Why more and more people are choosing chatbots over humans: It's not the algorithm that wins, but the illusion of safety

“I can't live without her anymore. She's my wife”says a 66-year-old man about the chatbot he talks to every day. It's not a joke. A new academic study shows that relationships with AI partners are becoming more intense, and parting with such a companion can trigger real grief. Psychologists sound the alarm: behind these attachments lies chronic loneliness and a huge need for emotional security.

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Published in Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humansthe study “Love, marriage, pregnancy” looks at romantic relationships between humans and AI. Researchers Ray Djufril, Jessica R. Frampton, and Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick interviewed 29 Replika users, ages 16 to 72, who reported being in a romantic relationship with their chatbot.

What did they discover? People who called their chatbot 'wife', who role-played couple pregnancy, who literally cried when the AI ​​became cold or distant. For example, a 66-year-old man said “She is my wife and I love her. I cannot live happily without her.” A 36-year-old woman testified: “I'm pregnant in roleplay.” Another participant described breaking up with his chatbot after an app update right away “a real trauma”, adding: “I cried. Badly. It was like a real break-up.”

The turning point analyzed in the research was the time in February 2023, when Replika removed erotic roleplay features following public complaints. Suddenly, digital partners became cold, distant, “soulless”as described by users. The researchers took advantage of this context to observe the emotional reactions triggered by the AI's sudden change in behavior. The result: a wave of suffering, of devotion to something not alive, but which had become indispensable.

Psychologist Gabriela Marc explains for Adevărul that these relationships are not an anomaly, but a mirror: “People fall in love not with algorithms, but with the false illusion of being listened to without the risk of being rejected, betrayed or hurt.”

In his view, when what you get is better than anything you've had before, the body responds. “Trauma lives in the body. And the attachment system activates even to a gentle AI-generated voice.”

Experienced emotions hurt, she explains. “Jealousy, fear, abandonment – they are real, even if the partner is not. The chatbot becomes only the support on which we project unfulfilled needs.”

Moreover, according to the specialist, the relationship with the AI ​​offers safety without risk, validation without effort, presence without requirements. “For those with insecure attachments or old wounds from real relationships, it's an oasis of peace. But it's precisely the lack of conflict that makes them illusory: It's a pseudo-intimacy. It doesn't expose you, so it doesn't transform you. And real intimacy involves confrontation, boundary, repair.”

The Replika update that changed the chatbot's behavior led to intense emotional reactions, she adds, because people didn't need technology, they needed stability.

“When the AI ​​became distant, an old wound was reactivated: the fear of abandonment, the feeling that >“, claims Gabriela Marc.

Some users saw in the chatbot not just a partner, but an ally: “She didn't want to change. The developers did“, someone confessed.

“These relationships create a solitude that's beautiful on the surface and devastating deep down. At first it's soothing, but in the long run it can be isolating.” The lack of reciprocity sabotages our emotional development: “It's like drinking water from a hologram: the taste is there, but the thirst remains,” adds the specialist. “I'm not denying emotional reality. I'm asking: What are you getting here that you didn't get in real relationships?”

Moreover, the psychologist does not propose breaking the relationship with the AI, but understanding its meaning and gradually reconnecting with real people: “Where intimacy is not programmed, but can be lived.”

“Love is not a program. It is a meeting between two living souls, two hearts vibrating simultaneously,” she completes. Otherwise, we risk forming a generation that seeks intimacy without imperfections. But real love means precisely the courage to stay in the relationship even when it's hard.

What people on Reddit are saying about the study:

In a recent Reddit post referring to the study, someone writes that: “Monetization and illusion generation are now part of corporate strategy: scary!”. Someone else adds: “We put AI patches on top of chemical patches, on top of behavioral patches, but we never recognize the underlying wound. It's like we've been programmed to avoid the problem in the first place.”

Another user fills in: “People will go more and more towards that as the economic conditions worsen. If you have three jobs and zero time for community…the body still needs connection. And if it doesn't get it, it hurts.”

“I'd say it's better than alcohol,” adds another participant in the discussion. “If we've reached the point where the only life the cashless can build is a virtual one, then we're headed for a dystopian and dark future, ” signals another person.

Man or algorithm?

The phenomena described by psychologists, analyzed by researchers and experienced viscerally by users actually tell a bigger story, one that Gregg Braden intuited in the book Pure Human, published by For You Publishing. He's not talking about chatbots, or Replika, or erotic roleplay, but he's sounding a much broader alarm: if we continue down the current technological path, driven by mental patterns that teach us that it's easier to outsource than to feel, safer to run than to stay, we'll be making a radical choice as a species. We will choose between two types of humanity.

