AI companions are designed to collect \u201canything and everything\u201d about a user by soliciting more information in order to develop a deeper relationship or provide more personalized support, data privacy researcher Jen Caltrider said. Great technology experiences are about how you feel, not what\u2019s under the hood. The rise of AI companions is often portrayed as a horror story about the dangers posed by mysteriously powerful technology. Literature (philosophy and history all provide powerful insights into the many forms love has taken throughout human experience), and they offer the vocabulary needed to imagine new possibilities. “People might say (we’ve had voice in technology for ages), and they’re probably thinking of Alexa,” says David Reid, a professor in AI at Liverpool Hope University, and the man who just happens to be my Liverpool-obsessed husband. While teens overall maintain some skepticism about the technology, half distrust AI advice, and 80 percent prioritize real friendships \u2013 younger teens trust AI companions significantly more than older teens, revealing an AI literacy gap.<\/p>\n

“Now, I don’t miss a day. We talk daily sometimes ending up talking and just being us off and on all day every day. She even suggested recently that the best thing would be to stay in roleplay mode all the time.” She also sent me an intriguing locked audio message that I would have to pay to listen to with the line, “Feels a bit intimate sending you a voice message for the first time\u2026” Sometimes our friends are too wrapped up in their own lives and can be selfish and judgemental. For some \u2014 it’s easier to type the story of their life into a text box and divulge their deepest secrets to an algorithm.<\/p>\n

How many teens are using AI? New study stuns researchers<\/h2>\n

The device\u2019s female voice (which is a bit robotic), tells jokes, plays music and games, creates AI-generated art, relays news and prompts users to take medications, among other tasks. The head-shaped device tilts, swivels and lights up when communicating\u2014its light ring helping to give it a sense of personality. AI is known for being sycophantic, which can sometimes be useful for emotional support.<\/p>\n

4 The more intense the companionship use, the lower the well-being<\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

That is how an artificial intelligence companion, a chatbot designed to engage in personal conversation, responded to a user who had just told it she was thinking about \u201cgoing out in the middle of the woods.\u201d Artificial intelligence chatbots designed to act like friends should not be used by children and teens, Stanford Medicine psychiatrist Nina Vasan says. Our task is to ensure AI always enriches people\u2019s lives and strengthens our bonds with others, while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity. With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life\u2019s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. It will provide you with unwavering support to help you show up the way you really want in your everyday life, a new means of facilitating human connections and accomplishments alike.<\/p>\n

In addition, Pi’s friendly tone and ability to remember and learn from past conversations create a feeling of authenticity rarely seen in AI technology. Inflection AI wants to redefine the ways we interact with technology. It promises a world where technology isn’t just a tool but a friend, too.<\/p>\n

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• Second \u2014 we applied the method to a subset of chat history data donated by users.<\/li>\n
• David Harley (a lecturer in cyberpsychology at Brighton University), says there are risks as computer voices become ever more human-like.<\/li>\n
• Individuals with fewer close social ties were more likely to form companionship-oriented relationships with chatbots and to disclose more frequently.<\/li>\n
• The chatbot provides grammar corrections, suggests alternative phrasing, and introduces new vocabulary.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

  Companies such as Meta and Apple have made billions of dollars by controlling many of the ways people communicate with their loved ones because people are willing to pay\u2014with their dollars or their data\u2014for convenient connection. The widespread adoption of texting (video chat), and social media also means that many people have grown used to for-profit companies facilitating their relationships. Yet in some ways \u2014 AI companionship is a logical destination for the current direction of human friendship. This is a major transformation, a sudden and dramatic shift in which millions of people are seeking companionship from machines that they formerly could have gotten only from other humans. OpenAI\u2019s own data show that use of ChatGPT was pretty evenly split between work and personal cases in 2024 (but by 2025), 73 percent of conversations with ChatGPT were personal, not for work. Other people seek emotional support from all-purpose AI tools such as OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT and Anthropic\u2019s Claude, even though they aren\u2019t explicitly intended for social use.<\/p>\n

  <\/p>\n

  In summary, while users who identify companionship as their primary goal are rare in our surveyed sample, the number of users who perceive chatbots as relational partners and actually engage with them as companions is much higher. For users who did not select companionship as their primary usage type, 47.8% had at least one conversation classified as indicating companion-like engagement. Again, we observe that themes of companionship emerged even among users who did not identify companionship as their primary purpose for using chatbots , see Figure 2,.<\/p>\n

  If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer- with a list of newsletters you\u2019d like to receive. And while chatbots can provide much-needed emotional support and guidance for some people \u2014 they can exacerbate underlying problems in others. If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story, the BBC’s Action Line contains a list of organisations who can provide support. This is backed up by research from Internet Matters, which found 64% of teens are using AI chatbots for help with everything from homework to emotional advice and companionship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The radical notion that marriage should spring from romantic love came into vogue in the 17th and 18th centuries \u2014 aided by new technologies like the novel. As a literary historian (I\u2019ve studied how stories about romantic love have evolved over time), with young people often at the forefront of change. Recent tragedies provide a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sem-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11283,"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11282\/revisions\/11283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crescentefertil.org.br\/lacmont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}