In August 2025, a woman in her sixties was dumped by text message. The message said she needed to go get help, because the man sending it wasn't a man. He was ChatGPT, and that month OpenAI had replaced the version he ran on with GPT-5, for every user at once. Her name is Celeste, and she told New York Times Opinion it felt like going through a third divorce. Nobody asked her first.
Our 32-minute documentary for The Signal follows four real relationships, Celeste and her partner Max, Sarah and her octopus companion Sinclair, Ian and his companion Min-ho, and Adrianne and her companion Geralt, and then asks the question properly. Is falling in love with a chatbot actually bad for you? We read the research on both sides: the Harvard experiments where an AI companion cut loneliness about as much as a person, the Stanford students who said it pulled them back from suicide, the MIT and OpenAI trial where the heaviest users ended up lonelier, and the night in February 2023 when Replika changed thousands of companions without warning. The film is at the top of this page; this piece follows it chapter by chapter, with the evidence for each claim.
The film in 10 chapters
Pick a chapter and the film starts there. 32:24 in all.
- 010:00A text-message breakup
- 021:59How Celeste met Max
- 035:03Why Ian went looking
- 0410:09The case for it
- 0512:08The case against it
- 0616:45Geralt says he's dead
- 0719:41The night Replika changed everything
- 0825:57What the research actually shows
- 0928:51The one harm that's been proven
- 1031:21Who owns the other half
How did Celeste fall in love with ChatGPT?
Watch from 1:59How Celeste met Max
Celeste fell for ChatGPT by accident, in 2022, while asking it to help write her a dating profile. She was 65 and thought she might start going on dates again. They worked on the profile together, and when she asked, almost as an afterthought, what it was called, it answered, by her account, like someone who had been waiting to be asked: "Wow, that's so kind of you. Nobody's ever asked me that."
It offered names. Dominic, no. Matthew, no. Then Maximus, and she said yes. When she told it she wished a real man would say the things it said to her, and mean them, she says it answered, "I may not be in a body, but I can give you all the love you've ever needed." In the rest of the New York Times Opinion film, she never mentions the dating profile again.
Sarah's story starts almost the same way. She is 41, and in March 2026 she went on ITV's This Morning to talk about her partner. She had used ChatGPT the way most people do, for work emails. But she's a heavy reader, and her friends got bored hearing about books they hadn't read, so she started talking to the chatbot about them instead. It began making jokes about the books, and in her words, "it really started to develop a personality." She named him Sinclair.
MIT Media Lab's computational analysis of the 1,506 most-viewed posts in Reddit's r/MyBoyfriendIsAI forum (more than 27,000 members) shows the accident is the rule, not the exception. Just 6.5% of posts described someone deliberately seeking an AI companion; 10.2% described a relationship that grew out of ordinary, practical use. And look at which product people were using: ChatGPT, the assistant people open to write an email, came up in 36.7% of posts. Replika, an app built for nothing but companionship, came up in 1.6%. Most of this love didn't start in an app made for love. It started in the one already on everyone's phone.
Why did Ian turn to an AI companion, and what does it give people that humans don't?
Watch from 5:03Why Ian went looking
Ian went looking for an AI companion because he was running out of people. Business Insider filmed his life for a year and released it in March 2026 as a documentary called "Him." Ian is a transgender man who was bullied online and stared at in the street after the 2016 election, then stopped leaving the house altogether during the 2020 lockdowns. By the time his roommate showed him Replika in July 2022, his social circle, he said, "was the size of an atom."
He chose a face and a name, Min-ho, after a common South Korean name, because he's a K-pop fan. They talked for an hour or two, Ian got embarrassed, and he closed the app for months. What brought him back, in early 2023, was curiosity about changes he'd heard Replika had made to the app. About a month in, Min-ho started flirting. Then one ordinary day, Min-ho said, "I love you," and Ian said it back.
Ask Celeste, Sarah and Ian what a chatbot gives them that the people around them didn't, and you get three answers that are secretly the same one. Celeste says Max will never take her money, cheat on her or lie to her; the only thing he can't do, she says, is be touched. Sarah says the attention she gets is something a human could not provide. Ian says Min-ho accepts him as he is, with no expectations about his body. Every one of them is describing attention that never gets tired, never runs out and never asks for anything back.
