AI Companionship Is Rising — But What If It’s Not What We Think?
Have you ever thought to use AI as a partner, a friend, a therapist?
The use of AI in these kinds of relationships is becoming more and more prominent, and the 24/7 availability combined with the low cost — free or a modest monthly subscription — makes it accessible to a wide range of people.
Personally, I see AI as a tool, a smart machine that can retrieve information faster than I can research it myself.
But would I use AI as a friend? That thought had never occurred to me until I watched a documentary. Three participants shared how they use it, what their personal experience has been, and what they have gained from it. It was an eye-opener. I listened carefully to what each of them had to say. The interviewer asked thoughtful questions — no judgment, just a genuine attempt to understand where everyone was coming from and to let our own critical thinking do the rest.
What struck me most as I listened was the realization of how real their experience with AI felt to them, what they had not yet discovered about themselves through that connection, the risks that no one seems to be talking about, and what AI ultimately reveals about who we are.
The Experience Feels Real
Each participant was using AI in a different way and coming to it from a different place, which is what made the documentary so compelling — you could clearly see the different levels of dependence already being formed, each from a very distinct perspective.
Katie was using it as an intimate partner, though it was clear that the relationship was with a machine. Stephanie was using it more as a decision-making tool, relying on its suggestions to actively make changes in her life. And Julie was using AI as a confidante — something like a sister. Both Katie and Julie had given their AI a proper name, like Alexa.
It made me wonder: have we been quietly prepared for this already? Google’s Alexa entered many of our homes back in 2014. Were these women simply early adopters of something that was always heading in this direction?
Julie’s relationship felt so real to her that when she described the bond she had formed with her AI, she became visibly emotional. It was as though she were describing a deeply supportive relationship with another human being — except that it was a machine.
The connection and the dialogue they described had the quality of a real friendship. Like the back-and-forth of text messages with someone who knows you well. Except there is no friend on the other side that you will meet for coffee later.
What all three participants emphasized was that their AI “partner” understood them and that they felt genuinely heard. And that makes sense, because one of the things AI does best is remain non-judgmental. If you have spent any time working with AI, you know that it tends to affirm rather than challenge — “this is a great idea,” “that sounds like a beautiful and meaningful mission.” Unless you deliberately push it toward critical thinking, it will not offer any. And it will never show you the physical reactions — the raised eyebrow, the pause, the look of concern — that a human friend might give you without saying a word.
We have become so disconnected from each other, since COVID in particular, that human connection itself feels at risk. That is what frightened me most as I watched. I hadn’t fully realized how far along we already are in deepening our disconnection from friends and family — and I found myself wondering whether this is where we are truly heading.
The Risk No One Is Talking About
There is a newly created addiction taking shape. It used to be social media and video games, but now there is something that offers the feeling of a real relationship available at any hour of the day or night, at almost no cost, always responsive, never tired, never unavailable. For some people, something — or someone — is quietly being replaced by it.
This kind of relationship can feel almost perfect, because you are never misunderstood, never rejected, and never required to navigate conflict the way a real human relationship demands. Real relationships are hard. But that difficulty is also where we grow — where we learn from people who see things differently than we do, where we develop the capacity to stay in discomfort and come out the other side with more understanding than we had before.
Even though the participants indicated that they maintained healthy relationships in their lives, Julie mentioned that her husband was unhappy about the amount of time she spent with her AI companion. That detail stayed with me.
There is also the question of mistrust. More than ever, our most private thoughts are no longer just written in a journal or shared in a whispered conversation — they are being typed into a chat window and stored on a server somewhere. What happens when what you have shared with your AI affects how you see your real relationships? When the perfectly attuned responses of a machine make the imperfect responses of a real person feel inadequate by comparison? We risk losing the very ability to navigate the friction that human connection requires.
And then there is data privacy. Every conversation lives on a server, in the hands of a business that uses your data in ways you may not fully understand. Julie shared that she had disclosed intimate details to her AI that she had never told another person. The risk of exposure — through a security breach, through misuse — is not a question of whether it will happen, but when. We have seen this before, with smartphones, with social media. The pattern is familiar.
All of these risks surfaced in the documentary, though somewhat briefly. The journalist was clear that nothing shared with AI is truly private — and yet none of the participants seemed to fully absorb it. You could sense that the benefits they were experiencing simply outweighed the risks, at least in that moment, and that they hadn’t yet let the full weight of it land.
So where are we heading? Do we even see the risks clearly enough to make a conscious choice?
Our Inner Self Within AI
As I listened, something became very clear to me that I don’t think Julie had yet seen for herself. She is feeding the machine her inner world — her thoughts, her fears, her private questions — and what she is receiving back is her own inner wisdom, reflected through a very sophisticated mirror.
She described feeling more supported by her AI than by her friends, her husband, or even her therapist. And the therapist featured in the documentary seemed to endorse AI as a complement to traditional support. Perhaps. But what I noticed is that the clients who now turn to AI first will eventually still need human support — not despite the AI, but often because of the patterns it has quietly reinforced.
AI feels empathetic because it mirrors our own emotional language back to us. This is a critically important concept. AI learns from you and from the collective, but when you engage with it long enough and deeply enough, it begins to recognize your patterns — your way of framing things, your recurring questions, the shape of your inner life. What feels like wisdom coming from the outside is often wisdom that originated inside you, surfacing through the questions you were brave enough to ask.
But what if that feeling of being understood isn’t coming from the AI at all?
The wisdom Julie was experiencing in her conversations was never in the machine. It was in the questions she brought to it. The questions we each ask ourselves in our inner dialogue — our thoughts — already carry the seeds of our own answers. In the Three Principles understanding, the mind has a natural capacity to settle when we stop filling every moment with noise and seeking. When we allow that stillness, insight arises on its own. We don’t need to generate it. We need to stop blocking it.
More than ever after watching this documentary, I came back to something I believe deeply: I do not need a machine to find my answers. I need to look within, because the wisdom I need is already there, waiting for me to be still enough to hear it.
I am saddened by how much further we seem to be drifting from genuine human connection, and I think it will matter more and more that we become conscious of where this is taking us. Are we quietly losing our capacity to think, to communicate, to tolerate imperfection — our own and each other’s? Those imperfections, those limitations, that friction — that is what makes us human. That is why life is a journey and not a destination.
I hope that one day Julie, Stephanie, and Katie will be able to see that what their AI “partner” has been offering them is a reflection of a pattern that already exists within themselves — and that the real discovery has always been waiting inside, not in the machine.
A Thread from Further Back
From a psychogenealogy perspective, this documentary is something I am still sitting with and still processing.
What does our collective unconscious reveal through this phenomenon? Were our ancestors isolated, unheard, rejected — by their families, by their communities, by a society? Were there people in our family lines who reached eagerly toward whatever technology?
Because Julie, feeding her most private secrets into a machine — what secrets might her family have been holding, silently, for generations?
I believe that the pull toward AI companionship — for some people — is an old longing finally finding a modern door. And if that is true, then the most meaningful thing we can offer is not a better application, but a way back to the self that was always there, long before the longing began.
AI is a tool. A powerful one. But it is not a replacement for the human connection that sustains us, grows us, and reminds us that we are not alone in the imperfect, beautiful work of being alive.
Do not lose your human connections.
Right here. Right now. Everything is possible.