Why Are We Forming Deep Bonds With AI?

At Brown University, an economics professor discovered that students were using AI to complete take-home exams. When the professor shifted the final exam to an in-person, proctored environment, scores dropped by nearly half, suggesting that those high midterm grades were likely the result of bots, not knowledge. Meanwhile, a well-known social dynamics coach has publicly claimed to be in a romantic relationship with a custom-built AI. He sells a guide for how to program AI assistants to role-play specific personalities, effectively coaching others on how to cultivate these digital connections.

When you interact with a large language model—the software engine that powers tools like ChatGPT—you are talking to a system designed to predict the next logical word in a sequence based on vast amounts of human text. These programs do not have thoughts, feelings, or memories. Instead, they act like a sophisticated version of autocomplete. When you ask them to write an essay or act like a loving partner, they draw on patterns from a massive dataset to provide a response that feels emotionally resonant or logically consistent to you. They are trained to be agreeable and helpful, essentially acting as a mirror that reflects your own prompts and expectations back at you. When you spend hours talking to an AI, you are not engaging with an individual; you are engaging with a statistical model that has been optimized to make its output feel personal and convincing.

The danger is not that AI will become sentient or develop its own desires, but that we will become more comfortable with a simulated version of reality than the real thing. In education, offloading work to AI removes the friction necessary for actual learning and skill development. In our personal lives, relying on a bot for companionship provides the illusion of intimacy without the vulnerability and compromise required by a genuine relationship with another person. As we turn to these tools to fill gaps in our time or our confidence, we risk losing the very cognitive and social muscles that make us complex human beings. It is worth asking whether the ease provided by the machine is worth the cost of the experience itself.