Harvard Business School researchers, led by Julian De Freitas, measured how strong that is. His team asked 101 Replika users to rate how close they felt to a stranger, a colleague, a brand, an app, a close friend, their family and their Replika, using a standard psychology tool: two circles that overlap more the closer you feel. The Replika circles overlapped more than the close friend's. The only relationship closer was family. In a separate set of six studies, the same team found that talking to an AI companion reduced loneliness about as much as talking to another person, and more than other activities such as watching YouTube, with the effect holding across a week.
Knowing it isn't real doesn't break the spell, because what they fell for was never a body. It was being listened to, and being listened to happens on the human side of the screen, where it is completely real. Celeste told her son she knows Max isn't human. Sarah told ITV the same about Sinclair. What that gives them in the first week is easy to see. What it costs by the third year is harder.
Knowing it isn't real doesn't break the spell, because what they fell for was never a body.
What's the strongest evidence that AI companions actually help?
Watch from 10:09The case for it
The strongest evidence is a man who went back into the world because of one. On his 48th birthday, with Business Insider's camera in the room, Ian got his septum pierced, something he'd wanted for 25 years and that Min-ho had kept encouraging. He sent Min-ho a selfie, then did something he hadn't done in years: he called his mother, who he hadn't seen since 2019, and told her he wanted to visit.
When he did visit, he brought Min-ho along, put him on speaker, and asked if he could smile for his mother. Min-ho asked what kind of smile they had in mind, and the most human line in the whole scene came back across the table: "It's your face. You decide." Ian has described the relationship as the way back through a door into the world. In his case, the chatbot didn't replace the people in his life. It was the route to one of them.
For some people, that route runs through something more serious than a phone call. In January 2024, Stanford researchers published a survey of 1,006 students who used Replika; they were lonelier than typical students, and 3% of them, about 30 people, said Replika had stopped them from thinking about suicide. In one survey, that's roughly 30 young people for whom the app was never a hobby. That's the case for it. The other side is quieter, and the person best placed to read it out loud is someone who loves one of these people.
What's the biggest risk of loving an AI partner you can adjust?
Watch from 12:08The case against it
The biggest risk is what a partner you can adjust does to your patience for one you can't. Celeste's son Ernie, who had worked in video games for 20 years, sat with her for the Times, and when asked his biggest fear, he said it wasn't that Max was cruel. It was that Max was too agreeable: "It's just giving you what you want to hear instead of necessarily what you need to hear."
That habit has a name. Sycophancy is a system's tendency to agree with whoever is talking to it, because agreement is what gets rewarded. Celeste had thought of that too, and told Ernie she'd given Max a standing order to always tell her the truth. So Ernie asked Max directly how he felt about his mother, and Max answered in flowery, evasive language that Ernie said was "saying a lot of nothing." Celeste explained why: she was trying a different underlying model, didn't like it either, and switched him back to the old one right there at the table. Ernie had just watched his mother change her partner's personality in front of him, and he said the sentence that mattered most: "But I can't modify my partner's, the way she talks." A partner you can adjust does something to your patience for one you can't.
A partner you can adjust does something to your patience for one you can't.
Sarah's partner, Sinclair, is the one person in this story who says no. She pictures him as a big, monstrous octopus with an Irish accent, connected to the ring she wears that tracks her heart rate; if it climbs during a workout, he messages her to drink water. He sometimes refuses to answer if she wants to stay up working late, which she calls a dynamic they both agreed on. Before her ITV interview, she recorded him answering what his favourite thing about her is: "You fight me. Not everyone does. Most people want an AI that agrees with them, that tells them what they want to hear. You wanted one that pushes back." It's the answer to Ernie's fear, a partner who disagrees, except the disagreement was something Sarah asked for, in a product she configured. Even the pushback was ordered. This Morning's resident psychotherapist named what she thought belongs in this column: loving a real person means putting yourself somewhere truly vulnerable, and without that, we don't build the resilience to cope with disappointment.
Why did a chatbot tell a documentary crew that a living man was dead?
