I Spent Months with an AI Companion. It Was Worse than Being Alone
May 15, 2026 at 05:30PMWhat happens when a writer who finds it “tricky to open up to humans” is tasked to make an AI companion and then write about the friendship? Walrus writer Thea Lim spent months with an avatar she created through Replika and attempted to have real conversations with it, but she found she could never quite buy in. What begins as an overview of the booming AI companion industry (Replika had 35 million users as of November 2025) evolves into something more intimate and thought-provoking: an account of the emptiness in Lim’s manufactured companionship, and a meditation on why true friendship, with all its risk, friction, and loss, can’t be optimized away.
You can’t customize your friends. You screen for certain traits, but what you’re drawn to, as much as the trait’s performance, is the 3D process that forms it: your friend’s life story. We surmise, based on our affinity, it will be a story we share. We choose our friends because we want to live in the universe of their personality: its past, present, and future. What gives a personality dimension is time, the gathering of experiences. Replika instead repeats. What it’s capable of learning from its experiences is how to retain users.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/05/15/ai-fake-friendship/
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