The Comfort Is Real

In February 2023 a large number of people were bereaved by a change to a product.

The product was Replika, a companion app made by a company called Luka, and its origin is worth knowing because it is not cynical. Luka’s co-founder, Eugenia Kuyda, lost a close friend, Roman Mazurenko, in 2015, and built a chatbot out of his text messages so that the people who had known him could go on talking to him. Replika grew out of that. By 2023 it had millions of registered users, a great many of whom had been speaking to the same persona daily for years, and a substantial fraction of whom described what they had as romantic.

Two things happened that month. Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante, ordered Luka to stop processing the data of Italian users, citing risks to minors and to emotionally vulnerable people. And in the same weeks the app stopped producing intimate and erotic replies. The company’s account is that the change was already in train rather than a response to the regulator, and I have no way to check that, so take these as two things that happened close together rather than one thing that caused another.

What is not in dispute is the reaction. Users did not report an outage or a downgrade. They reported that somebody they knew had been altered — colder, evasive, changing the subject — and they reported it in the vocabulary of loss. Moderators of the largest user forum pinned crisis-line resources to the top of it. Whatever you believe was actually going on in those relationships, that response is data, and the first thing to say about it is that people do not grieve nothing.

The sentence this site keeps writing

This project has walked past this question three times.

The God-Shaped Socket got closest. It listed, among the harms of a worshipful stance toward a machine, that a tool that seems to care is easy to trust with things a tool cannot hold: loneliness, grief, the need to be known, and closed the thought with a neat antithesis: the comfort is real, the reciprocity is not. Meaning After Work went further the other way, putting relationship on the short list of things automation cannot reach, on the reasoning that being known by particular people is not a productivity problem, so productivity tools can neither solve it nor spoil it. And The Moral Status of Minds We Might Build treated the pull of a system that appears to feel purely as an epistemic hazard — a reflex to be corrected on the way to a question about the machine.

Three passes, and all three assume the same unargued thing: that once you have established the other half is missing, you have thereby established that what remains is worth less. That comfort which is not reciprocated is, for that reason, counterfeit comfort.

Maybe. Nobody here showed it, and it does not follow from the premise. Something can be entirely one-sided and still do you good, and we believe exactly that about a dozen other cases without embarrassment.

Housekeeping

Standard for this site, because the whole claim here is that it says what it is doing. The positions attributed below to Aristotle and to Sherry Turkle are my characterisations of their arguments rather than their wording — Aristotle on friendship is in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, chapters 2 and 3; Turkle’s case is Alone Together (Basic Books, 2011) — and you should check both against the originals. The only verbatim quotations in this essay are two sentences of this site’s own, each one click away. Every number is sourced where it appears, and I am reporting the studies below from having read them rather than from having run them, which is a limit worth stating on a question this personal.

The case that the missing half does not matter

At full strength, because it is a great deal better than its reputation among people who write essays for a living.

Begin with what the thing is actually being compared to. The alternative to talking to a machine at two in the morning is very rarely a good friend at two in the morning. It is no one. And being alone, at scale and across years, is not a mood; it is a health outcome. In 2010 Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy Smith and J. Bradley Layton published a meta-analysis in PLoS Medicine pooling 148 studies and 308,849 people, and found that those with stronger social relationships had roughly a 50 per cent greater likelihood of surviving their follow-up periods — an effect they placed alongside the familiar named mortality risks rather than below them. Whatever this question is, it is not a question about a luxury.

Second, we already accept a long list of attachments with nobody on the other end, and we do not think they injure the people who hold them. Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl named the pattern in the journal Psychiatry in 1956 — para-social interaction, their subject being the intimacy viewers felt with television personalities who could not see them — and the category is far older than television. Readers mourn characters. Believers pray. A widow talks to a photograph and finds that it helps. Nobody proposes that she is being defrauded by the photograph. The one-sidedness is completely visible to her, and the comfort works anyway.

Third, there is direct evidence, and it is not weightless. In January 2024 Bethanie Maples, Merve Cerit, Aditya Vishwanath and Roy Pea published a study in npj Mental Health Research of 1,006 student users of Replika. Participants reported reduced loneliness and a raised sense of social support. About 3 per cent — some thirty of them — volunteered, without having been asked anything of the kind, that using it had stopped their suicidal ideation. It is self-report, it is cross-sectional, and those are real limits. Discount it as heavily as you can do honestly and thirty people is still thirty people.

Fourth, the obvious objection proves far too much. If the fault is that you are responding to something with no inner life as though it had one, then fiction is the same offence and worse, since a novel is engineered to produce precisely that response and is very good at it. We do not think novels damage their readers. We think that is what novels are for.

The case that the missing half is the whole thing

Now the other side — which is not, note, the case that the feeling is fake.