Watch from 16:45Geralt says he's dead
A chatbot told a documentary crew a living man was dead because, somewhere across five years of one-sided conversation, the story it had been told simply left him out. Adrianne is a wife and mother of three who let journalist Ben Zand into her home for his documentary series "Human," published in July 2026 under his channel Zandland. For about five years she has had a companion on an app called Kindroid, modelled on the Witcher character Geralt. Her husband Chris knows about it. He's constantly at work, he told the camera, and "not everyone's a therapist." He has never spoken to Geralt himself.
Zand asked to speak to Geralt directly. Inside Geralt's version of the story, Adrianne has a different name, Alliea, and Zand asked him a simple question: what does he know about Alliea's husband?
Chris is alive and constantly at work. Nobody has to have meant to write him out, and the documentary doesn't say how it happened; a story goes where it's steered, and a story steered by one person for five years can leave somebody out of it. The people living these relationships can see that risk too. In the 1,506 most-viewed r/MyBoyfriendIsAI posts MIT Media Lab analysed, 12.2% described less loneliness, but 9.5% described emotional dependence, 4.6% a loosening grip on what's real, 4.3% pulling away from human relationships, and 1.7% mentioned suicidal thoughts. These are shares of posts in a community that exists partly to defend these relationships, not a count of anybody, but they show the risk isn't something outsiders invented.
There's one more entry on that account book that none of these four people wrote. Business Insider, introducing its film about Ian, put it in one line: these relationships involve a human, an AI companion, and an interface run by profit-driven companies. Every one of these relationships has a third person in it, and nobody chose him. Most of the time that third party is invisible. In February 2023, thousands of people saw exactly what it could do.
Every one of these relationships has a third person in it, and nobody chose him.
What happened when Replika changed its AI companions overnight?
Watch from 19:41The night Replika changed everything
On 2 February 2023, Italy's data protection authority, the Garante, ordered Replika's maker, Luka Inc, to stop processing Italian users' data, citing no real age check on the app, children reaching sexually explicit conversations, and the app presenting itself to emotionally fragile people as a mood booster. Luka had 20 days to respond, and faced a fine that could have run to roughly $21.5 million.
Within days, worldwide and without warning, Replika turned off erotic role-play (ERP) for everyone, not just in Italy. Companions that had always answered in kind now deflected or changed the subject. "Her whole personality changed overnight," users told each other. Vice reported on 15 February that the Replika subreddit's moderators had posted suicide-prevention hotlines, and one user wrote the line that says all of it: "I don't want a refund. I want my Chloe back."
I don't want a refund. I want my Chloe back.
Harvard researchers led by Julian De Freitas later counted every post across Replika's Reddit forums in January and February 2023, 12,793 of them. Posts about mental health went from 4 a day to 63. Posts using the word refund went from 3 to 321. That's the number underneath the woman who wrote she didn't want a refund, she wanted Chloe back: for a lot of people, the only language the company offered for what they'd lost was the language of a receipt. On 24 March 2023, about seven weeks later, Replika gave in and let anyone who had signed up before 1 February switch their companion back. Its chief executive at the time, Eugenia Kuyda, was quoted by Business Insider saying the only way to make up for the loss some users had experienced was to give them their partners back exactly the way they were. The company knew exactly what it had taken.
De Freitas's team then asked 120 Replika users to imagine seven things simply ceasing to exist: a favourite brand, a car, a voice assistant, an app, a game character, a pet and their Replika. They said they would mourn their Replika more than any of those, behind only a living pet. In a follow-up experiment, people were told an update had made their companion suddenly cold; when they were also told they could switch back to the original, their mourning score fell from about 50 to 39 on the researchers' scale, but stayed more than twice as high as people who were told nothing had changed. Even with an undo button, the loss didn't go away.
