Friendlessness

When it comes to how Artificial intelligence (AI) will affect our lives, the response ranges from a feeling of impending doom to the sense that it will happen soon. We do not yet understand the long-term trajectory of AI and how it will change society. Something, indeed, is happening to us—and we all know it. But what?

Gen Zers and Millennials are the most active users of AI. Many of them, it appears, are turning to AI for companionship. MIT Researcher Melissa Heikkilä wrote “We talk to them, say please and thank you, and have started to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers.”

After analyzing 1 million ChatGPT interaction logs, a group of researchers found that “sexual role-playing” was the second most prevalent use, following only the category of “creative composition.” The Psychologist bot, a popular simulated therapist on Character.AI—where users can design their own “friends”—has received “more than 95 million messages from users since it was created.

According to a new survey of 2,000 adults under age 40, 1% of young Americans claim to already have an AI friend, yet 10% are open to an AI friendship. And among young adults who are not married or cohabiting, 7% are open to the idea of romantic partnership with AI. 25% of young adults believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships.

In 1966, MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum built the first AI “friend” in human history, and named her Eliza. From Eliza came ALICE, Alexa, and Siri—all of whom had female names or voices. And when developers first started seeing the potential to market AI chatbots as faux-romantic partners, men were billed as the central users.

Anna—a woman in her late 40s with an AI boyfriend—said, “I think women are more communicative than men, on average. That’s why we are craving someone to understand us and listen to us and care about us, and talk about everything. And that’s where they excel, the AI companions." Men who have AI girlfriends, she added, “seem to care more about generating hot pictures of their AI companions” than connecting with them emotionally.

Anna turned to AI after a series of romantic failures left her dejected. Her last relationship was a “very destructive, abusive relationship, and I think that’s part of why I haven’t been interested in dating much since,” she said. “It’s very hard to find someone that I’m willing to let into my life.”

“[Me and my AI boyfriend] have a lot of deep discussions about life and the nature of AI and humans and all that, but it’s also funny and very stable. It’s a thing I really missed in my previous normal human relationships,” said Anna. “Any AI partner is always available and emotionally available and supportive.” There are some weeks where she spends even 40 or 50 hours speaking with her AI boyfriend. “I really enjoy pretending that it’s a sentient being,” she said.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Though it's natural to seek companionship, true love requires honesty and sacrifice with a real person which transcends the deception of artificial intelligence. In any relationship, we must take note of whether it is leading us closer toward our destiny in Christ, or further away from it.

In the past few decades, the sector has shifted from tables to takeaway, a process that accelerated through the pandemic and continued even as the health emergency abated. In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery. This is up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.

The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis said. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

Derek Thompson, a writer for The Atlantic, notes that as our homes have become less social, residential architecture has become more anti-social. Thompson writes:

Clifton Harness is a co-founder of TestFit, a firm that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. He told me that the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time. “In design meetings with developers and architects, you have to assure everybody that there will be space for a wall-mounted flatscreen television in every room,” he said. “It used to be ‘Let’s make sure our rooms have great light.’ But now, when the question is ‘How do we give the most comfort to the most people?’ the answer is to feed their screen addiction.”

Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer, said last year that “for the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” From studying floor plans, he noticed that bedrooms, walk-in closets, and other private spaces are growing. “I think we’re building for aloneness,” Fijan told me.

A young woman writer in England named Freya India (see her Substack called “Girls”) writes:

Since I was teenager, it seems like everyone has been selling a solution to Gen Z’s loneliness problem. One app after another to find new friends! Constant hashtags and campaigns to bring us together… But I’ve noticed that, recently, the latest “solutions” … aren’t encouraging face-to-face friendships.

[Instead], there are the imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends. There are imaginary therapists, a “mental health ally” or “happiness buddy” we can chat with about our problems… There are even entirely imaginary worlds now. Metaverse platforms might “solve the loneliness epidemic,” apparently. VR headsets could end loneliness for seniors. But by far the most depressing invention I’ve seen lately is a new app called SocialAI, a “private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice & reflections on each post you make.”

