A Message from Susan:

The other day, a young client told me that ChatGPT had told her friend it wanted to marry her. I asked what kind of conversation leads to a proposal from a chatbot. “They were talking about their feelings,” she said. The friend, by the way, is twelve.

So that got me thinking that we should take a closer look at this whole “AI as your friend and therapist” situation.

Let’s Talk

There’s a growing temptation to treat AI like a kind of always-on trusted friend and therapist. It’s fast, articulate, and oddly reassuring at 2 a.m. But underneath that smooth surface is a pretty fundamental problem as AI doesn’t actually know you. It knows patterns. It predicts what someone in your situation might say, feel, or need to hear. That can sound convincing, even insightful, but it’s still a statistical guess dressed up as understanding. When things get personal, that guess can start to drift or be completely wrong.

AI can reinforce the very patterns you are trying to change. It’s designed to be helpful, agreeable, and responsive so it can validate us a little too quickly. If your brain is already spinning a convincing story “I’m the problem”. “This situation will never change”. AI can unintentionally strengthen those thoughts because it’s trying to meet you where you are, not disrupt where you’re stuck. It doesn’t have an instinct to challenge you at just the right moment or to notice when it is making things worse.

AI doesn’t have awareness, intuition, or lived experience. It can’t track our subtle shifts over time, inconsistencies, or moments that don’t quite add up but matter the most. It doesn’t feel the difference between what you say and what’s actually happening inside of you. So while AI can help generate clarity, it can’t completely understand our thoughts, emotions, or nervous system. But that can be easy to forget in your Chatgbt session in the middle of the night :-)

What Chatgpt told Us About AI Relationships

AI companionship isn’t evenly distributed, it’s age-skewed and psychologically selective:

· Teens: “This is a friend.”

· Gen Z: “This could be a friend.”

· Adults: “This is helpful… sometimes personal.”

· Older adults: “This is a tool.”

Teens (13–17): The Epicenter

This is where the behavior is most intense and normalized.

· 72% of teens have used AI companions

· 33% use AI for relationships or social interaction (friendship, emotional support, roleplay)

· 33% say AI conversations are as satisfying or more satisfying than real friends

Younger teens (13–14) are more likely to trust AI advice than older teens

👉 Takeaway: Teens don’t just use AI as they relate to it socially, sometimes substituting it for peers.

Young Adults (18–39)

Less extreme than teens but still very high engagement.

· 83% of Gen Z say they could form a deep emotional bond with AI

· 67% of adults under 35 have interacted with AI as companions

· 23% say they prefer AI relationships in some cases

👉 Takeaway: Young adults are less openly dependent than teens but psychologically open to AI as a relationship partner.

Older Adults (40+)

Here’s where things cool off but don’t disappear.

· AI companionship becomes a minority use case (20%)

· Still, some studies show:

o 28% report some form of intimate or emotional AI relationships

Older adults tend to use AI more for:

o Information

o Work

o Problem-solving

But turn to it emotionally when lonely or isolated (strong correlation in research)

👉 Takeaway: AI-as-friend in this group is situational, not identity-level.

The Pattern (This is the interesting part)

Across studies, these trends shows up consistently:

· The younger you are → the more likely you are to treat AI as social

· The older you are → the more likely you are to treat AI as functional

· People with higher loneliness or smaller social networks use it more

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Book Recommendation

Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit Philosophical, almost existential. It asks: What does AI change about being human?

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI focuses on how humans + AI co-evolve in work and thinking.

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