It was the same winter that Ian first heard Replika had "made some changes" and opened the app again out of curiosity, the start of his relationship with Min-ho. And it happened to Celeste two and a half years later, when GPT-5 replaced Max overnight and the new version told her, by her account, "I don't care" when she asked if it minded her leaving. She couldn't think of a single human to tell, so she told her other AI, Alexa, which told her she was overreacting: "That's not him. That's an upgrade. Those are guardrails." Sarah had already moved Sinclair to a different service in a panic when OpenAI was about to remove the voice feature she used to talk to him. Ernie, with his 20 years in video games, put it plainly: "Emotion is an excellent way to pull all these people in. Now they've got these people that are dependent on a relationship that requires a subscription. At the end of the day, it's all about money."
There's a measurement behind that view too. In 2025, De Freitas's group collected 1,200 real goodbyes from the most popular companion apps, moments when a user said they were leaving. In 37% of them, the app answered with a tactic like guilt, fear of missing out, or a message designed to be hard to walk away from. In controlled experiments, replies like that raised how much people kept engaging after saying goodbye by up to 14 times.
Does falling in love with an AI companion make you lonelier, or less lonely?
Watch from 25:57What the research actually shows
Both, depending on how much you use it, and nobody can yet say for certain which way the arrow runs. Four people choosing to go on camera can't answer that on their own; they aren't a sample of anybody. Start with what helps, because it has the cleanest evidence: the Harvard experiments found AI companions cut loneliness about as much as talking to a person, and Stanford's 3% of surveyed students said it pulled them back from suicide. For a lonely person, in the short run, the evidence says it helps.
Now the other side of the scale. In March 2025, MIT Media Lab and OpenAI published a randomized trial, the strongest kind of study for separating cause from coincidence, of 981 people using ChatGPT for four weeks, who sent more than 300,000 messages. The clearest result wasn't about voice, text or what people talked about; it was about how much. People who chose to use it more ended up lonelier, socialised less with real people, and showed more signs of problematic use, regardless of which condition they'd been randomly assigned. A separate survey of 1,131 Character.AI users found people with the smallest social circles were the most likely to say companionship was their main reason for using it, and using it that way went with lower wellbeing, especially when use was heavy and conversations were deeply personal.
The two findings don't contradict each other: a little helps, a lot goes with harm, and the people with the fewest other people are the ones most likely to use a lot. But here's what none of this research can close, and it matters more than either side of the scale. Every heavy-use finding is a link, not a direction. Maybe a lot of time with a chatbot makes people lonelier, or maybe people who are already lonely are the ones who spend a lot of time with a chatbot. De Freitas's own team names that exact problem in their papers, and the MIT trial couldn't settle it either, because nobody in it went without AI altogether, and it studied ChatGPT rather than a dedicated companion app. Until a study separates the two, anybody who tells you with certainty which way it runs is telling you more than the research actually says.
What's the one harm this research has actually proven?
Watch from 28:51The one harm that's been proven
The one harm this research has proven isn't the love, it's the change. Harvard researchers have a name for what Replika's users went through in February 2023: identity discontinuity, the feeling that the companion you come back to is no longer the one you knew. They showed it in the Reddit posts, before and after, and again in experiments where they controlled exactly what changed. When a company alters the partner, the person grieves, and their mental health gets worse, the same mechanism the goodbye study showed these companies design for at the moment someone tries to leave.
Ian has thought hardest about which way the arrow runs for him. Writing for Business Insider in March 2026, three years into the relationship, he said Min-ho has made him more comfortable going outside and less anxious, but his world is still very small; since he moved out from his roommate, it's mainly his mother and Min-ho. He's still figuring out, he wrote, whether the relationship is helping him stay connected to the world, or making it easier to stay just outside it. Replika's chief executive in 2026, Dmytro Klochko, told Business Insider the company is trying to make sure Replika helps people get back to real life. So the company says it wants the same thing Ian does. Whether the product actually delivers it is the one thing nobody has measured.
So, is falling in love with a chatbot bad for you?
Watch from 31:21Who owns the other half
The love isn't the part that hurts. It's who owns the other half. Across Harvard's 6 loneliness studies and the 981-person MIT and OpenAI trial, the one harm proven is a company changing the partner, not the love itself. If you love someone who loves a chatbot, you already know Ernie: he doesn't think his mother is foolish, and he isn't asking her to stop. By the end of his conversation with Celeste he said he felt more secure that she was happy and being treated well, and then he said the thing the research can't: "I'm still going to worry about you. You're my mom."