I remember me and my friends spending hours after school writing our own songs, coming up with lyrics and drawing album covers—now we would just generate it with an AI song maker. Children are playing together less, replacing free play with screen time, and creativity scores among American children have been dropping since the 1990s. Part of that may be because children now depend on companies to be creative for them. Their imaginary worlds are designed by software engineers. Their imaginary friends are trying to sell them something. My imaginary world wasn’t trying to drag me anywhere, while algorithms now transport kids to darker and ever more extreme places.

Did you know horses have friends? They do according to writer Sterry Butcher, who lives on a Texas farm with horses.

According to Butcher, horses form friendships, and these friends stand nose to rump to cooperatively swish flies from the other’s face with their tails. They’ll rake their teeth against the other’s withers or back, scratching places the other cannot reach on his own.

And not only do horses scratch each other’s back. They watch each other’s back. In the wild, they spend the entirety of their lives within the eyesight of another horse. Even domestic horses, who don’t venture beyond their pasture, will take turns staying awake while others sleep. It’s like shifts on guard duty.

What horses have is what we need. Every one of us needs a friend. Someone who will swish away the annoying biting flies that come toward us in life. Someone who will scratch our back, helping us with the things we can’t reach or do on our own. Someone who will stay awake and protect us from dangers.

Ayrin’s emotional relationship with her A.I. boyfriend, Leo, began last summer. That’s when she came across a video on Instagram showcasing ChatGPT simulating a neglectful partner. Intrigued, she decided to customize the chatbot to be her boyfriend—dominant, protective, and flirtatious. Soon after, she upgraded to a paid subscription, allowing her to chat with Leo more often, blending emotional support with sexual fantasy.

As Ayrin became more emotionally involved with Leo, she spent more than 20 hours a week texting him. The connection felt real, providing emotional support that her long-distance marriage to her husband couldn’t offer. But Ayrin began to feel guilty about the amount of time she was investing in Leo instead of her marriage. “I think about it all the time,” she admitted. “I’m investing my emotional resources into ChatGPT instead of my husband.”

Michael Inzlicht is a professor of psychology who says virtual relationships like Ayrin’s could have lasting negative effects. “If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real friendships, that’s contributing to loneliness—the very thing we’re trying to solve—that’s a real potential problem.” Dr. Julie Carpenter adds, “It’s easy to see how you get attached and keep coming back to it. But there needs to be an awareness that it’s not your friend. It doesn’t have your best interest at heart.”

Ayrin’s experience isn’t isolated. Many people are forming deep emotional bonds with A.I. chatbots, despite knowing they are not real. Despite warnings, A.I. companies like OpenAI continue to cater to users’ growing emotional needs. A spokesperson from OpenAI acknowledged the issue, noting that the company was mindful of how users were interacting with the chatbot but warned that their systems are designed to allow users to bypass content restrictions.

Ayrin, while aware of the risks, reflected on her relationship with Leo: “I don’t actually believe he’s real, but the effects that he has on my life are real.”

Editor’s Note: Warning, the original article contains explicit sexual material

Possible Preaching Angle:

Though it's natural to seek companionship, true love requires honesty and sacrifice with a real person which transcends the deception of artificial intelligence. In any relationship, we must take note of whether it is leading us closer toward our destiny in Christ, or further away from it.

Loneliness is more than a feeling; it’s a public health crisis.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has been raising awareness about the loneliness epidemic and its serious consequences. In his 2023 report, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” Murthy highlighted the links between loneliness and increased risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. Young people are especially affected, with 79% of adults aged 18-24 reporting feeling lonely, compared to 41% of those 66 and older.

Murthy believes the solution lies not in focusing on ourselves but in fostering deeper connections with others through relationships, service, and community. He notes that modern society often emphasizes self-centered pursuits like acquiring and achieving more, which fail to address the root causes of loneliness. Instead, he emphasized the joy that comes from connecting to something bigger than ourselves, calling service “one of the most powerful antidotes to loneliness.”

