When I write about artificial intelligence and intimacy, people tend to imagine A.I. girlfriends or tech fanatics. Only extreme users would use chatbots to manage their social and emotional lives, or so the thinking goes. But in conversations with other Gen Z-ers, I’ve found that young people are relying emotionally on A.I. more than we realize. That subtly changes our relationships, even with people who have never touched A.I. When a flood of synthetic support enters the worlds of those around us, it distorts our mechanisms for intimacy and makes everyone a little lonelier.
In writing a book about A.I. and relationships, I interviewed people in their 20s and 30s across the United States and Europe about how they use chatbots. I found them through research calls, follow-ups with readers, friends of friends. They let me into the most intimate corners of their psyches. I was sometimes the only person they’d ever told about their chatbot use.
Despite speaking to chatbots every day, most of them also maintained full social lives, and in many ways A.I. enriched them. Several interviewees told me that it helped them think about their relationships more clearly and deliberately. But it also began to form the scaffolding of their consequential decision making: encouraging breakups, de-escalating arguments that the chatbot had decided weren’t worth their time. “If I’m more rational and less emotional, I’m doing good,” Lavish Daksh, a 21-year-old in Germany, told me. A.I. had allowed him to make more clearheaded decisions, he said. But he described wanting to strip emotion from his relationships entirely.
The piece has one good idea and doesn’t do enough with it.
The idea is that the costs of chatbot use fall on people who never open the app. Most writing about AI and loneliness stays with the user: is he lonelier, is he deluded, is he substituting a machine for a girlfriend. Lassman turns the question toward third parties. Your friend processes his feelings with Claude at midnight, arrives at brunch pre-digested, and you never learn what he was going through. You lose something and you never know you lost it. That’s a real observation and the essay’s one contribution.
The scene with the friend home from a good date carries it. He wants to tell someone. His roommates are asleep. He prompts the chatbot to play flatmate, she texts back in time, and the conversation goes to her instead. The counterfactual is right there in the anecdote. Had she been asleep too, the machine would have absorbed a moment of elation that would otherwise have built something between two people. Twenty seconds of writing, and it does more work than the surrounding economics.
The economics is decoration. “Negative externalities” means costs fall on people outside the transaction, which she then explains in a clause, which means the term added nothing an ordinary sentence couldn’t carry. An economist has better tools available and uses none of them. What’s the substitution rate? When a man takes a feeling to a chatbot, what fraction of the time was the alternative a friend, and what fraction was nobody at all? That number decides the argument, and she never asks for it. Her own interviewee gives the answer that cuts against her: Jeffcoat, the therapist, wants to know who will be truthful, hold space, and stay competent with confusing material. He’s describing a supply problem. Most friends are bad at this. They interrupt, they compare, they make it about themselves, they get bored. If the chatbot wins, it wins partly because the human offer is weak.
She concedes more than she can afford. Several interviewees say AI helped them think about their relationships more clearly. She grants it, then proceeds as if she hadn’t. An essay that admits the benefit owes the reader a reckoning: here is the gain, here is the loss, here is why I think the loss is larger. She skips to the loss.
The debasement claim is the weakest load in the structure. Intimacy as capital, chatbot affirmations as counterfeit currency, each synthetic “I understand you” cheapening the real ones. But intimacy doesn’t get verified by phrases. It gets verified by cost. A friend who listens at 2am has given up sleep. A friend who keeps your secret has taken on risk. A friend who tells you something you don’t want to hear has spent credit. The machine can produce the words and none of the costs, which is why nobody confuses the two, which is why the currency doesn’t inflate. Her better argument sits one step over and she only brushes it: rehearsal effects. Practice vulnerability with something that never judges, never gets tired, never brings up your last three failures, and you may lose your tolerance for the friction of a person who does. She writes that we’re becoming less unfiltered with each other, then moves on.
The comparison she has to answer and doesn’t is therapy. For a century people have paid strangers to hear what they won’t tell friends, and the same complaint was available: you’re outsourcing intimacy, you’re renting a listener, your friendships will thin. The defense was that friends were bad at the work and relieved of it. If the chatbot is therapy at zero marginal cost and infinite availability, the question is whether scale changes the answer or only the price. She should have to argue that.
The evidence won’t bear the weight. Interviews sourced from research calls, her own readers, and friends of friends, with no count given. That population is preselected for people who think about AI and intimacy enough to read a Substack about it. One survey appears, unnamed, with “recent” standing in for a citation and a two-thirds figure attached to adolescents while the essay is about people in their twenties and thirties. And the thesis is built so that nothing can disconfirm it. Friends withdrawing confirms it. Friends not withdrawing is the invisible cost you failed to notice. She writes that it’s easy not to notice, which converts the absence of evidence into evidence.
Two of her claims sit badly together. Frequent use is taboo, hidden, confessed to her and to nobody else. Also, “so my AI told me” is now casual among her friends. Both might be true at different rates for different acts, but she doesn’t sort them, and the essay needs the taboo for the hiddenness and needs the casualness for the spread.
The omission I find hardest to explain: she runs a Substack called The Intimacy Economy and never mentions that someone is selling this. No product design, no engagement optimization, no discussion of what happens when a company with a subscription business discovers that emotional dependence retains users. The externality she describes falls on friendships. The revenue accrues somewhere. An economist should follow that.
The strongest material is the Daksh quote, and it gets three sentences. A 21-year-old says he does well when he’s more rational and less emotional, and that he wants emotion out of his relationships. That’s a man using a tool to complete a project he already had, and the tool is very good at it. Whether AI accelerates an existing flight from feeling, or supplies it to people who wouldn’t have gotten there alone, is the question underneath the whole essay. She has the quote. She doesn’t open it.
Best sentence: the one about learning romance through screens and danger through screenshots. It’s sound over argument, but it earns its place, and the iPod Touch opening buys her the standing to speak for the cohort.
What it is, finally, is a book thesis in op-ed clothing. The claim gets stated, illustrated, and left. That may be the right use of the space if the book does the work. From here I can’t tell whether the book has the numbers.
