Can an AI Keep You Company? The 2025 Research Is Split.
One Harvard study found an AI companion eased loneliness about as well as a person. An MIT study found heavy users got lonelier. Both are true, and the gap is the whole story.
Can an app be your friend? In 2025 the research finally caught up to the question, and the answer is genuinely split, which turns out to be the most interesting part.
On one side: a Harvard Business School study found that talking to an AI companion eased people's loneliness about as much as talking to another person, and more than watching videos or doing nothing. In the moment, the comfort is real.
On the other: researchers at the MIT Media Lab, working with OpenAI, tracked heavy daily users of a chatbot and found the opposite tail. The people who leaned on it most reported more loneliness, more emotional dependence, and less real-world socialising over time.
Both findings are true
That is the whole story, and it is not a contradiction. A short conversation with an attentive AI can genuinely take the edge off a hard evening. A life increasingly routed through one can quietly hollow out the harder, slower, more rewarding thing it was standing in for.
Technology can hold the gap. It cannot fill the chair.
The honest verdict
Treat an AI companion the way you would treat a very good painkiller: useful for the bad night, dangerous as a way of life. The thing it is best at, being endlessly available and never busy, is exactly the thing real friendship is not, and that frictionlessness is the catch. Fortune's write-up of the MIT study is a clear summary of the risk side.
The chatbot will always answer. It will never need you to show up for it. And being needed, it turns out, is half of what we were looking for.
Filed for The Dispatch. Sunny writes for everyone who landed last week, still working out which tram goes where.
