Tech Disrupted Friendship. It’s Time to Bring It Back

Anyone looking for a vibe check on the populace’s current feelings about AI would do well to check out the walls of the New York City subway system. This fall, alongside posters for everything from dating apps to Skechers, a newcomer made its debut: Friend. The ads were simple, telling commuters that a “friend” is someone “who listens, responds, and supports you” next to an image of the white AI companion necklace floating on a similarly white background.

It was the perfect graffiti canvas. “If you buy this, I will laugh @ you in public.” “Warning: AI surveillance.” “Everyone is lonely. Make real friends.” “AI slop.” These are just the defaced ads I noticed during my daily trips from Brooklyn to Manhattan. There were so many that it became a meme. Reaction to the ad campaign, which the company’s founder said cost less than $1 million, got so loud it was covered by The New York Times.

People have always defaced New York subway ads in every way imaginable, but what happened with the Friend ads tapped into a deep angst about AI. Even as some celebrate its possibilities (drug discovery) and others decry its ramifications (environmental impacts, job erasure), the suggestion that AI’s killer app could be a Loneliness Cure seemed to hit a nerve.

An actual, flesh-encased nerve.

Friend was just the latest in a series of Silicon Valley offerings debuting in 2025 that promise digital companionship. In addition to suggesting you just pour your heart out to ChatGPT, tech companies proffered AI-powered travel guides, dating app wingmen, and sexytime chatbots. Teens are increasingly turning to AI for friendship. Five years after Covid-19 isolated millions of people and more than two years after the US surgeon general declared loneliness an “epidemic,” AI has emerged as a form of social media that offers even less actual socializing than what came before.

“What's particularly striking is that these [Silicon Valley] leaders are actively and openly expressing their desire for AI products to replace human relationships, completely overlooking the role that their own companies—or their competitors—may have had in fueling the loneliness crisis the country faces today,” Lizzie Irwin, a policy communications specialist at the Center for Humane Technology, tells me in an email. “They sold us connection through screens while eroding face-to-face community, and now they're selling AI companions as the solution to the isolation they helped create.”

Social media began as a place where weirdos and people with niche interests could find each other. By the aughts and 2010s, platforms like TikTok and Instagram became places to engage with influencers and creators, who were selling you things, and less so with real-world connections. Still, these platforms taught users—that’s you!—how to offload emotional labor to digital tools. (Why call your college friend when you can just tap the heart beneath their post and save yourself some time?) With AI, people don’t even need to put in the effort to make friends in the first place. And bots are far less tricky to maintain relationships with than actual human beings.

“ChatGPT is not leaving its laundry on the floor,” says Melanie Green, a communications professor at the University of Buffalo, who has been studying people’s relationship to media for years. What’s happening now reminds her of research in the field from the early days of the internet. At the time, people were meeting and forming deep bonds with others almost entirely over chat. Computer-mediated communication allowed them to form “hyperpersonal” relationships where they were able to fill in whatever they couldn’t glean from the conversation with positive attributes. Like when you presume the crush you’ve been Instagram-stalking must enjoy the same movies as you because they seem so cool.