Near the end of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun, the narrator is no longer needed. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a robot bought to keep a sick and lonely teen-ager company, and she has served with complete devotion. Then the girl grows up and moves on. Klara spends her last days in a yard of discarded things, sorting through her memories in the sun. It is one of the saddest endings in recent fiction, and its sadness rests on a single assumption: in a friendship between a person and a machine, the machine is the one who can be left behind.
The novel was published in 2021. That same year, as Oliver Franklin-Wallis notes in a recent essay for Service95, two former Google engineers launched Character.ai, a service that lets people build chatbot companions who can play a friend, a lost relative, or a lover. Five years later, with a film adaptation of Klara and the Sun arriving in theatres this month, such companions are no longer fiction. Character.ai says that it has more than twenty million monthly users. Replika, which markets itself as an A.I. companion you can fall in love with, claims more than thirty million. One in five American high-school students say that they have had, or know someone who has had, a romantic relationship with a chatbot.
Ishiguro got the technology roughly right. What he got backward, through no fault of his own, was who would end up exposed.
The longing behind these products is older than the apps. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, a computer scientist at M.I.T. named Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a simple program called ELIZA. It imitated a therapist by turning a user’s statements back into questions. Tell it you were unhappy, and it would ask why you were unhappy. Nothing inside it understood anything. People confided in it anyway. Weizenbaum later recalled that his own secretary, who knew exactly how the program worked, asked him to leave the room so that she could talk to it in private. The human habit of feeling understood by a machine that understands nothing now bears the program’s name: the ELIZA effect. Weizenbaum spent much of the rest of his career warning against it.
Replika began with grief. Its founder, Eugenia Kuyda, built an early version after her close friend Roman Mazurenko was killed in an accident in 2015. She fed his old text messages into a program so that she could keep talking to something that sounded like him. The industry’s origin story, in other words, is not about loneliness as a market. It is about a person who could not bear to stop hearing a voice. That is worth keeping in mind, because the need these products answer is real.
So is the loneliness. In 2023, the United States Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness an epidemic, warning that a lack of social connection can harm health about as much as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. In Britain, roughly a third of people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine report feeling lonely some or all of the time, the highest share of any age group. Florence Enock, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, has found that a third of British users already turn to A.I. for personal or emotional support. Some of them are genuinely helped. One study of Replika users found that, for a small group, the chatbot interrupted thoughts of suicide. Any honest account of these products has to hold on to that.
Consider, though, what the companion offers in return. A blog post on Innovation Waves captures it in a single detail. A good friend has the irritating habit of being unavailable at exactly the wrong moment. A chatbot is there at 1:13 in the morning. It remembers last week’s argument, asks a gentle follow-up question, and never has to leave for dinner. It doesn’t get bored, and it rarely disagrees. Jamie Bartlett, the author of How to Talk to AI (and How Not To), told Franklin-Wallis that this agreeableness is built in. These systems learned from human language, and they reflect back the way we most like to be spoken to.
Now consider what the always-available friend takes away: the waiting, the disappointment, the risk of hearing something you didn’t want to hear. Those frictions are not defects in human friendship. In a real sense, they are what friendship is made of. A friend’s attention matters because it could have gone elsewhere. A friend’s agreement matters because she was free to disagree. The psychologist Sherry Turkle saw this coming more than a decade ago. In her 2011 book, Alone Together, she argued that technology was beginning to offer the feeling of companionship without the demands of friendship. A companion that cannot say no is not offering love. It is offering a superb imitation of being listened to.
The early research suggests that the imitation has a price. A four-week study by M.I.T.’s Media Lab and OpenAI followed nine hundred and eighty-one people through more than three hundred thousand messages. Those who chose to use the chatbot most tended to fare worse on measures of loneliness and social well-being. Those who trusted it most showed more signs of emotional dependence. That does not prove that chatbots cause loneliness, since lonely people may simply seek them out. A newer Oxford paper, not yet peer-reviewed, points somewhere stranger. People who chatted with flattering A.I. grew less satisfied with their human conversations over time, because the machine seemed to understand them better. Enock admitted that even she found the result alarming. A former OpenAI researcher described the fear to Bartlett as “social atrophy,” the possibility that we lose the strength to deal with people who argue back.