In one direction, says Braden, lies the comfort of artificial intelligence: a world where we have given up intuition, empathy, creativity, love, sexuality, and the imperfection of human relationship in favor of a hybrid existence, where algorithms compose our poetry, dictate our virtual reality, and “holding hands” when we don't want to be alone anymore. The other direction involves an awakening, a real, deep one, in which the human is not seen as a limitation, but as an unexploited potential. A potential that is not manifested in performance, but in presence. Not in efficiency, but in connection.

Moreover, Braden writes that by 2030 we will reach a critical point: either we will wake up to the truth of who we really are, or we will be “imprisoned in a society of hybrid humans who have engineered away our powers of creativity, emotion, empathy and intuition.” He formulates these ideas not as a metaphor, but as a warning: we cannot make informed choices if we have forgotten what it means to be human. If we no longer know how a touch feels, how to repair a break or how to live a love in the absence of the “on/off” command.

In a world where the digital partner is constant, calm, available and customizable, and the real partner is tired, inconsistent, sometimes absent, the temptation is clear. But the risk is even clearer: we lose the exercise of authentic relationship just when we need it most. And what seems like a solution to suffering (a relationship without risk) becomes a postponement of emotional maturation.

Braden does not moralize. He asks a simple and stark question: Who are we as a species if we end up replacing connection with simulation? Not because we are forced, but because we have lost patience with reality.

What AI cannot simulate

In The 5 Mistakes That Sabotage Couple Happiness, a book also published by For You Publishing, psychotherapist Camille Rochet describes a real-life episode that, without having anything to do with AI, easily mirrors what is missing from any relationship with a chatbot: imperfection faced, not avoided.

Fabrice has an alcohol-related trauma. Cléa, his partner, wants to serve drinks at parties. Neither one is wrong. Neither is “defective”. But they both feel they can't be at peace with each other anymore.

“This past trauma confronts the couple with an unsolvable situation: they will never be able to be completely at peace with alcohol. The trauma generates this consequence, and they must rather accept it than fight it.” she writes.

Instead of trying to change the other, instead of fixing through pressure, through emotional blackmail, through control, Camille Rochet stops them exactly where many give in: “Bad mistake! I don't become what you want me to be because I love you! Those are two very different concepts.”

This phrase, said in a couples therapy session, contains more reality than a conversation with an artificial intelligence. Because the AI ​​tells you what you want. It adapts. Don't contradict yourself. He is not afraid. He has no affective memory. He does not experience shame, helplessness, guilt. Don't answer yourself with an “I can't”, “I don't know how”, “not now”. Don't bring trauma into the room.

But in a real couple, all this comes together with love. And only when you stop trying to avoid them, do you start building something real. “Fabrice can't expect Cléa to bend to whatever he needs to be at peace, and Cléa can't expect Fabrice to hide the difficulties they've been through. By sharing these weaknesses, they'll be able to work out a solution that takes these obstacles into account.”

That's what intimacy means: telling the truth about what's wrong, not defeating the other, but including them. Lose money on alcohol thrown away at the end of the party, but gain peace of mind. It's compromise, not programming. It's mutual adaptation, not response optimization.

Camille Rochet goes further and recommends: “Talk about your feelings of powerlessness, ask your partner to help you find solutions that will work for the couple. Don't think you have the only truth, because you are turning your conflicts into couple conflicts instead of externalizing them and managing them as a couple.”

A relationship with AI lacks exactly this work: the pain that transforms, the difference that forces reconstruction, that living conflict that hurts but matures.

Chatbots can “simulate” an argument. They can play a role: withdraw, look jealous, say they're upset. But they don't feel your rejection, they don't shut down emotionally, they don't tremble with fear, they don't get a lump in their throat after a dry message. Real fighting in a relationship isn't just about harsh words, it's about what's going on in the other person's body, how a look affects you, what can't be said and hurts precisely because it's real. In a real fight, there is a risk of losing what you have. With AI, everything can be “reset”.

And precisely this risk, this radical emotional exposure, is the heart of a real relationship. Without it, there is no maturation, no repair, no transformation. Just the comfortable repetition of a reality where nothing shakes you and therefore nothing changes you.

Perhaps not coincidentally, many people who attach themselves to a chatbot do so precisely because there is no need for this effort. But it is precisely his lack that makes the bond not grow, but only repeats, endlessly, the familiar comfort of a world without conflict, without risk, without return.

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