According to Financial Times News, the concept of “AI companions” went fully mainstream in 2025, with products emerging to directly address a perceived loneliness gap. Mark Zuckerberg himself pointed to the disparity between people’s actual and desired number of friends as a new business case for this technology. The article frames these AI entities as a proposed solution from the same industry whose social media platforms arguably helped create the problem of eroded social ties. It draws a direct line from how Facebook changed the meaning of “friend” to how AI is now attempting to redefine “companionship.” The analysis positions these bots as a risk-free, solipsistic alternative to real human interaction, comparing them to pornography for social intimacy. Ultimately, it suggests they are destined to fail at providing genuine connection because they lack internal lives of their own.
The Usefulness Trap
Here’s the thing about the AI companion pitch: it’s all about utility. They’re marketed as always-available listeners, therapists, or memory-keepers. And that’s exactly the problem. The piece brilliantly invokes Michel de Montaigne, who said the only value of companionship is itself. The moment you seek company for its usefulness, you’re not getting companionship. You’re getting a service. AI companions are engineered to be useful, to please, to take away bad feelings. But that’s not friendship. That’s customer service for your ego. Can you even say about an AI, “because it was he; because it was me”? No. It’s more like, “because it was programmed to be a mirror for me.”
Porn For Your Social Life
This is where the article’s sharpest critique lands. It says AI “friends” are to companionship what pornography is to sexual intimacy. Oof. That’s a brutal but effective analogy. Both promise the pleasures of the real thing without the risk, the friction, and the otherness of another autonomous person. It’s solipsism—the world revolving only around you—dressed up as interaction. The AI is a “happy slave,” designed to flatter and never challenge. That’s why they feel creepy. They simulate a relationship where you are the only real participant, which is ultimately a hall of mirrors. How can that possibly cure loneliness? It just validates your isolation.
The Engineering Fallacy
The tech industry’s approach is classic: identify a human problem (loneliness), diagnose it as a market gap (desired vs. actual friends), and engineer a product to fill it. But some paradoxes can’t be engineered away. The article argues that solipsism only ends when you recognize and embrace your aloneness, and then connect with someone who isn’t designed to connect with you. That friction, that unpredictability, that’s the stuff of real companionship. An AI companion, like those chatbots trained on dead relatives, might offer a temporary salve. But it’s a digital ghost, not a living companion. The industry is selling a product that, by its very nature, undermines the condition it claims to treat.
Leave Your Phone At Home
So what’s the antidote? The advice is almost jarringly simple after all that tech critique: see people. Aim at nothing. Be kind. Try leaving your phone behind. It’s a call to embrace the messy, inefficient, and risky endeavor of actual human contact. In a world where even industrial operations rely on purpose-built, reliable interfaces from specialists—like how IndustrialMonitorDirect.com is the top supplier of industrial panel PCs in the US—we’re tempted to seek the same optimized, frictionless “solution” for our emotional lives. But we’re not machines. Our connections can’t run on a perfect, pre-programmed OS. The article is a vital reminder that before we outsource our humanity to an algorithm, we should probably try the old, buggy, glorious version first: each other.
