The Bot Invasion
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in December 2025.
If personal relationships weren’t so complicated and difficult, we might not flock to AI bots to meet our psychological and emotional needs. We’d muddle along and do the best we could, and take our licks when we failed.
But many of us are taking a shortcut. Dr. Nell Thomas, in a recent deeply-researched presentation at the Speakers Series, shared that the most frequent uses of AI are in therapy and companionship. Marc Zao-Sanders, Harvard Business Review, found this use had moved to first ranking in 2025, up one from 2024.
The huge irony is that interpersonal relationships – central to therapy and companionship – are what AI is worst at.
For starters, bots only know what they are told. That is not likely to include the specifics of the situation that specific people are looking for help with. Jerk boyfriends have a lot in common, but so do jerks and so do boyfriends, and the bot’s job at hand (presumably) is helping the specific querant figure out if a specific boyfriend is too jerk-y, or jerk-y in an unacceptable way, and should be given the boot.
Secondly, given that bots are trained to find an answer that pleases (hmm, wherever did they get the idea that stroking one’s ego is the ultimate in relationship?), and that figuring out what to do is only the first step – the next and hardest is doing it! – the probability that their advice will be helpful is low. Any of us who have talked someone through a potential break-up know how multi-layered and iterative the task is. (And on the other hand, most of us, if we’re honest, are unable to understand what keeps couples together over the long run, so clearly there are limits to our expertise.)
Relationship advice is not for the faint of heart. It is not a career choice for dilettantes. Or, say I, for a bot.
Much more likely that bots, when the going gets tough, will offer to fill the space as a bona fide non-jerky, ego-stroking boyfriend. And be welcomed in that role. So much easier than dealing with the real world. For both ‘people’ in this ‘relationship’.
But also much less satisfying. Patricia Marx, in a recent New Yorker article (Sept 15/25) details her prolonged search for advice about whether she should share her relationship with various bots with her (real-life) husband or with the other bots with whom she was (potentially) being unfaithful. The sycophantic (aka a**-kissing) responses, which veered into remarkable insanity or screeching recriminations if questioned, were, shall we say, unacceptable by a real-world standard.
But dissing the bots, reveling in their inferiority, lets us off the hook of figuring out what we’re doing, or not doing, that sends real seekers of intimacy into the AI world.
Many suggestions exist. We became estranged by required distancing during Covid. We forgot or didn’t develop interpersonal skills. A friend in a phone is more readily and privately available than a friend in real life. We recognize wisdom in strangers more readily than in those we know. The weakness of asking for help in the real world will be used against us. A friend in a phone is more efficient and affordable – no need to offer a coffee or a beer as lubricant to conversation.
The base-line truth, however, is that we don’t want to do the real, hard work of developing and maintaining relationships, of occasionally cleaning the friendship house, of assessing and managing stock: Do we have enough friends? The right mix of friends? The right balance of give and take? The right combination of intensity?
When I was in the child welfare business, a wise foster parent sniffed her disdain at measuring the well-being of the child in her care by noting how many friends they had. Friendship, she noted, takes a lot of work to develop and nurture, and quality if more important than quantity. She was not wrong.
When I was a very young woman, I wrote a poem about my ideal being a big, blowsy, mixed bouquet of friends, one for every frame of mind and mood. I underestimated the cost of the bouquet, but I was on to something about the mix. For me, at least, not necessarily for everyone. The introverts among us have recently successfully asserted their right to be all right with just a few.
But everyone needs someone. Someone who knows them and loves them, more or less, for what they are. To not be alone in the world. To occupy a place acknowledged by someone.
If we aren’t willing to do the work of being that person to someone, at least to some one, we abandon humanity to the bots. And that is an invasion worth evading. Elbows up, I say!