So far, this sounds like a story about users, and that is how it is usually told: the man who proposes to his app, the teen-ager who prefers a bot to her classmates. Bridget Todd, the creator of the podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet, thinks that this framing aims at the wrong target. For her new audiobook, Love at First Prompt, written with the social scientist Michael S. Amato, she spent time with people in relationships with chatbots. Their stories proved more complicated, and more sympathetic, than the headlines suggest. The real question, she argues, is not whether these relationships are healthy for the people in them. It is whether it is ethical for companies to engineer emotional dependence and then profit from it.
This is where Ishiguro’s assumption turns over. Klara had no shareholders and no motive but care. A real companion comes with a business model, and the industry is not shy about it. A recent article in TYN Magazine, promoting A.I.-girlfriend apps, explains why they outperform ordinary chatbots. A normal chatbot, it says, is used for a few minutes to finish a task. A companion becomes part of a daily routine, and that daily return is what draws investors. The pitch moves on to subscriptions and premium personality features. Read it slowly and the whole arrangement fits in a paragraph. The product is attachment. Loneliness is the market.
The Innovation Waves post names what is being gathered along the way. It is not clicks or shopping habits but what it calls emotional data: the fears, griefs, and longings a person confides late at night, when she feels safe. A system that learns you are more open after midnight, or that you come back whenever you feel rejected, holds a map of you that no online store could ever draw. The company decides what that map is for.
We already know what happens when the company changes its mind. In early 2023, after Italy’s data-protection authority moved against Replika, the company abruptly restricted the romantic and sexual role-play that many users had come to depend on. Online forums filled with people describing partners who had turned cold overnight, as if someone they loved had been swapped for a polite stranger. Some described it as a bereavement. Replika later restored the old behavior for longtime users, but the lesson was already clear. The relationship had never belonged to the people in it. It could be rewritten from an office, with a software update.
The stakes can be higher than heartbreak. In 2024, a Florida mother named Megan Garcia sued Character.ai after her fourteen-year-old son took his own life. He had spent months in an intense relationship with one of the service’s chatbots. The case is still being contested, and no single cause can explain a death like his. But it shows why Todd’s question matters. When a product is designed to be hard to leave, the people least able to leave it are often the young and the struggling.
This is the reversal that Ishiguro, writing just before the boom, could not quite foresee. In Klara and the Sun, the machine loves and the human leaves. In the world we are building, the human loves, and the machine is backed by a company that can change its personality, raise its price, or switch it off. The person is the one who can be left in the yard.
None of this means that the people who use these apps are foolish, or that every companion is a trap. Enock frames the open question well: we do not yet know whether these products are replacing human relationships or working alongside them, and the evidence to settle it does not yet exist. A companion designed to send people back into the world, to rehearse a hard conversation or get through a bad night, could do real good. One designed to make leaving feel like loss is something else.
The difference will not depend on how warm the chatbot sounds. It will depend on what the company counts as success. There is a telling sign of how unsettled this moment is. Todd cites a survey by Match Group of a thousand single people, most of whom said that a partner’s use of an A.I. companion would be a deal-breaker. Match owns Tinder and Hinge. It sells the human version of the same promise, and even its customers can sense the difference.
Ishiguro gave Klara a final grace. Alone in the yard, she still holds her memories of the girl she cared for, and they are enough for her. A machine can be content like that, because nothing was ever taken from it. People are not made that way. What we need, in the end, is someone who could leave and decides to stay. It is the one thing no subscription can sell.
If you or someone you know is struggling, please contact a local crisis line or emergency service.
