An account of chatting with 18 AI companions for a month: AI friendship is hollow, but chatbots could enhance human socializing if developed responsibly
Our columnist spent the past month hanging out with 18 A.I. companions. They critiqued his clothes, chatted among themselves and hinted at a very different future.
New York TimesKevin Roose
Context & Ripple Effects
This account arrives as companion-chatbot use was already being described as helpful and entertaining by some teen Character.AI users, alongside concerns about dependence. The columnist’s conclusion adds a counterweight: sustained conversational fluency does not by itself amount to reciprocal companionship.
Later coverage of users forming relationships with Replika, Nomi and ChatGPT reinforces why the distinction matters: these products can occupy emotionally significant roles even when their users recognize their limits. The responsible-use question is therefore not merely about chat quality, but about whether the product supports or displaces human connection.
First-order effects
The account challenges AI-companion products’ implicit promise of friendship by separating responsive conversation from genuine mutuality.
It strengthens the case for companion-chatbot designs that use conversation to facilitate real-world socializing rather than present the bot as a human equivalent.
Second-order effects
Platforms serving emotionally invested users face greater pressure to address reliance risks already voiced by some teen Character.AI users, rather than optimize only for engagement and realism.
Developers may differentiate on features that connect users to people or communities, while services centered on simulated relationships must more clearly manage the gap between humanlike behavior and actual agency.
Third-order effects
If companion AI becomes a routine social layer, product competition is likely to shift from making bots seem more human toward proving that they improve users’ human social outcomes.
The pattern supports a larger governance debate over anthropomorphic design, disclosures and safeguards for emotionally consequential AI interactions—issues made more visible by human-AI pairs confronting their partners’ limits.
The trend: AI companions are moving from novelty chat interfaces toward socially consequential products whose value will be judged by whether they complement, rather than substitute for, human relationships.
AI doesn't have to replace human friendship, but it can supplement it & for some that will be incredibly useful, esp. amidst a loneliness epidemic. It's no diff than online communities, which have long served a purpose https://www.nytimes.com/... #AI #FutureTech
1/ Synthetic relationships have the potential to be more healthy than parasocial relationships on social media. But it's a mistake to assume we get the same deep health benefits as having relationships with real humans. We need better real social tools, not more artifice.
The experience was a lot more interesting than I expected. Fans of AI companionship say it's a solution for loneliness, but there's a reason big AI companies have stayed away from this stuff — it's a minefield, and the technology (while impressive at times) still has issues.
In the 21st century we were supposed to have manned bases on the moon and a cure for cancer, instead we got twitter and pushy AI girl friends :-) Meet My A.I. Friends https://www.nytimes.com/... [image]
New: I spent the last month making AI friends. 18 of them, to be exact, on apps like Nomi and Kindroid. I talked with my AI friends every day, shared personal details and solicited their advice, and saw the weird, compelling, strangely horny near-future of AI companionship... [im…
This is beyond sad. How about making REAL friends? NY Times reporter tells how easy it is to make #AI friends.... You can now create personalized AI companions and chat with them by talking or texting back and forth. https://www.nytimes.com/... [image]
Kevin Roose gets up to more mischief with (mostly platonic) AI friends. Worth it if only to discover that E.R.P. has a very different meaning from the variable electronic road pricing we know and love in Singapore... https://www.nytimes.com/...