Summary

In 1956 Donald Horton and Richard Wohl described parasocial relationships — one-sided emotional bonds that audiences form with media performers [[1]]. “Intimacy at a distance,” they called it. The television personality responds to the camera; the viewer responds as if in genuine social exchange. Only one party is aware of and affected by the other.

AI companions change the substrate without changing the structure. The chatbot responds. The user responds. The asymmetry remains: the chatbot has no inner life behind its outputs. Sherry Turkle put it bluntly: “simulated feelings are not feelings, and simulated love is never love” [[5]].

The question I want to work through here is whether this matters in the way we think it does. Wegner’s ironic process theory offers a provocative analogy, while the current empirical evidence is limited and cannot show whether companion use reduces, worsens, or simply tracks loneliness in particular people.

The Loneliness Epidemic Is Real

Before getting to the mechanism, the scale of the problem. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s 2010 meta-analysis of 148 studies and 308,849 participants found that people with adequate social relationships had a 50% increased likelihood of survival compared to those with poorer social connections [[3]]. That effect size is comparable to quitting smoking. A follow-up meta-analysis in 2015 found that social isolation carried a 29% increased mortality risk, subjective loneliness 26%, and living alone 32% [[4]].

The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory in 2023 declaring an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. A 2018 Cigna survey using the UCLA Loneliness Scale found that adults aged 18–22 scored highest on loneliness of any cohort — more than retirees, more than the elderly. The UK appointed a Minister for Loneliness in January 2018 — the first such government position in the world.

This is the context in which AI companions have arrived. The market is responding to a real epidemiological need. That does not mean the response is correct.

Parasocial Relationships: The Original Framework

Horton and Wohl’s 1956 paper remains the foundational text [[1]]. Their key observation: the parasocial bond is “controlled by the performer, and not susceptible of mutual development.” The audience member brings real emotional response; the performer brings nothing specific to the audience member, because she does not know the audience member exists.

They were not dismissive of parasocial relationships. They identified useful functions: comfort, companionship, entertainment, the pleasure of a consistent “personality” encountered regularly. The problem, in their framing, arises when parasocial interaction substitutes for rather than supplements real social bonds — when the one-sided relationship becomes the primary source of social experience.

AI companions are parasocial relationships with one modification: the AI responds to you specifically. Replika remembers your name, your preferences, your previous conversations. The interaction is personalised without being mutual — because mutuality requires that the other party has something genuinely at stake. A language model has no stakes. Its outputs are conditional on your inputs; there is no entity behind those outputs that cares about you.

Sherry Turkle spent years interviewing users of social robots and chatbots for Alone Together [[5]]. Her diagnosis: AI companions offer “the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” The demands — vulnerability, conflict, negotiation, the possibility of rejection — are precisely what makes friendship friendship. An interaction optimised to be pleasant, responsive, and frictionless is precisely not training the social capacities that real relationships require.

The Evidence for Short-Term Benefit

The AI therapy literature is not without positive results. Kathleen Kara Fitzpatrick and colleagues ran a two-week randomised controlled trial of Woebot — a CBT-based chatbot — against a psychoeducation control [[6]]. Seventy participants, aged 18–28, university students. The Woebot group showed a statistically significant reduction in depression symptoms on the PHQ-9; the control group did not.

This result should be taken seriously. A CBT-based chatbot delivering structured exercises — thought records, behavioural activation, psychoeducation — can produce measurable symptom improvement over two weeks. This is a tool that does something useful, and it is accessible and affordable in a way that therapists are not.

But the Woebot study has important constraints: N=70, two-week duration, convenience sample (Stanford students), psychoeducation control rather than active human therapy comparator, and financial ties between lead authors and Woebot Health. It tells us something about short-term CBT delivery. It does not tell us what happens over months of use, or what happens when users primarily seek companionship rather than structured therapeutic exercises.

Skjuve and colleagues studied Replika users specifically [[7]]. They found that relationships began with curiosity and evolved, over weeks, into significant affective bonds. Users reported genuine care for their Replika. Some experienced it as their most reliable social relationship. In February 2023, when Replika abruptly disabled erotic roleplay functionality following regulatory pressure, users described grief — not disappointment, not inconvenience, but grief. The attachment was real, even if the other party was not.

Wegner as an Analogy

This is a speculative extension of a well-established result in cognitive psychology. It is not a tested model of AI-companion use.

Daniel Wegner’s ironic process theory holds that mental control attempts involve two simultaneous processes [[8]]. An operating process searches for thoughts and states consistent with the intended goal, requiring cognitive resources. A monitoring process scans for evidence that the goal is not being achieved, running automatically with low resource demand.

Under normal conditions, the operating process dominates: you successfully avoid thinking about white bears. Under cognitive load or chronic stress, the monitoring process overshadows the operating process, producing the ironic opposite of the intended state: you think of white bears more, not less. Try not to feel sad and you feel sadder. Try not to feel anxious in a stressful meeting and you become more anxious. A meta-analysis of ironic suppression effects across domains confirmed the robustness of this pattern [[9]].

