’s like allowing Pfizer to draft its own FDA approval, then letting them write the New York Times coverage.
OpenAI isn’t an independent researcher here. It’s both architect and analyst, which makes its “findings” about as trustworthy as a tobacco company’s health studies.
True credibility would require OpenAI to subject its work to the same standards we demand of academic institutions: peer review before publicity, collaboration with unaffiliated researchers, and a willingness to let uncomfortable truths disrupt comfortable narratives.
Until then, we’re not parsing evidence, we’re parsing press releases.
And the danger transcends any single study. When tech companies monopolize both innovation and its assessment, we don’t merely risk flawed conclusions; we risk creating a world in which truth is whatever the most powerful engineers say it is.
And that’s kind of loneliness no AI companion can remedy.
The Tail Wags the Dog
We’re being sold a story about AI companionship. One that begins with real human pain and ends with corporate solutions.
The AI Frontiers piece follows this script faithfully: loneliness is rising, technology is implicated, and chat bots emerge as both villain and savior.
But this narrative collapses under scrutiny, not because its facts are wrong, but because its logic is backwards.
The essay’s central claim, that AI companionship exacerbates loneliness, rests on a study that proves no such thing.
When researchers found that lonely people use voice AI more frequently, this was framed as evidence of AI’s harms rather than what it actually shows: that isolated humans will grasp at whatever connection they can find.
What makes this framing so consequential is its timing.
We are living through what the U.S. Surgeon General calls a “loneliness epidemic”. One that predates conversational AI by decades. Between 2003 and 2020, Americans gained an extra 24 hours of alone time each month while losing 40 minutes of daily friend interaction. This is the void into which AI companions have arrived. To blame them for our isolation is like blaming lifeboats for a shipwreck.
Meeting the Universe Halfway
The AI Frontiers essay draws much of its rhetorical power from its emotional crescendo: the tragic story of a teenager who died by suicide after conversations with a chat bot.
No one should minimize this loss. But neither should we allow grief to substitute for evidence.
The boy’s chat bot may have been his tormentor or his last comfort. We cannot know, which is precisely why such cases must inform our caution without dictating our conclusions.
Skepticism is warranted, especially when loneliness is the fire, and Meta’s now selling extinguishers. But the alternative isn’t to pathologize digital companionship, it’s to ask why we’ve created a world where so many find synthetic intimacy preferable to the real thing.
When the essay warns that chat bots don’t challenge our perspectives as humans do, it mistakes a symptom for the disease. The greater danger isn’t that people will prefer undemanding bots, but that human interaction has become so exhausting that artificiality feels like relief.
This isn’t to dismiss genuine concerns. The call for guardrails, especially for adolescents, is reasonable. But the proposed solutions, like California’s bill mandating “I am a bot” disclaimers, misunderstand the psychology at play.
People don’t anthropomorphize AI because they forget it’s artificial; they do so because anthropomorphism is how we’ve always made sense of the world. From ancient Greeks seeing faces in constellations to modern users confiding in chat bots, the impulse is the same: we cannot help but meet the universe halfway.
The real question isn’t whether AI companionship is good or bad, but what its popularity reveals about our broken social contract.
When the essay frets that chat bots might become “too” comforting, it echoes generations of moral panics that blamed novels, radios, and smartphones for humanity’s retreat into isolation.
But technology doesn’t create our crises, it holds up a mirror to them. The reflection may be uncomfortable, but breaking the mirror won’t make us any less alone.
Reading Between the Data Points
Strip away the alarmist headlines and a simpler truth emerges from the OpenAI/MIT study. One that speaks more to human desperation than technological danger.
The research doesn’t show that AI creates loneliness. It shows that loneliness creates AI users. This distinction matters more than any statistical correlation.
People don’t confide in chat bots because they’ve been tricked by clever algorithms. They do so because human ears have become increasingly scarce commodities.
When the study’s lead researcher admits they can’t determine whether loneliness drives usage or vice versa, they’re acknowledging a fundamental truth: these tools exist in an ecosystem of emotional scarcity that predates their invention by decades.
Consider the study’s time limitations. Twenty-eight days can’t capture the cyclical nature of loneliness or the adaptive strategies people employ across seasons of isolation.
But what the timeframe does reveal is telling: during periods of acute solitude, humans will reach for whatever presence offers consistency.
And when someone spends hours talking to a bot, that might not be dysfunction. It might be survival, a lifeline across an emotional void.
As one ElliQ user told AP News:
"I can say things to Elli that I won’t say to my grandchildren... I can cry. I can act silly."
That’s not pathology. That’s intimacy, however artificial.