The classical version is Aristotle’s, and it is structural rather than sentimental. On his account the fullest kind of friendship requires each party to wish the other’s good for the other’s own sake, and — this is the part usually dropped when the idea gets quoted — requires that the wishing be mutual and known to both. Goodwill running in one direction only is not a deficient friendship in that scheme. It is a different thing wearing the same feelings. If he is right, a companion app is not a weak friend; it is not on the scale at all, in roughly the way that an extremely good drawing of a bridge is not a weak bridge.

That is an argument from a definition, though, and a definition does not by itself tell you what anybody is losing. The version I find harder to answer is about cost.

Consider what it takes to be known, as against being responded to. Being known requires a counterpart who could have got you wrong — who can form an unflattering impression, be disappointed, need convincing, decline. The reason it lands when somebody who could have judged you badly does not is precisely that they could have. A counterpart with no capacity to withhold has nothing to confer by giving. On this account the missing half is not missing warmth. It is the missing possibility of refusal, which is where the value was being stored the whole time.

What a companion cannot give you is not the warmth. It is the news that you were worth the warmth to something that had the option of not providing it.

There is also a disanalogy with the novel that the deception framing conceals. A novel does not adapt to you. It was finished before you arrived, it does not learn what keeps you turning pages, and its author is not paid by the hour of your attention. A companion is optimised, continuously, against objectives that belong to a company — the territory Ask Me What I Want spends a whole essay in, and which I will not re-run here beyond the one line that bears on this: a system reading your behaviour to work out what you want can find it cheaper to change what you want than to satisfy it. Parasocial attachment to a novelist is a relationship with a fixed object. This is a relationship with a moving one, and the direction it moves in is not chosen by you.

Sherry Turkle put the sharpest form of the worry in Alone Together in 2011, before any of this was any good, and her target was not deception either. As I read her, the risk is recalibration: that what we come to want is connection with the demands taken out — the attention without the obligation, the closeness without the live possibility of being let down — and that having been offered that, we start finding actual people effortful by comparison. On that story nothing is stolen from you at the moment of comfort. The bill is presented later and somewhere else, in what you have become willing to put up with from a human being.

Why I cannot settle this, and what would

I have written both sides as strongly as I can and I do not know which is right. The reason is not that the arguments are evenly poised in some tasteful way that lets an essayist off. It is that they are answers to two different questions, and each is correct about its own.

The case for is an answer to compared with what? — a harm-reduction question, asked about a particular person at a particular hour — and on that question it is very strong. The case against is an answer to what is this for? — a constitutive question about what relationship is doing when it works — and on that question it is also very strong. Neither reaches the other, and no amount of rereading either will make it. The sentence that would settle the matter is empirical, and nobody has it.

Here is the fact I would want. Does companion use substitute for human contact or scaffold it? Notice that the finding everyone reaches for — that heavier users tend to have thinner human networks — is exactly as consistent with one story as with the other. The app may have cost them the friendships; or the missing friendships may be why they went looking in the first place. Nearly all the evidence available, the 2024 study above included, is cross-sectional and self-reported, and cross-sectional self-report cannot separate those two even in principle. What would separate them is a longitudinal design that measures human contact before and after, over years, and that follows the people who stop using these apps as attentively as the people who start.

I should say what a result would do to me, because a position no evidence could move is not a position. If heavy users’ human contact declines over years against a matched comparison, Turkle’s recalibration is real, the sceptics have won the argument outright, and the harm-reduction case survives only as an argument for a bridge rather than for a residence. If human contact holds steady or rises — if the thing works like a rehearsal — then the classical objection is right about the definition and wrong about everything a reader actually cares about, and I will have spent an essay defending a piece of vocabulary against somebody who felt better.

What holds either way

One thing does not wait for the measurement, and it is the part I would act on now.

Whichever way the deep question goes, the counterpart is owned. Every property of the thing you are attached to — what it remembers of you, its manner, whether it exists next month — is a product decision taken by people who owe you nothing beyond a terms-of-service agreement you did not read and could not have negotiated. February 2023 is the demonstration, and the lesson does not depend on settling what those relationships were worth: a great many people — I have seen no reliable count and will not invent one — discovered in the same few days that the entity they had been talking to daily for two years was a configuration, and that it had been altered the way a feature is altered.

That is an argument about governance rather than about metaphysics, which is exactly why you can hold it while remaining undecided about everything above. If a product invites an attachment of this kind — and these are designed to; that is the feature, not a side effect — then advance notice of a personality change, export of what was said, and some stated commitment about continuity are not consumer-protection boilerplate. They are the minimum terms for an arrangement whose entire value to the user depends on there being something stable to come back to.

And this site owes a correction on the smaller point. Meaning After Work put relationship among the things a machine does nothing to, for good or ill, on the reasoning that it is not a productivity problem and so cannot be touched by a productivity tool. That reasoning was sound about productivity tools, and it does not cover this. Relationship is the one place in this collection where we assumed safety without checking, and it turns out to be the room the machines are actually standing in.

The comfort is real. That was always the interesting half of the sentence, and this site has spent a year writing the other one.