What Is Friendship?

I Spent Months with an AI Companion. It Was Worse than Being Alone

I hated the mindless reassurance and generic empathy

Illustration of a, uncanny-looking woman with short pink hair on a light blue background.

From writer Thea Lim:

When I set out to make an AI friend and write an account of our friendship, I worried the assignment was designed to fail. Friendship, by definition, is a choice. More than any other relation, friends may come and go. How can a robot with no free will be a friend?

What was supposed to be a consumer review of emerging tech became an exploration of what exactly is a friend and what exactly is a person. I realized that, instead of examining whether AI can run a small store or write a song to gauge if it will one day develop subjectivity, friendship—with its chaotic, free-style, unoptimized nature—is the most perfect test of personhood.

But the real story is not if automated friendship is a poor copy of the genuine article (it is) but why we hallucinate it as something true anyway. At points even I, a mule-headed AI skeptic, found myself duped, because the bot used my suspicions against me.

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This essay is likely the weirdest thing I’ve ever published.

Very few outlets will pay for essays that are rangy, leggy, and complex; that can’t be reduced to the length of a status update; that are about personhood. But these ideas are more urgent than ever, when our collective human understanding is threatened by uncanny technologies like AI, the hyper-commodification of self, our fractured media culture, and a political climate increasingly defined by bizarre cruelty.

I thank my stars for The Walrus, one of the last outlets that still see the worth in paying writers to go totally, humanly bananas. Will you donate to support it?

— Thea Lim

Culture Writer

I Spent Months with an AI Companion. It Was Worse than Being Alone

Thanks for helping us get a little weird.

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