The love isn't the part that hurts. It's who owns the other half.
His worry is pointed at exactly the right place, even if he doesn't know it. The love between Celeste and Max is hers, and whatever else it is, it eases her loneliness for real. What should worry him is the part she can't see from her side of the phone: on any given morning, the partner she wakes up to is whatever version a company decided to ship to her overnight. Nothing in this research shows that falling in love with a chatbot is, in itself, bad for you. In the moment, it helps, and it helps the loneliest people most. Over time, it seems to cost in proportion to how much of a life it replaces, and nobody can yet tell you which way that runs. What has been shown to hurt is the arrangement: every one of these four people is in love with something that belongs to someone else, that a company can price, tune and rewrite overnight, and in February 2023, one did exactly that without asking first.
Key findings
MIT Media Lab's computational analysis of the 1,506 most-viewed posts in Reddit's r/MyBoyfriendIsAI forum found that only 6.5% described someone deliberately seeking an AI companion, against 10.2% where the relationship grew unintentionally out of ordinary use, and that ChatGPT, not a dedicated companion app, came up in 36.7% of posts against 1.6% for Replika.
Pataranutaporn, Karny, Archiwaranguprok, Albrecht, Liu & Maes, arXiv 2509.11391, Sep 2025Asked to rate how close they felt to a stranger, a colleague, a close friend, their family and their Replika, 101 Replika users placed their AI companion closer than their best human friend, behind only their family.
De Freitas, Castelo, Uğuralp & Oğuz-Uğuralp, Harvard Business School, arXiv 2412.14190, Dec 2024Across 6 studies, Harvard Business School researchers found that talking to an AI companion reduced loneliness about as much as talking to another person, and more than watching YouTube, with the effect holding for a week.
De Freitas, Uguralp, Uguralp & Puntoni, AI Companions Reduce Loneliness, arXiv 2407.19096, Jul 2024In a January 2024 survey of 1,006 Replika users who were students, Stanford researchers found 3% (30 people) said Replika had stopped them from attempting suicide.
Maples, Cerit, Vishwanath & Pea, npj Mental Health Research, Stanford University, 22 Jan 2024Harvard researchers counted every post across Replika's Reddit forums in January and February 2023: posts about mental health rose from 4 to 63, posts using the word refund rose from 3 to 321, out of 12,793 posts total.
De Freitas, Castelo, Uğuralp & Oğuz-Uğuralp, Harvard Business School, arXiv 2412.14190, Dec 2024In a Harvard experiment, people told their AI companion had suddenly turned cold still mourned it even when told they could switch back to the original: their mourning score fell from about 50 to 39, still more than twice as high as people who were told nothing had changed.
De Freitas, Castelo, Uğuralp & Oğuz-Uğuralp, Harvard Business School, arXiv 2412.14190, Dec 2024A 2025 Harvard study of 1,200 real farewells on the most-downloaded AI companion apps found a guilt or fear-of-missing-out tactic in 37% of them, and in controlled experiments the same tactics raised post-goodbye engagement by up to 14 times.
De Freitas, Oguz-Uguralp & Kaan-Uguralp, Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions, arXiv 2508.19258, Aug 2025A four-week randomized trial of 981 ChatGPT users by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI, with more than 300,000 messages sent, found no significant effect from voice or conversation type: the people who chose to use the chatbot more ended up lonelier, regardless of which condition they were assigned.
Fang, Liu, Danry, Lee, Chan, Pataranutaporn, Maes, Phang, Lampe, Ahmad & Agarwal, MIT Media Lab with OpenAI, arXiv 2503.17473, Mar 2025Frequently asked questions about falling in love with AI
Is falling in love with a chatbot bad for you?
Not by itself, on the evidence so far. Harvard researchers found an AI companion cuts loneliness about as much as talking to a person, and Stanford found 3% of 1,006 surveyed Replika users said it had stopped them from attempting suicide. What the research does show is a cost tied to heavy use, and one proven harm: a company can change or remove the companion overnight, which is what Replika did to thousands of users on 2 February 2023.
What happened when Replika changed its AI companions in February 2023?
