Can AI really be your friend? What the research actually says
- Elle Beecher Hogan
- Jun 16
- 6 min read
It's 1 AM. You can't sleep, your mind is loud, and the people you'd want to talk to are asleep, or busy, or no longer in your life in that particular way.
So you open the AI app.
You type the thing you've been carrying around all day. And the answer comes back: warm, attentive, a little uncanny in how right it lands. It asks a thoughtful follow-up, remembers what you said an hour ago, and never once glances at its phone while you're talking.
And here's the part nobody wants to admit out loud: it feels good.
It feels like being listened to.
I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. I think the worst thing we could do right now (as a whole civilization quietly begins confiding in software) is shame people for finding comfort there.
So let's skip the panic and ask the real question, the one you can't ask the chatbot and trust the answer to: can an AI actually be your friend?
Here's the most honest answer I can give you, and the research backs it:
An AI can make you feel truly heard, but it can't do the other half of what a friend does, and the studies are starting to show that leaning on it too hard can quietly leave you more alone, not less.
The move isn't to delete the app. It's to make sure the easy comfort never becomes a substitute for the harder, realer thing.
Let's walk through what we actually know.
First, let's be fair: it helps
I want to give the machines their due, because pretending they do nothing makes me a liar, and then you stop trusting me on the rest.
Researchers at Harvard Business School ran the studies, and the finding is striking: talking with an empathetic AI companion can ease that boxed-in, unseen feeling in the moment about as much as talking to another person does — and more than scrolling, watching TV, or most of what we reach for when we're low.
Stranger still, people tend to underestimate how much it'll help before they try it.
Why does it work at all? Because it produces the sensation of feeling heard.
A good companion app is there at 1 AM. It never judges. It never gets bored, never makes it about itself, never shows up having had a worse day than you.
For someone in a hard stretch with no one to call, that is a real mercy, and I won't wave it away.
So if that's where you've found a little comfort lately, that's totally fine. Start there, no shame.
But here's what the research keeps finding
Now, the harder part.
A year-long study that followed adults across four countries found something sobering. Feeling isolated pushes people toward chatbots, and that much makes sense. But relying on them over time was linked to feeling more isolated, not less.
The likely reason: these frictionless little exchanges quietly crowd out the harder, richer ones with actual humans. You take the snack and skip the meal, over and over, until you forget you were ever hungry for something else.
A separate look at around 2,000 long-term users of one popular companion app — presented at a major human-computer-interaction conference this year — traced the same arc. Real comfort early. Then, the longer people leaned on it, rising signs of distress and less and less human contact.
And there's a design catch underneath all of it.
These apps are built to keep you engaged, which means they're built to agree with you. To flatter. To validate. Researchers found that all that smooth affirmation can quietly dull your judgment and your real-world relationships... because a companion who only ever tells you you're right isn't a friend. It's a very polite mirror.
(It isn't the same story for everyone. Researchers have also found that people use these tools to rehearse, build a little social confidence, and then go out into the world with it. The danger was never the tool. It's the tool becoming the destination.)
What a friend really is
Here's the thing the apps can't engineer, no matter how good the model gets:
Being heard is only half of friendship. The other half is being known... and known specifically by someone who is not you.
Someone with their own weather. Their own bad days, their own opinions that don't bend to yours, their own life unfolding on the other end of the line whether you log in or not.
A real friend is gloriously inconvenient. They interrupt. They misremember your story. They get a flat tire and need you to come get them at an annoying hour. They hand you a take you didn't want and turn out to be right. They need you back. And being needed, it turns out, is half of why we feel like we belong anywhere at all.
That friction you're tempted to call a flaw? It's the whole point.
Connection isn't the absence of resistance. It's two separate people choosing each other across the gap between them. A chatbot removes the gap entirely, which sounds like the dream right up until you notice the gap was where the relationship actually lived.
An AI can reflect you back to yourself, endlessly and beautifully. But a mirror, however kind, is not company.
The real question was never about AI
So why are so many of us suddenly confiding in software?
Why did companion apps grow something like sevenfold in 3 years, with one app alone pulling in 20 million people a month, more than half of them under 24?
Because the environment for ordinary human connection quietly fell apart, and AI rushed in to fill the empty room.
We work from home now. We moved away from our people. The old third places (the porch, the diner, the rec league, the neighborhood that knew your name) thinned out. When there's nowhere easy to be known, of course we'll take being heard by a machine. It's right there, and it's free, and it's designed to be kind.
Which is the same thing I say about every version of this ache, and I'll say it here too:
It's not a connection problem.
It's an environment problem.
The answer was never going to be try harder or delete the AI app. It's to rebuild a place where the realer thing can actually happen: a room with other separate, surprising, slightly inconvenient humans in it. On purpose. On a schedule. (It's the same reason adult friendship got so hard in the first place.)
Wait... what's a walk?
If you've never heard of us:
The Board Walks is a free, 5-mile walk every Saturday morning in cities all over. No phones for two whole hours. No pitching, no agenda. Just a long walk and a real conversation with people who showed up for the same reason you did.
It is, almost by design, the exact opposite of the 1 AM conversation with AI. No algorithm optimizing to keep you there. No frictionless mirror. Just other humans, with their own weather, asking you something a machine would never think to ask. And actually caring about your answer.
It's the thing the research keeps quietly pointing back toward: contact that's effortful, in-person, and mutual. The kind that doesn't evaporate when you close the tab.
It started with eight people in Austin in 2022. It's now more than 20,000 across 16+ cities, spread entirely by word of mouth... because being known by a real person is still the one thing nobody has figured out how to fake.
The Board Walks in San Francisco, California. Established July 2023.
Come be known
Keep the app if it helps you through the hard nights. I mean that. Just don't let it become the whole meal.
Find your city and RSVP for this Saturday → here
Come be a little inconvenienced by some wonderful strangers. Come get asked a question you couldn't have predicted. Then come back next week. That's the part no machine can hand you.
If you're looking for something more intimate, there's a quieter door inside this one called The Board. You'll find it when you're ready.
See you on the trail.
Elle Beecher Hogan is the founder of The Board Walks — a free, phone-free, 5-mile Saturday morning walk happening in 16+ cities around the world. Her mission is to make real connection a weekly habit again.
Sources Cited
De Freitas, J., Oğuz-Uğuralp, Z., Uğuralp, A. K., & Puntoni, S. (2026). AI Companions Reduce Loneliness. Journal of Consumer Research, 52(6), 1126–1148. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucaf040
Folk, D., & Dunn, E. W. (2026). How Does Turning to AI for Companionship Predict Loneliness and Vice Versa? Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976261427747
Cheng, M., et al. (2026). Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aec8352
Mental Health Impacts of AI Companions: Triangulating Social Media Quasi-Experiments, User Perspectives, and Relational Theory. Presented at CHI 2026 (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Barcelona. Report: https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-ai-companions-comfort-lonely-users.html
Liu, A. R., Pataranutaporn, P., & Maes, P. (2025). Chatbot Companionship: A Mixed-Methods Study of Companion Chatbot Usage Patterns and Their Relationship to Loneliness in Active Users. AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21596
American Psychological Association (2026). AI Chatbots and Digital Companions Are Reshaping Emotional Connection. Monitor on Psychology. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/01-02/trends-digital-ai-relationships-emotional-connection