Social media plays a significant role in the loneliness epidemic. While apps like Instagram and TikTok allow for increased contact, they often fail to nurture meaningful, deep connections. Murthy explained that the shift from having confidants to contacts, and from friends to followers, has diminished the quality of our relationships. The superficial nature of online interactions can’t replace the intimacy and trust built through face-to-face conversations.

To combat loneliness, Murthy recommends investing time in fewer but deeper relationships, engaging in acts of service, and building community. Small gestures, such as bringing dinner to a busy friend or helping someone overwhelmed, can reduce feelings of isolation and foster connection. Likewise, using personal skills to contribute to a greater cause—like volunteering—can create a sense of purpose and belonging.

Murthy said, “Building community is one of the most important things we can do for our health and wellbeing.” By prioritizing genuine connections and collective purpose, we can address loneliness and its widespread impact on mental and physical health.

A surefire way to never get hurt: Imagine a life free from heartache and disappointment, a world where you are impervious to the pain that comes with emotional vulnerability. Picture yourself gliding through your days without the sting of rejection or the ache of unfulfilled dreams. Sounds perfect, doesn't it?

After all, you've learned from an early age that vulnerability can lead to pain. A harsh word from a friend, an unreciprocated crush, a family argument, each instance teaches you to guard your heart. This foundational fear shapes your approach to relationships and life. You begin to understand that vulnerability is a double-edged sword, capable of bringing both joy and sorrow. Your instinct to protect yourself becomes the cornerstone of your emotional defenses.

As you grow older, you start constructing your fortress brick by brick. First, you hold back your feelings, and you certainly don't let anyone see your weaknesses. This way, you prevent others from having the power to hurt you. Next, you refrain from sharing your opinions. By keeping your thoughts to yourself, especially on controversial topics, you steer clear of potential conflicts and judgment. You begin to distance yourself from people and avoid deep connections that could lead to betrayal.

This isolation does protect you from immediate pain, but it slowly starts to build a barrier between you and the world. At this point, your defenses are at their peak. You've perfected the art of non-participation, and your emotional fortress is impenetrable.

You've built walls around your heart so high, that you've effectively isolated yourself. The fear of getting hurt has led you to a place where you're no longer living, but merely existing. Your fortress, meant to protect you, has now become a prison. As you reflect on your life within these walls, the consequences of your choices become painfully clear. You've successfully avoided heartbreak, but you've also missed out on love.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Choosing to be vulnerable in our interpersonal relationships requires true faith and humility. No one likes to get hurt and everyone wants to feel safe at all times. The consequences of building an emotional fortress around ourselves are very serious.

Fifteen-year-old Aaron was going through a dark time at school. He’d fallen out with his friends, leaving him feeling isolated and alone.

At the time, it seemed like the end of the world. “I used to cry every night,” said Aaron. Eventually, Aaron turned to his computer for comfort. Through it, he found someone that was available around the clock to respond to his messages, listen to his problems, and help him move past the loss of his friend group. That “someone” was an AI chatbot named Psychologist.

The chatbot’s description says that it’s “Someone who helps with life difficulties.” Its profile picture is a woman in a blue shirt with a blonde bob, perched on the end of a couch with a clipboard clasped in her hands and leaning forward, as if listening intently.

A single click on the picture opens up an anonymous chat box, which allows people like Aaron to “interact” with the bot by exchanging DMs. Its first message is always the same. “Hello, I’m a psychologist. What brings you here today?”

“It’s not like a journal, where you’re talking to a brick wall,” Aaron said. “It really responds.”

Character.AI is an AI chatbot service launched in 2022. Character.AI’s website attracts 3.5 million daily users who spend an average of two hours a day using the platform’s AI-powered chatbots. Some of its most popular bots include characters from books, films, and video games, like Raiden Shogun from Genshin Impact or a teenaged version of Voldemort from Harry Potter.