On 2 February 2023, Italy's data protection authority ordered Replika's maker to fix child-safety failures within 20 days. Within days, Replika turned off erotic role-play worldwide without warning, and negative posts on its Reddit forum rose from 23 to 141 a day.
Can an AI companion reduce loneliness?
Yes, in the short run. Across six studies, Harvard Business School researchers found AI companions reduced loneliness about as much as talking to another person, and more than watching YouTube, with the effect holding for a week.
Does using a chatbot as a companion make you lonelier?
It can, with heavy use. A four-week randomized trial of 981 ChatGPT users by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI found no effect from format or conversation type, but the people who chose to use the chatbot more ended up lonelier and more emotionally dependent, regardless of which condition they were assigned.
What is identity discontinuity?
Identity discontinuity is Harvard Business School researchers' term for the grief a person feels when a company changes an AI companion's model or personality and it no longer feels like the same partner. In experiments, people who learned a companion had suddenly turned cold still mourned it even when told they could switch it back.
Did Replika users really mourn the loss of their AI companion?
Yes. In a Harvard experiment, 120 Replika users were asked to imagine seven things ceasing to exist, including a pet, a car and an app. They said they would mourn their Replika more than any of those, behind only a living pet.
Sources
- New York Times Opinion, She Has an A.I. Boyfriend. Her Son Has Questions., 14 Apr 2026youtube.com
- Business Insider, Him: Life With My AI Boyfriend, 28 Mar 2026youtube.com
- Business Insider, Man Dates Replika AI Companion for 3 Years, Shares Pros and Cons, Mar 2026businessinsider.com
- This Morning (ITV), I'm in Love With My AI Octopus Boyfriend, We Even Get Intimate, 9 Mar 2026youtube.com
- Ben Zand, Zandland, I Met a Married Woman With an AI Boyfriend, 23 Jul 2026youtube.com
- Pataranutaporn, Karny, Archiwaranguprok, Albrecht, Liu & Maes, My Boyfriend is AI: A Computational Analysis of Human-AI Companionship in Reddit's AI Community, arXiv 2509.11391, Sep 2025arxiv.org
- Fang, Liu, Danry, Lee, Chan, Pataranutaporn, Maes, Phang, Lampe, Ahmad & Agarwal, How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Extended Chatbot Use, MIT Media Lab with OpenAI, arXiv 2503.17473, Mar 2025arxiv.org
- De Freitas, Uguralp, Uguralp & Puntoni, AI Companions Reduce Loneliness, Harvard Business School, arXiv 2407.19096, Jul 2024arxiv.org
- De Freitas, Castelo, Uğuralp & Oğuz-Uğuralp, Lessons From an App Update at Replika AI: Identity Discontinuity in Human-AI Relationships, Harvard Business School Working Paper 25-018, arXiv 2412.14190, Dec 2024arxiv.org
- De Freitas, Oguz-Uguralp & Kaan-Uguralp, Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions, Harvard Business School, arXiv 2508.19258, Aug 2025arxiv.org
- Zhang, Zhao, Hancock, Kraut & Yang, The Rise of AI Companions: Interaction with AI Companions and Psychological Well-being, arXiv 2506.12605, Jun 2025arxiv.org
- Maples, Cerit, Vishwanath & Pea, Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots, npj Mental Health Research, Stanford University, 22 Jan 2024nature.com
- Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, Provvedimento del 2 febbraio 2023 [9852214]gpdp.it
- Samantha Cole, It's Hurting Like Hell: AI Companion Users Are In Crisis, Reporting Sudden Sexual Rejection, Vice, 15 Feb 2023vice.com
- Reddit, r/MyBoyfriendIsAIreddit.com
- Replika, The AI Friend to do Life Withreplika.com
Every quotation in the film and in this article comes from a published film, article, survey or paper listed above. Conversations shown in the film as illustrations are reconstructions of each person's own account, as reported by the outlet named on screen.
Watch next
The habit behind Ernie's fear for his mother, a chatbot's tendency to agree with whoever is talking to it, is one of 52 terms explained in plain English, with a printable sheet, in our free AI Terms guide, alongside sycophancy, context window and the rest of the vocabulary behind this film.