What Companion AI Can’t Give Us: The Opportunity to Contribute

Abstract Prevailing debates emphasize whether AI companions can genuinely care, have empathy, respect privacy, avoid deception, or prevent depersonalized care. Because these debates focus the issue on whether AI companions can give users the experiences they need, they implicitly treat users as passive recipients of care and attention. In this paper, we advance a novel critique of companion AI by arguing that AI companions cannot meet human beings’ social contribution needs: the vital interest many people have in actively benefitting others and sustaining relationships. We draw on psychological evidence and discussions in philosophy to argue that being able to socially contribute plays a large role in maintaining psychological wellbeing, self-esteem, and providing meaning in life. We also argue that mutual contribution is constitutive of valuable relationships, which in turn play a role in our self-identities. Because contemporary AI companions are not wellbeing subjects, human users cannot develop mutually beneficial relationships with AI companions. As a result, human users cannot fulfil their social contribution needs in relationships with AI companions. The implication of our argument is that while AI companions may be used in some cases, they should not be used to replace human interactions. They should be designed to avoid feigned reciprocation, encourage users back into human relationships, and institutions should deploy bots as adjuncts within professional care frameworks, but not as replacements for human caregivers. Similar content being viewed by others Data Availability NA. Notes Other papers have advanced related ideas, including that AI companions do not facilitate a reciprocal process of “transformation” (Sommerer, 2026), concerns regarding mutuality and reciprocity (Smith et al., 2025), the one-sided nature of human-AI relationships (Degen, 2025), social deskilling (Malfacini, 2025), among others. We take our main contribution to be a sustained defence of the concept of social contribution needs, and explaining why AI companions may not be able to satisfy those needs. A third possibility is contributions to the overall value in the world in an abstract sense. For example, an artist may see themselves as adding value to the universe by creating something beautiful. We do not discuss this possibility here primarily because it is less directly relevant to relationships between humans and in human-AI relations. In some cases it is also unjust for a person to be deprived of the opportunity to be a social contributor, although it is not the goal of this paper to articulate the conditions for when this is the case. For example, see (Martire et al., 1997), who note that women who perceive themselves as good caregivers are likely to have higher levels of self-esteem. Of course, sometimes people don’t contribute. Larger groups sometimes come with a risk that there will be free riders who do not contribute meaningfully in any way. But the existence of free riders doesn’t affect our discussion here. Theorists who seem to endorse this claim include (Bradley, 2015; Bramble, 2016; Chalmers, forthcoming; Hawkins, 2015; Rosati, 2009; Sumner, 1996) Meanwhile, this claim is acknowledged as a dominant view, but rejected, by (Bradford, 2023; Lin, 2021). For opinions to the contrary, see (Goldstein & Kirk-Giannini, 2025), and (Munn & Weijers, 2025), who point out that many AI companion users empathize with their AI companions. It is additionally worth noting, however, that many defenders of “AI rights” defend AI rights for AI systems which possess properties like agency, responsibility, performance equivalent to other creatures with moral status, and moral reasoning (Danaher, 2020; Gordon, 2020; Laukyte, 2017). It is unclear that LLMs meet these criteria. One possible exception may exist in the form of AI systems which remain “boxed in” during development, which means that they have no access to the internet or other sources of information which will lead them to “parrot” claims about their preferences, needs, or signs of consciousness (See (Schneider, 2020). However, given the nature of LLM development, it is unclear if it is indeed possible for a “boxed in” LLM to learn such content. A related question or objection might be: If social contribution is genuinely a fundamental human need, why would users not notice that AI companionship fails to satisfy it? There are a number of possibilities here, which depend on empirical study to establish. One possibility is that companion bots satisfy immediate desires such as the desire for attention, which can mask other desires such as that to socially contribute. Another is that people do notice an unmet need to socially contribute, but underestimate how the unmet need is affecting them. Another is that users believe (falsely, in our view) that AI companions are benefitted by their interactions. And perhaps another possibility is that users do recognize their need to contribute, but perceive their need as unrelated (they may think that they can use AI companions and then contribute to other people separately). Lang (2026) also points out that users of AI companions can be deceived in some sense even when they recognize that an AI companion does not possess mental states like emotions, because AI companions are designed to trigger automatic involuntary affective and behavioral responses. This raises an additional concern about the deceptive potential of AI companions. Additionally, from a consequentialist point of view, there are still risks attached to deception, such as risks that we may inappropriately engage in anthropomorphism or inappropriately trust AI, and that we may overestimate the capabilities of AI (Sharkey & Sharkey, 2021), or that we may be deceived into believing that AI companions care about our wellbeing (Browning, 2026). References Adewale, M. D., & Muhammad, U. I. (2025). From Virtual Companions to Forbidden Attractions: The Seductive Rise of Artificial Intelligence Love, Loneliness, and Intimacy—A Systematic Review. 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Author information Authors and Affiliations Contributions Both authors played roles in conceptualizing, developing, and writing the key claims in this paper. Lim is the first author. Corresponding author Ethics declarations Ethics Approval and Consent to Participate NA. Consent for Publication NA. Competing interests None to disclose. Additional information Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Rights and permissions Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. About this article Cite this article Lim, J.E., Muyskens, K.L. What Companion AI Can’t Give Us: The Opportunity to Contribute. Philos. Technol. 39, 191 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01200-7 Received: Accepted: Published: Version of record: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01200-7