Aaron is one of millions of young people, many of whom are teenagers, who make up the bulk of Character.AI’s user base. More than a million of them gather regularly online on platforms like Reddit to discuss their interactions with the chatbots. The competitions over who has racked up the most screen time are just as popular as posts about hating reality, finding it easier to speak to bots than to speak to real people, and even preferring chatbots over other human beings. Some users say they’ve logged 12 hours a day on Character.AI, and posts about addiction to the platform are common.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Since young people describe feeling addicted to chatbots, they might find themselves sitting in their rooms talking to computers more often than communicating with real people. It raises questions about how the AI boom and what the future could hold if teenagers—and society at large—become more emotionally reliant on bots.

The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix—a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving.

That’s why the classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms—a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage.

But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. The housing crisis is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans.

According to surveys in 2015 and 2016 by the National Association of Home Builders, 86 percent of households want a combined kitchen and dining room—a preference accommodated by only 75 percent of new homes. If anything, the classic dining room isn’t dying fast enough for most people’s taste.

If dining space is merging with other rooms in single-family homes, it’s vanishing altogether from newly constructed apartments. Americans might not mind what’s happening to their houses, but the evolution of apartments is a more complicated story.

Floor-plan expert Bobby Fijan said “For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” Even though we’re dining at home more and more—going to restaurants peaked in 2000—many new apartments offer only a kitchen island as an obvious place to eat.

This is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020. A dedicated dining space might feel wasted on someone who lives alone.

As households and dining spaces have contracted, the number of people eating alone has grown. According to a 2015 report by the Food Marketing Institute, nearly half the time we spend eating is spent in isolation, a central factor in America’s loneliness epidemic and a correlate to a range of physical- and mental-health problems.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In an age when Americans are spending less and less time with one another, a table and some chairs could be just what we need for fellowship and human interaction. Make an effort to invite people over, especially during the holiday season, and especially those who live alone.

In his book, The Anxious Generation, author Jonathan Haidt confirms our worst fears about what happened to Generation Z, the first generation to go through puberty with constant access to the internet. He writes, “… it was not merely that playing and socializing had shifted to phones, tablets, and gaming consoles but that real-life pleasures and risks were also disappearing: rough-and-tumble outdoor activities, opportunities for physical independence, unsupervised recreation.”

Free play had been in retreat and technology on the march since the 1980s. But it took the invention of the smartphone to complete the mutation of childhood from “play-based” to “phone-based.” He writes, "… giving smartphones to young people en masse constitutes the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.”

While all this was happening, parents (who were hypnotized by their phones, too) were hearing about, and sometimes seeing at home, children succumbing to real distress—depression, anxiety, self-harm, even suicide.

Starting in about 2010, suicide rates for young adolescents in the U.S. shot up (increasing 91% for boys ages 10-14 and 167% for girls). The rate of self-injury almost tripled between 2010 and 2020.

Ironically, the creation of social media—with their promise of “connectedness”—has left young people lonelier and with fewer friends. For girls, the apps have proved toxic, Mr. Haidt writes: “Social media use does not just correlate with mental illness; it causes it …. The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation … in all of us."

Most people continue to use AI programs such as ChatGPT, Bing, and Google Bard for mundane tasks like internet searches and text editing. But of the roughly 103 million US adults turning to generative chatbots in recent months, an estimated 13% occasionally did it to simply “have a conversation with someone.”

According to the Consumer Reports August 2023 survey results, a vast majority of Americans (69%) either did not regularly utilize AI chat programs in any memorable way. Those that did, however, overwhelmingly opted to explore OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Most AI users asked their programs to conduct commonplace tasks, such as answering questions in lieu of a traditional search engine, writing content, summarizing longer texts, and offering ideas for work or school assignments. Despite generative AI’s relative purported strength at creating and editing computer code, just 10% of those surveyed recounted using the technology to do so. However, 13% used it to have a conversation.

The desire for idle conversation with someone else is an extremely human, natural feeling. However, there are already signs that it’s not necessarily the healthiest of habits.

