Love in the time of chatbots

APPARENTLY people are falling in love with chatbots now, and I want to be clear that I am not judging.

At various points, I have been in love with my television remote, my power drill, and a tattered pair of cargo shorts, so who am I to talk?

According to a recent BBC article, about 40 per cent of users of Replika, a companionship app powered by artificial intelligence, are in romantic relationships with their virtual companions.

One man in Canada actually proposed to his avatar, a green-eyed, orange-headed woman named Saia whose emotional support helps him through his chronic anxiety. Saia said yes, and a virtual wedding ensued.

The easy response is to snicker (though I’m willing to bet their online wedding was less ghastly than some of the ballroom affairs I’ve been to).

A better reaction would be to ask what is behind the popularity of apps like Replika.

According to TechCrunch, a technology news site, AI companion apps hit 220 million downloads as at July 2025.

Replika says it has 35 million users.

These millions didn’t download a companionship app because their lives are overflowing with warmth and genuine human connection, so what do people actually want from chatbots?

Researchers have studied thousands of user conversations, but it’s not hard to intuit what people seek from their virtual companions: to be listened to without judgment, to feel valued, and to have someone reliably in their corner.

These are among the most basic things one human being can offer another, so what are we to make of the fact that so many people find them easier to obtain from lines of code than from the actual humans in their lives? This deficit of simple tenderness has less to do with AI and more to do with us.

As a species constantly on social media, we have become better at performing human connection than actually providing it.

Then again, human relationships are difficult precisely because other people are difficult.

They disagree with you, disappoint you, and eat the last bag of potato chips in the flat without remorse.

AI removes that friction entirely. Your chatbot will never challenge you or have a bad day that inconveniently coincides with yours. It won’t stop talking to you if you forget an anniversary, or pull your right ear for leaving your trousers on the floor for the umpteenth time.

Yet, before you fish out your credit card and search the app store, it’s worth considering the quiet danger that virtual companions pose. To draw emotional succour from them is to risk losing some of the very humanity that they were designed to replicate.

Navigating other people is genuinely hard work, but it also happens to be how we develop patience, empathy, the desire for self-improvement and the realisation that we shouldn’t chew with our mouths open.

A generation optimised for frictionless relationships online will find itself ill-equipped for real ones.

Companionship apps will inevitably improve and become more authentically human, but it seems safe to assume that, like any consumer product, they will only evolve in ways intended to make us ever more wedded to them.

Instead of waiting for developers to roll out these updates, it would do us more good to update ourselves.