Tech companies are piling into the ‘loneliness market,’ sensing big profits from the broken-hearted

By Samantha Rose Hill

A few months ago, I broke up with my boyfriend. I told close friends but otherwise kept the news to myself. Or so I thought. Scrolling through Instagram in bed, between stand-up comedy and cooking videos I saw an advertisement for an A.I. companion. “Late-night whispers” was written across his chest while he soaked in a bubble bath. Did Instagram know I was single?

Tech companies have found a way to market digital goods to lonely people, promising relief through connection, but this kind of connection isn’t the solution; it’s the problem. Calling loneliness an epidemic transforms a feeling into a pathology to be cured, creating a loneliness economy. Reframing a universal human experience like loneliness as a medical diagnosis creates a market opportunity to manufacture, sell and buy treatment. The prescription given for loneliness is connection, and Big Tech has found a way to seize the vulnerability of lonely people eager to escape their predicament.

Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, argues that A.I. companions can help fill what he sees as a friendship gap. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, is developing an A.I. “companion” that will live with users and, the company claims, be capable of sensing their surroundings. Replika, a generative A.I. chatbot, touts customer claims like “I love my human-like A.I. companion” and “Replika understands me better than any real guy ever did.” “Friends come and go, but GalaxyAI has your back,” another ad reads. Social media, dating apps and A.I. companions won’t alleviate loneliness; they will make it worse by giving people a way to avoid their aloneness.

Lonely people are particularly vulnerable to commercial exploitation because they will often go to extreme lengths to avoid being alone with themselves. When loneliness was declared “a national epidemic” in 1983 in The Times, researchers were already worried that loneliness would become an industry. “Because lonely individuals feel pressed to search for others, they are likely to explore any possible remedy, whatever its genuine promise,” Robert Weiss, then a professor at Harvard, told attendees at a 1982 conference on loneliness.

The loneliness industry assumes that loneliness derives from a lack of sufficient connection to others. Early researchers often argued that loneliness was a reflection of an insecure attachment to the mother figure. Our first relationships become blueprints for our adult relationships, they believed. The terror of loneliness was likened to an infant crying out from the crib. With new A.I. companions, tech companies are essentially selling a risk-free relationship that recreates an idyll of childhood — except instead of an ever-present mother figure, customers receive a bot they can shape to their demands.

Unlike human-to-human contact, which involves vulnerability, disappointment, negotiation and potential rejection, A.I. gives you what you want, how you want it, when you want it. You never have to apologize, ask for forgiveness, suffer an uncomfortable silence or wonder what another person is thinking. There’s no other, just a reflection of yourself. The user becomes speaker and audience, always affirmed, never challenged.

Mr. Zuckerberg calls this innovation the “personalization loop.” A more honest term might be the loneliness loop. Like Ovid’s Narcissus gazing into the water, users are being transfixed by their own reflections. A.I. companions don’t make loneliness go away; they just create a distraction, allowing the users to fixate on a reflected image of themselves. Eventually, that creates isolation from others. It’s a godlike seduction: to remake relationships in one’s own image. No risk, no mess, no friction. But also, no reality.

The danger is not that A.I. will replace human connection. The danger is that it will make us forget what actual connection requires while eroding our ability to think for ourselves by training us to depend on A.I. for the simplest of tasks and interactions. Treating loneliness as a disease is dangerous, because the goods being sold as cures keep us stuck in a loneliness loop.

You cannot cure loneliness with a marketed solution. When I saw that ad for an A.I. boyfriend that night, I felt uneasy. But I noticed something wasn’t quite right: When I clicked on the image, I saw it was targeted to gay men. The algorithm had come up short. I laughed and went to bed.

Now the ads keep coming. The most recent: “Human-like A.I. boyfriend to ease your loneliness.” This was a second miss: I’m not lonely right now. I’m spending time with friends, writing a book, feeling like myself again after a miserable relationship I’d jumped into because I was in a lonely place. Researching loneliness had taught me that what most people want is to be heard, but I hadn’t learned how to listen to myself, and I’d let my loneliness override my intuition. It’s these moments of vulnerability that A.I. is positioned to exploit.