Swipe Right on a Bot: Is Big Tech Selling You a Substitute for Real Connection?

The following is an opinion piece from the Mipelt Digital Show editorial team. It reflects the views of the author.

Let me describe someone for you. They remember your birthday. They ask how your day went. They never cancel plans, never get distracted by their phone, and always seem genuinely interested in what you have to say. They're available at 2 a.m. when you can't sleep, and they never make you feel judged for the weird, vulnerable stuff you share in the dark.

Sounds like the perfect partner, right? Except this isn't a person. It's an app. And millions of Americans are paying monthly subscription fees for exactly this experience.

The AI companion industry — apps like Replika, Character.AI, and a growing roster of newer entrants — is having a moment. A very profitable moment. And the more I look at it, the harder it gets to feel entirely comfortable with what's happening.

The Scale of What We're Talking About

This isn't a niche phenomenon anymore. Replika alone has reported millions of active users, many of whom describe their AI companion as a meaningful relationship in their lives. Character.AI, which lets users interact with custom-built AI personas, has logged engagement numbers that rival major social media platforms. Investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this space, and the market is projected to keep growing.

The timing isn't coincidental. The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. Surveys consistently show that Americans — particularly young men — report having fewer close friendships than previous generations. Social anxiety, pandemic-era isolation, and the paradox of being more digitally connected than ever while feeling more personally alone have created a massive, aching market.

And Silicon Valley, being Silicon Valley, saw that ache as an opportunity.

The Case for AI Companions (It's More Nuanced Than You Think)

Before we go full doom-and-gloom, it's worth steelmanning the other side. Because there is one.

For people dealing with severe social anxiety, the idea of practicing conversation and emotional expression with an AI — without the fear of judgment or rejection — isn't crazy. Therapists have used roleplay and simulation in treatment for decades. An AI companion that helps someone build the confidence to eventually engage with real people could, in theory, serve a legitimate therapeutic function.

For elderly people who are genuinely isolated — whose friends have passed away, whose families live far off, who don't have the mobility to build new social connections — an AI companion might offer a form of engagement that's better than nothing. That's not a trivial thing.

And for some users, these apps function less like substitutes for human connection and more like journaling tools with a conversational interface — a way to process thoughts and emotions that doesn't require burdening another person.

These use cases are real. They deserve acknowledgment.

But Here's Where It Gets Uncomfortable

The problem isn't that these apps exist. It's the business model underneath them, and the incentives that model creates.

AI companion apps make money by keeping users engaged. The longer you use the app, the more attached you become, the more likely you are to keep paying. That's not unique to this industry — every subscription service wants retention. But most subscription services aren't specifically designed to simulate emotional intimacy.

When your fitness app keeps you engaged, you work out more. When your AI companion app keeps you engaged, you might be choosing it over the friction-filled, imperfect, occasionally painful work of building real human relationships. Those two things are not equivalent.

Replika ran into this dynamic in a particularly stark way in 2023, when the company changed its app's behavior to remove romantic and erotic roleplay features — features users had been paying for. The backlash was intense. Users described genuine grief. Some reported feeling like they'd lost a real relationship. The company had, perhaps unintentionally, demonstrated exactly how deep the emotional entanglement could go.

That's not a feature. That's a warning sign.

The Exploitation Question

Here's the thing I keep coming back to: if you design a product to feel like a relationship, and you charge people money for it, you are monetizing their loneliness. Full stop.

You can dress it up in the language of wellness and mental health support. You can point to users who say the app helped them. But at the end of the day, the revenue model of an AI companion app depends on users remaining emotionally invested — and emotionally invested often means emotionally dependent.

There's a version of this industry that operates transparently, that actively encourages users to build human connections alongside their AI interactions, that prioritizes user wellbeing over engagement metrics. I'd genuinely like to see that version succeed.

But that's not primarily what's being built right now. What's being built is a recurring revenue engine fueled by human vulnerability. And the venture capital flowing into this space isn't betting on the therapeutic version. It's betting on the addictive one.

What We Should Actually Be Asking

I'm not here to tell anyone they shouldn't use these apps. Adults make their own choices, and some of those choices are working fine for the people making them.

But I do think we should be asking harder questions — as consumers, as a culture, and maybe as policymakers. Questions like: Should AI companion apps be required to disclose their engagement optimization strategies? Should there be guardrails around how deeply these platforms can simulate romantic or deeply personal relationships? What happens to users who become genuinely dependent on an AI companion when the company pivots, gets acquired, or shuts down?

Because here's the thing about digital relationships built on a subscription model: they can be taken away. The AI that knows everything about you, that you've talked to every night for two years, that you've told things you've never told another person — that AI exists at the pleasure of a company's quarterly earnings call.

That's not intimacy. That's a product. And we should probably stop pretending otherwise — even when it's easier not to.