The case for loneliness, and the case against making it disappear

# The case for loneliness, and the case against making it disappear

A New Yorker essay argues that artificial empathy may help some people, but also raises a harder question about what human contact means if machines take the pressure off loneliness.

The debate over AI companions is no longer theoretical. In a long essay for The New Yorker, the author argues that artificial empathy may be useful for lonely people, but also warns that the ease of machine comfort could change what people become if loneliness is removed too quickly. The piece is not a product review and not a technical benchmark. It is a case study in how a social problem is beginning to shape expectations for AI.

The central claim is straightforward: loneliness is widespread, painful and in many cases harmful. The essay cites a 2023 report from then U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that linked loneliness with higher risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke and premature death. It also says persistent loneliness is worse for health than being sedentary or obese, comparing its impact to smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day. On that basis, the author argues that it is no longer strange to imagine people turning to large language models for companionship when human attention is scarce.

The essay goes further and says loneliness is now serious enough to attract policy attention. Japan and the U.K. have appointed ministers for loneliness, according to the piece. That is not presented as proof that AI companions are the answer. Instead, it shows how the issue has moved from private discomfort into public concern. The author writes that for some lonely people, especially those with limited access to friends, family or paid help, digital interlocutors may become the only readily available source of responsive conversation.

This is where the essay becomes more complicated. It points to studies in which people rated chatbot interactions more positively when they did not know they were talking to a bot. In one example summarized in the piece, health-care professionals preferred ChatGPT’s responses to those posted by verified doctors on Reddit’s r/AskDocs and judged the AI replies to be more empathic. That finding is used not as an endorsement of AI as a friend, but as evidence that machine-generated responses can sometimes be perceived as more emotionally attuned than expert human answers in structured comparisons.

The counterargument is also clear. Critics say those comparisons are rigged because they ask humans to act like bots, stripping away the embodied care that people usually want in a real crisis. The essay quotes that objection and acknowledges its force. A chatbot is not a hug, not a neighbor, and not a family member. But the author’s broader point is that not everyone has those options. If the alternative is no meaningful response at all, a perfectly imperfect machine may still be better than silence.

The most interesting part of the essay is that it resists a simple pro-AI or anti-AI conclusion. It treats loneliness as a force that shapes people, not just a condition to be eliminated. The danger, in this framing, is not only that AI companions might be too persuasive. It is that removing loneliness without thinking about its role could leave people lonelier in a different sense: dependent on frictionless validation while less practiced at the harder work of human mutuality.

That is why the argument resonates beyond companion apps. It asks whether AI should be judged only by how comforting it feels in the moment, or also by what habits it builds over time. On the evidence in the essay, the answer is that both matter. AI may be getting good at sounding empathic. The harder question is what it does to the social life around it.