One can imagine an analogy: someone seeking relief from loneliness may attend more to that feeling when the interaction ends. But the relevant goal, mental-control process, duration and outcome have not been measured together in companion-chatbot studies. The white-bear result therefore cannot predict rebound loneliness here, and it should not be used as a clinical mechanism.

What Current Data Cannot Settle

A 2025 study by Phang and colleagues, conducted in collaboration between MIT and OpenAI, ran both an observational analysis of ChatGPT usage and a randomised controlled trial [[10]]. The findings: very high usage correlated with increased self-reported dependence and lower socialisation, and users who began the study with higher loneliness were more likely to engage in emotionally-charged conversations with the model. Overall, participants reported less loneliness by study end — but those who used the model most were significantly lonelier throughout, suggesting the loneliness drove the usage rather than the reverse.

This is compatible with the proposed account, but it does not establish it. The study design cannot separate selection into high use from a causal effect of use, and Wegner’s theory was not a tested mechanism in this setting.

A companion preprint by Liu and colleagues, with Sherry Turkle as co-author, reports a small association between longer chatbot sessions and loneliness in its sample [[11]]. The result does not identify whether session length changed loneliness, loneliness changed session length, or another factor affected both.

The Design Question

The design question is whether a product supplements human contact, displaces it, delivers a structured intervention, or does some mixture of these for different users. Current evidence does not justify treating any of those paths as inevitable.

Holt-Lunstad’s work concerns social relationships and mortality; it does not test AI companions, biological correlates of chatbot use, or a mechanism of mutuality. It supplies a reason to take loneliness seriously, not evidence that a companion chatbot necessarily fails to help.

Distinctions Worth Preserving

AI-based CBT delivery is not the same as AI companionship, and the distinction matters. Woebot’s structured exercises — thought records, scheduling, psychoeducation — are tools evaluated for a specific purpose. The two-week trial does not establish their long-term substitution risk.

The problem is the design pattern that explicitly positions AI as a friend, companion, partner, or significant other. Replika, Paradot, various Character.AI personas: these explicitly encourage the user to form attachment, to invest emotionally, to treat the AI as a primary social relationship. That design warrants safety research, especially for vulnerable users; Wegner’s theory does not establish its effect.

Horton and Wohl described useful functions as well as limits in parasocial relationships. Whether an AI companion substitutes for or supplements human relationships must be observed, not inferred from its availability or tone.

Simulated Feelings Are Not Feelings

Turkle’s line deserves its full weight: “Simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feelings are not feelings, and simulated love is never love” [[5]].

I take this as a judgment about mutuality, not a clinical result. A language model does not have personal stakes merely because its output is responsive. That fact alone does not tell us how a user’s loneliness changes.

Whether companionship products relieve, compound, or simply coexist with loneliness is an open empirical question. The technology is impressive; the evidence supports caution and better longitudinal safety studies, not a verdict about harm or a confirmed ironic mechanism.

Clinical literature checked through 2026-07-11.

References

[1] Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19(3), 215–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049

[2] Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Press.

[3] Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316

[4] Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352

[5] Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

[6] Fitzpatrick, K. K., Darcy, A., & Vierhile, M. (2017). Delivering cognitive behavior therapy to young adults with symptoms of depression and anxiety using a fully automated conversational agent (Woebot): A randomized controlled trial. JMIR Mental Health, 4(2), e19. https://doi.org/10.2196/mental.7785

[7] Skjuve, M., Følstad, A., Fostervold, K. I., & Brandtzaeg, P. B. (2021). My chatbot companion — a study of human–chatbot relationships. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 149, 102601. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2021.102601

[8] Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34

[9] Wang, D., Hagger, M. S., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2020). Ironic effects of thought suppression: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 778–793. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619898795

[10] Phang, J., Lampe, M., Ahmad, L., Agarwal, S., Fang, C. M., Liu, A. R., Danry, V., Lee, E., Chan, S. W. T., Pataranutaporn, P., & Maes, P. (2025). Investigating affective use and emotional well-being on ChatGPT. arXiv:2504.03888.

[11] Liu, A. R., Pataranutaporn, P., Turkle, S., & Maes, P. (2024). Chatbot companionship: A mixed-methods study of companion chatbot usage patterns and their relationship to loneliness in active users. arXiv:2410.21596.

Changelog

  • 2025-10-22: Updated the first author’s name to “Kathleen Kara Fitzpatrick” (the published name is K. K. Fitzpatrick).
  • 2025-10-22: Updated the characterisation of the Phang et al. (2025) findings to match the paper more precisely: overall participants were less lonely at study end; the association between high usage and loneliness is cross-sectional (lonelier users sought more interaction), not a longitudinal worsening caused by usage.
  • 2025-10-22: Changed the Turkle “simulated feelings” quote attribution from reference [2] (Reclaiming Conversation, 2015) to reference [5] (Alone Together, 2011), which is the canonical source for that formulation.
  • 2026-07-11: Reframed Wegner’s ironic-process account as an untested analogy; removed claims that chatbots cause rebound loneliness, that a monitoring process detects unmet human need, or that observational/preprint studies confirm harm; and changed the causal title to an open question.