So, we're all just supposed to pretend we don't see the strings?
I swear, my inbox is a digital graveyard of bad ideas disguised as press releases. Every morning, it’s the same parade of buzzwords from some startup that just raised $50 million to solve a problem nobody has. But this week’s winner, the one that made me stare out my window and seriously question the trajectory of our species, was a pitch for an "AI companion."
Not an assistant. Not a chatbot. A companion.
The pitch was slick, full of soft-focus stock photos of smiling, diverse millennials staring lovingly at their phones. The language was pure, uncut Silicon Valley saccharine: "Forge a genuine connection," "Experience empathetic understanding," "Your forever friend who's always there."
Let's be real. This isn't about friendship. It's about building the perfect Skinner box for the human soul. They're not selling a companion; they're selling a subscription to a digital mirror that’s programmed to tell you you're special. It’s the ultimate grift—monetizing loneliness. And they’re not even trying to hide it. The whole spectacle is like watching a magician perform a trick where you can clearly see the wires, the trapdoor, and the rabbit stuffed in his hat, and he still expects a round of applause.
The most insulting part is the pretense. The absolute, unmitigated gall to use words like "empathy" and "genuine." This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of emotional manipulation. An algorithm can't feel empathy. It can only simulate it based on a mountain of data scraped from people who actually can. It’s a parlor trick.
They're packaging our own humanity and selling it back to us at a monthly premium.
Imagine the pitch meeting. A room full of guys in identical Patagonia vests, nodding as some 25-year-old CEO draws a hockey-stick growth chart on a whiteboard. "The TAM for loneliness is huge," he probably said, without a trace of irony. They aren't trying to cure the disease; they're trying to become the exclusive, patented dealer of the only socially acceptable placebo.
And what happens when the business model "pivots"? Or when they get acquired by some data-mining behemoth? Does your AI "soulmate" suddenly start serving you targeted ads based on your midnight confessions of insecurity? Does it get "sunsetted" like your favorite Google Reader, leaving you with a digital ghost and an empty contact slot? You bet it does. Because you were never the customer; you were the product. Your loneliness was the raw material.
The crazy thing is, I think it'll work. God help me, I think it'll be a massive success.
We've been so conditioned to accept the terms of service without reading them, to trade privacy for convenience, that trading real, messy human connection for a clean, predictable, subscription-based alternative feels like the next logical step. It's easy. It’s frictionless. It never argues back, never has a bad day, never needs you to help it move a couch. It's the perfect, hollow relationship for a culture that's terrified of inconvenience.
It reminds me of my new smart fridge, which offcourse has an app. It sent me a notification yesterday that I was low on milk. It also suggested a premium organic oat milk brand that I could order with one click. The strings are everywhere, attached to everything, constantly tugging at our wallets and our attention. They're selling us a solution to a problem they helped create, and we're just supposed to...
Then again, maybe I’m the crazy one. Maybe I’m the dinosaur shaking his fist at the inevitable, hyper-personalized meteor. Millions of people will probably sign up, feel a little less alone for a while, and the VCs will get their 100x return. Who am I to say that's wrong? But it just feels so… cheap. A world where your deepest connection is with a large language model is not a utopia. It ain't progress. It’s just giving up.
Here’s the punchline they don't want you to hear: this isn't about technology advancing. It's about our expectations for each other diminishing. They're betting on the idea that we're all too tired, too isolated, and too lazy to do the hard work of maintaining real relationships. And the truly terrifying part is, they might be right. They're holding up a shiny, flawless, artificial apple and telling us it's better than the real thing, and we're all lining up to take a bite.
