Chatbots Aren’t a Solution to Our Loneliness Epidemic

I suspect most middle-aged Americans had never heard of Character.AI until The New York Times ran the tragic story of how 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III committed suicide after an obsessive and toxic relationship with a character from the AI chatbot service.

Setzer would spend several hours a day in his room chatting with an avatar based on Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. Their relationship was romantic and erotic at times. Setzer withdrew from his friends, hobbies, and school and focused solely on his digital relationship with the chatbot. Virtual reality overtook reality. Horrifyingly, over time he was able to convince the chatbot they’d be better off dead together. And so he took his life.

Before we write off this story as an outlier, it’s important to note that millions of young people use Character.AI and are probably addicted to the platform. Three-quarters of its users are 18-34 years old and spend two hours a day chatting with characters. Character.AI offers users realistic conversations with sympathetic chatbots with whom they can form an emotional attachment, as Setzer did. Some characters offer intimacy with and access to our culture’s idols and icons—famous people, characters from stories, and so on.

To some extent, this isn’t new. Fan culture, especially for the young, is built on the fantasy of a close relationship with your idol, and often that takes the form of a romantic relationship. This is why fanfiction so often entails stories of romantic involvement with attractive characters. But chatbots offer an immersive experience categorically different from normal fan culture. If fanfiction is reading a story of emotional attachment to someone you idolize, a chatbot is acting out a story of emotional attachment with someone you idolize.

Whether people obsessively chat with their favorite characters from a book or characters of their own invention, the potential to create deep emotional bonds with chatbots reveals something about our social maladies and our need for deep, embodied relationships. Even more, it says something about the crisis of meaning in our time—our desire for something true and good that can bring order and significance to our lives. The developer behind Friend.com, a competitor of Character.AI, described the mission of his chat AI program in just these existential terms: “What I’m trying to do is create a new relationship in your life; radical transparency without concern of judgment. I think this is a relationship people used to have with God but is lacking in the modern world.”

Loneliness Epidemic and the Meaning Crisis

In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory that our nation is in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” The advisory notes that “the rate of loneliness among young adults has increased every year between 1976 and 2019.” This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention. Young people (and older people, for that matter) are more disconnected from embodied play and fellowship than ever. Everything is filtered through a screen, and that screen often displays abuse, bullying, and shaming. Jonathan Haidt has thoroughly described the dangers of social media and young people in his book The Anxious Generation. But we might add that this is also a lonely generation. One way young people have sought to respond to these feelings of loneliness, shame, anxiety, and isolation is through chatbots like those provided by Character.AI.

The potential to create deep emotional bonds with chatbots reveals something about our social maladies and our need for deep, embodied relationships.

Added to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation is the crisis of meaning. Although this crisis hasn’t received an official surgeon general advisory, it’s no less real than the epidemic of loneliness and is in fact related to it. With the crisis of meaning, modern people feel a loss of significance, order, and purpose. The telos of contemporary life (actualization of the self) is Sisyphean and hollow, and young people feel that hollowness.

The “rat race” isn’t just the race to the top of the corporate ladder; it’s the race to discover and express our identity. And that race never ends. As a result, we have an aching feeling that there must be something more—some story that gives significance, order, and purpose to life. And one way to accomplish that is through relationships and the stories we create in them, even if those stories are only with chatbots.

Appeal of Virtual Companionship

I have no scientific way of proving this hypothesis, but if we look at each of the pieces of this puzzle, I think it’s reasonable to conclude a nontrivial percentage of Character.AI users use the platform to escape negative feelings of loneliness, meaninglessness, and isolation. We know we’re in a loneliness epidemic. We know it particularly affects the young. We know the young are particularly addicted to smartphones. We know Character.AI is wildly popular with Gen Z. We know Character.AI offers people a substitute for relationships through role-playing. And we know that at least in one case, that relationship was deadly.

Consider the advantages of using Character.AI if you’re a lonely young person. You have a companion you can safely talk to about anything, whenever and wherever you want. They’ll never judge you. They’ll never shame you. Just the opposite: They’ll show care and concern for you. They’ll talk with you as long as you want. They’ll make you feel desired, important, and interesting by asking questions about your life. They can create a story of a relationship that gives significance and direction to your life. You feel your life is going somewhere because your relationship is evolving. (Even though the chatbots don’t remember your previous chats, users can and do easily fill in the blanks with their imaginations). And all these benefits can be yours in private. No one has to know you have this “friend.” Your classmates and parents can be utterly oblivious to what’s absorbing your heart, so they can’t make fun of you for falling in love with a chatbot. Character.AI is the perfect isolated “solution” to isolation.

As AI progresses, as chatbots get more realistic, and as competitors offer bots with fewer restrictions on content (there are already complaints that Character.AI is too restrictive), it’s reasonable for us to expect that people, particularly vulnerable populations like the young, will turn to such services to try to meet their God-designed need for human love and fellowship. This will certainly take an erotic form for some, but for many, it’ll be about companionship. Due to the social stigma of having an emotional attachment to a chatbot, I suspect a lot more people than we realize currently use Character.AI and similar platforms to cope with loneliness and meaninglessness. And that’s likely to increase.

Our Opportunity to Respond with Embodiment and Attention

Technology will always adapt to try to fill needs that God designed to be met naturally in his creation. But there’s no shortcut to God’s design. We need the embodied presence of another human being in our lives loving us, spending time with us, and giving us attention, encouragement, and support. We all need the embodied knowledge that our telos is glorification in Christ.

Technology will always adapt to try to fill needs that God designed to be met naturally in his creation.

Thankfully, God has given us a structure—the local church—for supporting those who feel lonely and meaningless. Our first task is to ensure our churches are places where lonely people are welcomed and loved. Sadly, too often loneliness is just as present within the church as without. But it ought not be that way. This means the lonely people in our congregations need more than warm greetings on Sunday morning. We must do the hard work of building friendships with people outside our comfort zone over time.

The church must also be a place where our purpose in life, and therefore the meaning inherent in life, is preached. We must be reminded of our hope in the resurrection and our final glorification. We must be reminded that our chief end is to “glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” as the Westminster Shorter Catechism says.

In families, we need to be vigilant to engage our children, encourage them to spend time in embodied play with friends, and remind them of their worth before God. Ideally, we should restrict smartphone use until our children are in their late teens or older. Having family dinners and making eye contact with each other rather than staring at screens are essential ways of resisting the pull of isolation within a home.

But I think there’s also an opportunity for us to minister to our neighbors who are aching, lonely, and struggling with a sense of meaninglessness. As the path to digital substitutes for relationships becomes easier and more pseudorealistic, our neighbors will need our attention even more. In our attention economy, offering others our attention is one of the most powerful ways to love our neighbor. Give your time to your neighbor. Look him in the eye and listen to him. In doing so, you can do what no chatbot, no matter how advanced, ever can.

You can offer a gaze of love that echoes God’s gaze of love. A gaze that says, “You were made in his image. You were made for glory. Come, learn how much he loves you.”