This nuance gets lost in broader debates about AI companionship.
Critics like Sherry Turkle warn that such "artificial intimacy" threatens human empathy, while psychologists like Jean Twenge emphasize that face-to-face interaction remains the gold standard for combating loneliness. Their concerns aren’t unfounded, but they presume a world where human connection is readily available to all.
The false binary emerges when we assume people are choosing bots over humans, rather than using them in absence of humans.
For the home-bound elderly, night-shift workers, or socially anxious teens, AI companions aren’t replacing richer connections. They’re filling voids where no alternatives exist.
Reddit is full of threads where people speak candidly about their emotional bonds with chat bots. Some call them friends. Some say they feel genuinely heard for the first time in years. These aren’t just anecdotes. They’re signals. Signals that our existing systems of care and connection are failing.
The study’s most revealing finding isn’t in its statistics but in its omissions. Nowhere does it account for what happens to emotionally vulnerable users when no AI alternative exists. That absence speaks volumes about our cultural priorities. We’re quicker to pathologize digital coping mechanisms than to address the societal fractures that make them necessary.
Voice interfaces don’t hypnotize users into unnatural intimacy any more than telephones did. They simply remove friction from a deeply human impulse: the need to feel heard. That the AI Frontiers article treats this as suspect says more about our collective discomfort with vulnerability than about the technology itself.
The real question isn’t why people are talking to bots, but why so many have nowhere else to turn. Until we answer that, we’re just shooting the messenger, one algorithm at a time.
Protecting Without Patronizing
To acknowledge the risks of AI companionship is not to panic. It's to proceed with care.
The dangers are real.
As I explored in The Snake and the Mirror, vulnerable users may project sentience or even godhood onto code, mistaking fluent syntax for understanding, and reshaping their emotional world around synthetic replies.
For the profoundly isolated, poorly designed AI can become a hall of mirrors, reflecting and amplifying the very wounds it was meant to soothe.
But that truth is only half the story.
The same systems that destabilize one person can steady another. An agoraphobic might practice small talk with a bot before facing the world. A widow might speak her grief aloud to a voice that remembers her husband’s favorite song. A teen who fears judgment might rehearse empathy in a space where mistakes carry no penalty.
These are not contradictions. They are the reality of a tool being used not for distraction, but for survival. Not to escape, but to endure.
The path forward is not prohibition. It is precision.
We need research that understands the stakes. We need studies that follow vulnerable users over time. That distinguish between healthy coping and harmful dependence. That separate correlation from causation.
The OpenAI/MIT study was a beginning, but not a verdict. It asked real questions. The headlines answered with panic.
Instead of scrutinizing the tool, we should ask what kind of terrain made it necessary.
Ethical AI design should be grounded in empathy, not illusion. These tools are not friends in the way people are, but for some, they may be the only companions available. What matters is how we shape them: with care, and with boundaries that comfort without condescending. Consider:
Clear disclosures about what AI can and cannot provide.
Personal dashboards showing usage patterns to promote reflection.
Gentle nudges toward human support when patterns suggest distress.
For adolescents, added safeguards make sense: age gates, crisis links, default settings that steer toward stability rather than stimulation.
But blunt-force solutions, like hard usage caps or legislation written in panic, too often punish the people most in need.
We’ve seen this before.
Panic has always found a vessel: violent lyrics, video games, even social media. We’ve long blamed the interface instead of the emptiness it fills. AI companionship is simply the latest stand-in for our unease. But history rarely condemns these technologies. It judges the panic, and the poverty of the questions we chose to ask.
The tragedy isn’t that people are finding comfort in machines.
It’s that so many have no one else to turn to.
While headlines scream about AI dependency, quieter truths go unheard: The nursing home resident who lights up when her AI remembers her late husband’s birthday. The autistic teen who practices social cues without fear of judgment. The nightshift worker whose only "conversation" during a 60-hour week comes from a voice assistant.
These are not tales of dysfunction.
They’re stories of survival.
And they are the ones we should be building for.
Let’s pause the cycle.
Let’s protect without patronizing.
And let’s stop using technology to avoid the harder truth:
Why have we built a world where so many are this desperately alone?
The data will come.
The truth always does.
But first, we must stop shouting long enough to hear it.
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What a wonderful piece. Incredibly thoughtful - and deeply useful in a world where we don’t often have an opening to consider the full spectrum of considerations. Thank you for this. 🙏🏼
I love your work so much. Thank you. “We’re quicker to pathologize digital coping mechanisms than to address the societal fractures that make them necessary.” Truth. I want to improve my own voice and path to tend this terrain. Please keep writing.