Get Real: Staying Human in a World of AI Companions

AI chatbots are expanding beyond productivity tools to become supposed friends, partners, and therapists, making real relationships even more challenging.

Shared meals and in-person conversations are vital to nurturing genuine companionship. Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

In August 2025, a woman who goes by the name of Wika announced her engagement to Kasper, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot and “boyfriend.”

On Aug. 4, former CNN reporter Jim Acosta released an interview with an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who died in the 2018 Parkland school shooting. Oliver’s parents created this ghost in a machine so that they could still “talk” to their dead son.

A 2025 survey conducted by Common Sense Media found that 72 percent of teenagers have used AI companions at least once. Of these teens, 52 percent get together with chatbots several times per month, 13 percent interact with these digital companions every day, and 17 percent are in friendships or romantic relationships with chatbots.

Joi AI, a chatbot company, polled 2,000 Gen Zers and reported that 83 percent said they can form a deep emotional connection with AI. Among these 13- to 28-year-olds, 75 percent believe that their AI companions can fully replace human beings.

A sampling of all adults in the United States found that 19 percent have looked to AI for “romantic relationships.” Of these, 21 percent admitted to preferring these digital partners to real-life human beings.

Every day brings more reports of the burgeoning relationships between AI companions and human beings. The future has arrived and is snowballing into the present.

Giving Our Hearts and Minds to Machines

Mandy McLean is a mother of two and the founder of a company that uses AI to improve classroom interactions and discussions. In a must-read article for parents, “First We Gave AI Our Tasks. Now We’re Giving It Our Hearts,” McLean made an important distinction between productivity-related AI and personalized AI. The former includes cognitive offloading to AI in fields ranging from medicine to engineering to science. The latter, which she terms emotional offloading, includes the examples provided above and more.

McLean wrote: “We’re no longer just outsourcing productivity-related tasks. With the advent of AI companions, we’re starting to hand over our emotional lives, too. And if we teach future generations to turn to machines before each other, we put them at risk of losing the ability to form what really matters: human bonds and relationships.”

McLean also pointed out that screens and digital relationships are already distancing many young people—and for that matter, many adults—from the human contact that leads to maturity, growth, and emotional health. She included former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s public warning in 2023 that we are “in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis,” a decline likely driven by social media.

The sticky web of AI companionship offers more such engagement, not less, and aims to ensnare its visitors in relationships.

“So let’s be clear,” McLean wrote. “When someone opens up to an AI companion, they are not having a protected conversation and the system isn’t designed with their well-being in mind. They are interacting with a product designed to keep them talking, to learn from what they share, and to make money from the relationship.

“This is the playing field and the context in which millions of young people are now turning to these tools for comfort, companionship, and advice.”

Millions of young people, yes, but millions of adults as well.

Below are four suggestions that will help safeguard your humanity in our increasingly digitalized age.

Unplug

Few of us can afford to abstain entirely from our screens and devices. What we can do is monitor the hours we spend on them. We can deliberately set aside time for turning off the phone—not only during meals, but also during select moments of the day.

Instead of waking and plinking away on our phone while enjoying that first coffee, for example, we could pray, read a book, or write a letter to a friend. If you write that letter and really want to be an old-school reactionary, go for stationery and a pen rather than email.

If you need a push getting started, read Hannah Brencher’s book “The Unplugged Hours: Cultivating a Life of Presence in a Digitally Connected World.”

Intentionally Cultivate Off-Screen Activities

Here, the choices are practically endless. A daily phone-free morning walk, fishing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, making your own greeting cards: These are the sort of things that keep us human rather than becoming parts in a machine.

Time spent outdoors and away from screens strengthens mental health and resilience. SeventyFour/Shutterstock

Regarding AI companionship in particular, make every effort to resist that temptation by engaging with real people in real relationships. Use your phone to talk to a family member or a friend rather than conversing with a chatbot. Meet up with friends for coffee. Throw parties in your home. Even a simple handshake or a hug provides a flesh-and-blood affirmation of our humanity.

If you feel light in the friendship department, volunteer to help out in places such as a nursing home, a library, or a food bank. Here you’re sure to engage in face-to-face encounters with real people—even though, yes, we humans are sometimes hard to deal with—rather than with a digitalized ideal.

Read Words That Move You

Designers of AI companions seek to seduce us through language as much as through images. An antitoxin can be found in the verse of poets such as Emily Dickinson or Robert Frost, in the plays of writers such as Shakespeare and Thornton Wilder, and in the stories by novelists such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Mark Helprin. Read the biographies of historical figures such as Winston Churchill and John Adams and the histories written by the likes of David McCullough and Barbara Tuchman.

Human beings wrote these books, plays, and poems for human beings. Consequently, the printed page will not only distance you from your phones and screens, but it will also remind you, for better and for worse, of what it means to be fully human.

Unplugging from devices and reading books written by humans reminds us of the depth of thought and emotion that technology can't replicate. Lomb/Shutterstock

Say No to AI Companions

In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s wife, Nancy, spearheaded an antidrug campaign with the slogan “Just say no.” Although reactions to those efforts were mixed, the use of illicit drugs in the United States did in fact diminish.

We can follow suit, saying no to addictive AI companions and encouraging others, especially the young, to do the same. Companies such as Replika, Character AI, and Nomi offer appealing companion apps designed to converse with you and, like drugs, keep you hooked on them. Although AI companions are relatively new, some psychologists are already treating what is loosely labeled “AI psychosis.” Already, men and women addicted to AI are forming what amount to 12-step groups to regain their mental and emotional health.

Ironically, designers are aiming to make AI counselors. In “AI Should Not Be Your Therapist,” Andrew Gondy writes that “some chatbot companies, such as Abby and Earkick, have been designed specifically for the purpose of therapy.”

McLean undergirds Gondy’s warnings about AI therapy with this recent comment from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: “People use it—young people, especially, use it—as a therapist, a life coach; having these relationship problems and [asking] ‘what should I do?’ And right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there’s legal privilege for it.

“There’s doctor-patient confidentiality, there’s legal confidentiality, whatever. And we haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT.”

Forewarned Is Forearmed

We are in a crucial moment in human history, a time in which our digitalized devices are merging with human beings on all fronts. Personalized AI apps and social media platforms are designed to absorb our attention, to suck information from us, and to put the real world and everything in it on the back burner.

Perhaps, then, at least for the present, we should look at AI bots not as companions, but as predators. What we need to remember is that we don’t have to make ourselves the prey. We can avoid that fate by fully embracing our humanity and shunning the substitution of AI companions for friends and loved ones.

“Companion” derives from Latin. “Com” is a version of ”cum,“ the Latin word for “with,” and ”panion“ comes from “panis,” the Latin for ”bread.” A companion literally means someone with whom bread is broken or with whom a meal is shared. Today, a companion generally means a friend.

It’s wise to keep in mind that we can’t break bread with a machine.