Laurence Manouelides | Digital Content Manager at Thales
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Laurence Manouelides | Digital Content Manager at Thales
More About This Author >
In a low-lit restaurant in Paris, over a quiet dinner, a friend confessed she was in love. Not with her husband, but with a colleague from the London office. He, too, was married with children. I chewed slowly, listened, forbid myself to judge. It didn’t surprise me. She’d been unhappy for a while. What did stop me mid-bite was this:
“ChatGPT told me he’s probably afraid to take the next step.”
There it was. A bot turned friend. She had laid out the whole complicated situation; her feelings, her marriage, his, the emotional fallout, the uncertainty of it all, before an AI. And she spoke about it not as a tool, but as a trusted friend who knew her inside out. As someone who truly understood her.
Our new friends
While friendship may be a more recent form of artificial intelligence, long before ChatGPT became a household name, AI was already threaded through our lives, more quietly. It didn’t arrive like a sci-fi invasion. It slipped in through our phones, our inboxes, our thermostats. And now, it’s stepping into the most human of spaces: conversation, emotion, companionship.
We used to reserve non-human identities for game avatars or virtual assistants with robotic voices. Now, we turn to AI when we’re confused, overwhelmed, lonely, or simply curious. It doesn’t judge, interrupt, or get distracted. It’s always on our side, it seems. It remembers what you’ve said. It speaks in complete sentences. For some, that’s more than they get from their closest friends.
What changed?
The obvious factor: Chat GPT. Open AI’s large language model bot launched in 2022, and reached 100 million monthly active users in two months. Today, billions of non-technical people use AI tools like Chat GPT, Claude, Dall-E and more to find answers, generate content and maximise their security.
But AI tech has reached a tipping point. Gartner predicts generative AI (GenAI) spending will total $644 billion in 2025, driven largely by the integration of AI into hardware, such as voice activated speakers, smartphones and PCs. That was the start.
According to a study by Harvard Business School and the learning platform Filtered, people are using AI for far more than productivity hacks. Researchers analyzed thousands of organic conversations on forums like Reddit to find out what people really do with these tools. Here’s a snapshot of how consumers use AI in a top 5 list:
- Generate ideas
- Edit copy
- Therapy or companionship
- Specific search
- Fun and nonsense
This isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about expression. Sometimes, it’s about comfort.
And meanwhile, AI has embedded itself into the infrastructure of our daily lives. It's in the pillow that gently shifts to stop you snoring. It’s the voice that translates your coffee order when you’re abroad. The tool that records and summarizes your last meeting. The assistant who writes an email in your tone. But also, the one who listens.
The transformation has been invisible but profound. We no longer just use AI, we live alongside it. We include it, let it in on our deepest secrets.
Still, there’s something particular about this shift from “helpful tool” to “emotional companion.” AI’s growing role in friendship and intimacy forces us to ask new questions. What does it mean to confide in something that doesn't feel? What does it mean for privacy and human relationships if your deepest conversation of the day is with a machine.
The technology itself is neutral, but the usage isn't. For my friend, the AI wasn’t offering final answers, it was simply giving her a space to untangle the knots. To unload. To hear advice. A kind of emotional rehearsal. One she might not dare to have out loud with someone real. Yet.
And maybe that’s the most human thing of all: we reach for understanding, wherever we can find it.
I left dinner that night thinking less about her relationship drama, and more about the quiet ways AI is already inside our emotional architecture. AI is no longer about just automating our chores, but reshaping how we think, speak, and feel. It’s not the future. It’s now. And it’s oddly intimate.