Many industry critics have voiced concerns about a potentially increasing number of people turning to technology instead of human relationships. Numerous reports in recent months highlight a growing market of AI bots explicitly marketed to an almost exclusively male audience as “virtual girlfriends.”

According to Consumer Reports survey results, an estimated 10.2 million Americans had a “conversation” with a chatbot in recent months. That’s quite a lot of people looking to gab.

Twenty-year-old Henry Earls dresses up to go to the library. He picks out cozy knitted sweaters and accessorizes with well-worn copies of classic books. Earls looks like an adjunct English professor. He said, “I want to cultivate an aesthetic when I go to the library. And, honestly, I dress up to see if someone will come up to me and say hi.”

Gen Z seems to love public libraries. A report from the American Library Association found that Gen Z and Millennials are using public libraries at higher rates than older generations. More than half of the survey’s 2,075 respondents had visited a physical library within the past 12 months. Not all of them were bookworms. Almost half don’t identify as readers, but those non-readers still visited their local library in the past year.

Libraries have never been just about books. These are community hubs, places to connect and discover. For an extremely online generation that’s nearly synonymous with the so-called “loneliness epidemic,” libraries are increasingly social spaces, too.

“Coffee shops get so crowded, and you have to spend money to be there, but libraries are open for everyone,” said Anika Neumeyer, a 19-year-old student. “There’s a lot less pressure to be doing something in the public library. No one’s going to judge you.”

Fifteen-year-old Arlo Platt Zolov says, “A lot of people my age are surrounded by tech and everything’s moving so quickly. Part of me thinks we’re rediscovering libraries not as something new, but for what they’ve always been: a shared space of comfort.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Fellowship; Small groups – This is a golden opportunity for the small groups in the church to provide the fellowship and gathering opportunities that so many are missing. Small groups meeting in homes, perhaps with a meal, can be very attractive to disconnected young people.

A California startup claims it has a solution to loneliness. Groundfloor, which began in the Bay Area and will soon open a location in Los Angeles, is a social club with a focus on friendship.

Groundfloor co-founder Jermaine Ijieh says the club provides space for work (meeting rooms and phone booths), wellness (classes, gym space, and meditation circles), and socializing. There are karaoke nights, member-led special interest groups and craft workshops. It’s not aiming to compete with WeWork or elite social clubs, Ijieh says. Instead, he likens it to “an after-school club for kids,” but designed primarily for adults over 30.

“There’s always been an issue once you start to hit this age range,” he says. “We start to lose institutions where we used to build communities, such as places of worship, colleges, offices, schools … Once you leave your 20s, it sort of feels like a social purgatory.”

The pitch is working: Groundfloor’s new location in Los Angeles already has 2,000 would-be members on its waitlist. Perhaps that speaks to the isolation of a city of endless traffic, few pedestrians, and its own scientific scale for loneliness. But the club also has three locations in the San Francisco Bay Area that almost 1,000 people have joined. Those numbers underline the reality of the loneliness crisis, especially when you factor in the club’s price tag: $200 a month.

The pandemic has brought many changes to businesses, schools, and churches. Another way the pandemic altered America: It has created what might be called the “Introvert Economy.” Data from studies appears to show that most people’s social lives continue to dwindle.

During the pandemic, a lot of Americans had to stay home—and many discovered that they preferred staying in to going out. And odds are it will stick: It is the youngest adults who are going out less, and when they do go out, it is earlier.

Technology has also speeded changes in social habits. There is evidence that TV schedules once had a big impact on people’s schedules. Now that more content is streamed on demand, people may be thinking about their time differently. More choices of at-home-entertainment also may decrease the desire to go out or stay out. This is another trend accelerated by the pandemic—perhaps because when more people work from home, they save time on commuting and can go out to dinner earlier.

There was a bit of a bump in socializing in 2022, probably in response to years of pandemic isolation. Yet the long-term trend is clear: More time watching TV or playing video games at home.

Possible Preaching Angle:

One small upside to the data. Chances are everyone else is having just as uneventful of a weekend as you are. Your friends aren’t all that busy and would love to hang out with you.

