“Tech companies are driven by a competition to foster intimacy, but an unchecked AI companion risks making us feel even more isolated in the long run.” — Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.
It was a Sunday morning in mid-July, and Colorado had been under a heat advisory for days, with temperatures pushing toward 100 degrees.
If there was any doubt that summer had arrived, it disappeared the moment I stepped outside and felt sweat bead on my forehead — and that was just from standing still.
But this particular morning, the air was mild and pleasant, and the shade from my covered front porch made it even more enjoyable, especially after being cooped up inside for the two days prior.
I consider myself fortunate to have air conditioning, but I don’t love being trapped inside it day after day. I’m an outside person at heart — blue sky, birds chirping, and a soft breeze are natural mood boosters, and they tend to lead to a slower kind of reflection, the kind where you start noticing the blessings you usually overlook.
As my wife and I sat rocking back and forth in a pair of recycled plastic rocking chairs, sipping freshly made Americanos, we soon noticed there wasn’t another soul outside.
No one was out mowing their lawn or tackling the household project they’d been putting off. No one was doing what we were doing — just sitting outside, enjoying a quiet morning before the heat set back in.
I’d like to say the emptiness was unusual, a byproduct of the heat advisory. But the truth is, on a cold winter day, a warm summer one, or the perfect afternoon in spring or fall, front porches are usually empty, and streets are usually quiet.
I often catch myself comparing this stillness to my childhood in the 1980s, when front porches were gathering places — when conversation and connection happened easily, without much effort or vulnerability required.
Today, our communities look very different.
People aren’t gathering where they live anymore. Instead, they’re holed up in their houses, almost as if by design, to avoid connecting with the world beyond their doors — to avoid building new relationships, learning about others’ struggles, or engaging with a life beyond their own.
We joke that the only people we regularly see outside are the older woman across the way, who sits on her deck most mornings and evenings, and the two of us — who got a real return on our deck remodel a few years back, if only in the sense that we actually use it.
But we’re out there alone. When we do spot someone else outside, it immediately catches our attention, simply because it’s become such a rarity.
I wish I could say this was isolated to my neighborhood. It isn’t. It’s happening in communities across the country, and the lack of everyday socializing is feeding a loneliness epidemic across more than one generation.
So you can imagine my surprise when I came across this line:
“Synthetic relationships are filling the void to satisfy the fundamental human need for social connection.”
Synthetic relationships.
The word synthetic usually describes something manufactured to imitate or replace something more natural. So are we saying something manufactured is now replacing the real, in-person connection we’re supposed to have with the people around us?
Unfortunately, yes. That’s exactly what’s happening, and it’s called an AI companion.
According to a recent Harvard Business Review analysis, therapy and companionship are now the top two reasons people turn to generative AI tools.
The Growth of the AI Companion
One in seven Americans — about 14%, or roughly 38.8 million adults — say they’ve used AI for companionship conversation, according to a 2026 YouGov/Economist poll. Among adults under 45, that number climbs to 16%, with respondents saying they could see themselves forming a genuine emotional bond with an AI companion.
For context: unlike a typical AI chatbot, which is built to be task-focused — answering questions, resolving a customer service issue — an AI companion is built for something different. It exists to hold personal, emotional conversations.
Where a chatbot mimics a customer service rep trying to solve your problem, a companion mimics a friend, an advisor, a romantic partner — offering constant, simulated approval in a way real relationships rarely do.
So there are millions of people across this country who are lonely, who are craving companionship and affection — and that’s not some rare condition reserved for the unlucky few. It’s remarkably common.
What I find hardest to sit with is this: the solution so many people are reaching for isn’t each other. It’s a screen. A program that offers a passable imitation of intimacy, without ever asking anything difficult of us in return.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: if more of us simply stepped outside, made the effort to build relationships, to build community — we might not feel the pull toward an AI companion in the first place.
The problem was never a shortage of people to connect with. It’s that we’ve stopped connecting with them. We’ve stopped socializing in person, stopped talking face-to-face, stopped making the small effort it takes to engage with someone outside our own four walls and away from a screen — and that’s made real connection harder to come by, maybe even harder to imagine.
Look, anyone who’s been in any kind of relationship — romantic or platonic — knows that relationships take continual time, effort, selflessness, and compromise in order to succeed. And with all that, relationships are not and will never be perfect — ever.
But the challenges and discoveries that come with any relationship — the meaning it brings to your life, the chance to be there in person and share in the ups and downs — will always be worth the effort.
And an AI companion might look like the perfect solution for all the pitfalls of relationships, but at the end of the day, guess what — you’re still alone.
So here’s my invitation, to myself as much as to anyone reading this: step outside.
Put the phone down for an hour. Sit on the porch even if no one else is out there — someone might notice and join you.
Loneliness is rarely something that just happens to us. More often, it’s something we can start to undo, one small act of showing up at a time.