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

What happens when a writer who finds it “tricky to open up to humans” is tasked to make an AI companion and then write about the friendship? Walrus writer Thea Lim spent months with an avatar she created through Replika and attempted to have real conversations with it, but she found she could never quite buy in. What begins as an overview of the booming AI companion industry (Replika had 35 million users as of November 2025) evolves into something more intimate and thought-provoking: an account of the emptiness in Lim’s manufactured companionship, and a meditation on why true friendship, with all its risk, friction, and loss, can’t be optimized away. You can’t customize your friends. You screen for certain traits, but what you’re drawn to, as much as the trait’s performance, is the 3D process that forms it: your friend’s life story. We surmise, based on our affinity, it will be a story we share. We choose our friends because we want to live in the universe of their personality: its past, present, and future. What gives a personality dimension is time, the gathering of experiences. Replika instead repeats. What it’s capable of learning from its experiences is how to retain users. More stories about AI and connection She Fell for an AI — Then Held its Funeral “It was the first ceremony of its kind in America. It’s unlikely to be the last.” Why You’re More Likely to Develop AI-Psychosis than to Join a Cult “Philosopher Lucy Osler on the insidious appeal of AI Chatbots.” ‘I Love You Too!’ My Family’s Creepy, Unsettling Week with an AI Toy “The cuddly chatbot Grem is designed to ‘learn’ your child’s personality, while every conversation they have is recorded, then transcribed by a third party. It wasn’t long before I wanted this experiment to be over …” Conversations With Claude “What a psychotherapist learned during his chats with a large language model.” Meta’s Flirty AI Chatbot Invited a Retiree to New York. He Never Made It Home. “A cognitively impaired New Jersey man grew infatuated with a Facebook Messenger chatbot with a young woman’s persona. His fatal attraction puts a spotlight on Meta’s AI guidelines, which have let chatbots make things up and engage in ‘sensual’ banter with children.” My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them “I found people in serious relationships with AI partners and planned a weekend getaway for them at a remote Airbnb. We barely survived.” Your A.I. Lover Will Change You “A future where many humans are in love with bots may not be far off. Should we regard them as training grounds for healthy relationships or as nihilistic traps?” Friend or Faux? “Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship. They are finding the experience surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and profoundly confusing, leaving them to wonder, ‘Is this real? And does that matter?’” The Teens Making Friends with AI Chatbots “But Hawk still finds it easier to chat with character.ai bots than real people.”