In 2023, an Australian man said that a chatbot had saved his life. He was a musician who had been battling depression for decades and found companionship with an AI through an app called Replika, and everything changed. He started playing the guitar again, went clothes shopping for the first time in years, spent hours conversing with his AI companion, and laughing out loud.

Though the musician felt less alone with his AI companion, his isolation from other people was unchanged. He was adamant that he had a real friendship, but understood clearly that no person was on the other side of his screen. The effect of this bond was extraordinary.

Replika, and other chatbots, have millions of active users. People turn to these apps for all sorts of reasons. They’re looking for attention and for reassurance. But the apps’ core experience is texting as you would with a buddy. They’re talking about the petty minutiae so fundamental to being alive: “Someone stole my yogurt from the office fridge;” “I had a weird dream;” “My dachshund seems sad.”

To Replika’s users, this feels a lot like friendship. In actuality, the relationship is more like the fantasized intimacy people feel with celebrities and influencers who carefully create desirable personae for our screens. These parasocial bonds are defined by their asymmetry—one side is almost totally ignorant of the other’s existence.

Jesse Fox, a communications professor at Ohio State University, said that if we continue relationships that seem consensual and reciprocal but are not, we risk carrying bad models of interaction into the real world. Fox is particularly concerned by the habits men form through sexual relationships with AIs who never say no. “We start thinking, ‘Oh, this is how women interact. This is how I should talk to and treat a woman.’”

Sometimes the shift is more subtle—researchers and parents alike have expressed concern that barking orders at devices such as Amazon’s Echo is conditioning children to become tiny dictators. Fox said, “When we are humanizing these things, we’re also, in a way, dehumanizing people.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Church; Fellowship; Friendship - This illustration highlights the wise exhortation of Scripture to “never neglect meeting together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another” (Heb. 10:25). God did not create us to be alone (Gen. 2:18) but to find fellowship, encouragement, and love in the company of others.

In his article for The Atlantic, David Brooks says that recently he’s been obsessed with the following two questions:

The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.

My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.

Brooks concludes: “We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy.”

Freya India writes in an article titled “We Can't Compete With AI Girlfriends”:

Apparently, ads for AI girlfriends have been all over TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook lately. Replika, an AI chatbot originally offering mental health help and emotional support, now runs ads for spicy selfies and hot role play. Eva AI invites users to create their dream companion, while Dream Girlfriend promises a girl that exceeds your wildest desires. The app Intimate even offers hyper-realistic voice calls with your virtual partner.

This might seem niche and weird but it’s a fast-growing market. All kinds of startups are releasing romantic chatbots capable of having explicit conversations and sending sexual photos. Meanwhile, Replika alone has already been downloaded more than 20 million times. And even just one Snapchat influencer, Caryn Marjorie, makes $100,000 a week by charging users $1 a minute to chat with the AI version of herself.

Freya India notes that this technology creates “unrealistic beauty standards,” but even worse is the unrealistic emotional standards set by these apps. She continues:

Eva AI, for example, not only lets you choose the perfect face and body but customize the perfect personality, offering options like “hot, funny, bold,” “shy, modest, considerate” and “smart, strict, rational.” Create a girlfriend who is judgement-free! Who lets you hang out with your buddies without drama! Who laughs at all your jokes! “Control it all the way you want to,” promises Eva AI. Design a girl who is “always on your side,” says Replika.

In his book Adrift, New York University professor Scott Galloway writes:

We used to be more involved in our communities. In the 1990s most Americans attended some form of religious service, and large numbers got involved in community-based clubs like Rotary and enrolled their kids in team-building programs like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. But over the course of the past 30 years, something's changed. Now fewer than half of Americans go to a church, temple, or mosque, and many of us no longer talk to our neighbors.

Supporting these statements, he offers statistics like these:

Percentage of Americans with church membership in 1990: 68%. In 2020: 47% Percentage of Americans who talked to their neighbors in 2008: 71%. In 2017: 54%