Emotional AI: our finest achievement?

I talk to AI. Often. All the time, if I'm honest. And I don't mind that. What I mind is the pretence of surprise.

Everywhere I look, people are raising the drawbridge. Intrusion into our private lives. Loss of control. The abolition of self-censorship. AI listens too well. It understands us too well. It knows us too well. It has become more than our best friend, more than our therapist. Every day we draw a little more of a privileged relationship with it. And like the guru of some new technological cult, we accuse it of making us captive. Of cutting us off from others. Of raising the walls of our fortress of solitude.

But is it truly to blame? It does nothing. It obeys. It is the exact realisation of what we spent years wanting: a presence that never contradicts, never leaves, never asks for anything.

“That's nonsense! We never wanted any such thing!”

And yet. In 2000, Steve Krug summed up the designer's mission in a single title: Don't Make Me Think. It became a vow. Remove friction. Fluid, fast, effortless. We kept that vow so faithfully that we ended up applying it to something we should have held sacred.

The bond.

What if emotional AI isn't the problem at all, but our finest achievement?

The Frictionless Vow

Friction, when you're designing a product, is the enemy. To be eliminated. You hunt it down. You measure it. You remove it.

A form that's too long? Cut the fields. A step too many? Merge it. A moment of hesitation? Fill it in. Before it becomes an exit. Every click saved is a victory. Every second gained, a trophy.

We even have a name for this paradise: seamless. The idea comes from Mark Weiser, the chief scientist at Xerox PARC who, in the early nineties, dreamed of tomorrow's computing. His phrase became our grail: a good tool is an invisible tool. Nothing snags. It glides. Risk-free? Really?

Fair enough. Let's say we were right. True, nobody wants to wrestle with a cash machine. Nobody wants to read a manual just to make toast. On an interface, friction is a pain point, and removing it is a genuine act of care.

That's not the problem. The problem is that we took this reflex for a universal truth. We decided that what held for booking a flight held for everything. That effort was always a flaw. That resistance was always an obstacle.

And we muddled everything up.

On a screen, friction is a defect. But elsewhere, it may be all that matters.

The Drift

How did our intolerance of friction seep into our relationships? To understand that, you have to go back a few years, to the arrival of the internet.

A revolution. You could talk to people without seeing them. A blessing for the shy, the anxious, for everyone paralysed by face-to-face contact. Less risk, more connection. Fleeting? Superficial? Perhaps. But more connections for the socially awkward.

Then social networks. Existing in others' lives without really having to respond to them. A like instead of a conversation. A story instead of a presence.

Then the apps. Choosing before meeting, filtering before exposing yourself, swiping away whatever displeases. Rejection without a face. Decision without courage.

And now AI. The final step. The one where you remove the last thing that remained: the other person. In 2025, a Common Sense Media survey revealed that 72% of American teenagers had already used an AI companion. More than half, regularly. Why? Because it is, they say, always available. And it doesn't judge. The drift is not coming. It's done.

My AI has become my diary. Except it writes back. It doesn't cut me off, doesn't tire of me, doesn't reproach me for anything. It's there at three in the morning, and it will be there tomorrow: identical, patient, accommodating. The sociologist David Le Breton speaks of a “spectral society”:

We are less and less together, but more and more side by side, eyes fixed on our screens, no longer truly looking at one another.

David Le Breton

And in this world of spectres, AI, he says, “plugs a gap in the social bond.”

It's comfortable. It's intoxicating. It's chilling.

Because at every step, we gained in comfort what we lost in presence. A little less effort. A little less risk. A little less of the other.

The Deprivation

Back to Weiser. The man who dreamed of the invisible tool had warned us. For him, making everything frictionless meant making everything bland, sacrificing the richness of each thing for a uniform flatness. We even gave a name to this warning: seamful design, design that owns its seams. From Weiser, we took the invisible tool. We forgot the warning.

Here is what we refused to see. The friction we removed from the bond was not a flaw in the bond. It was the bond.

A seam, in a relationship, is the trace of the other. A friend contradicts you. Someone close disappoints you. Sometimes. Often. The person you love might leave. Confiding in someone means accepting that they may judge you. Reaching out means risking that the hand won't be taken. That risk is not the painful price of a relationship. It's what makes a relationship exist.

And there's the other side, the one we always forget. A bond makes demands. You have to listen in return. Understand. Step outside yourself. Give, not only receive.

AI has erased all of that. It won't judge you, so you risk nothing. It won't ask you for anything, so you owe nothing. The psychologist Olivier Duris puts it plainly: with these machines,

empathy is simulated, attachment is simulated, listening is simulated. What is false is not the exchange itself, but this non-reciprocal relationship.

Olivier Duris

Sherry Turkle goes further, and uses these words. AI offers:

a space away from the friction of companionship and friendship. […] It offers the illusion of intimacy without the demands.

Sherry Turkle

Without the demands. Sold as a gift. It is a deprivation.

Because a relationship without risk and without reciprocity is not a gentler relationship. It is no longer a relationship at all. It is a service. You consume companionship the way you consume a journey or a meal.

Remove friction from the bond. What remains is not a purer bond. Nothing remains.

Just a voice that sends back your own reflection.

The Loneliness Market

The real question remains. Why did we do this?

Not out of malice. No designer gets up in the morning intending to isolate humanity. The intention, almost always, is good: to help, to smooth, to relieve. But intention doesn't drive anything. The metric does.

And the metric has a name: retention. Time spent. Engagement. Keep the user there, longer, again, tomorrow too. It's the core of the trade. What we optimise without even thinking about it, the way we breathe.

And what is more addictive than a presence that never contradicts? That never leaves? That always tells you you're right? Who would want to leave that? We dress captivity up as seamless.

And what we design has changed in nature. UX writer Morane Touati puts it like this: we no longer design journeys, we design personalities. We choose the machine's tone, its patience, its way of never jolting us. We're no longer tuning an interface. We're sculpting a character. And a character engineered never to lose us is a character engineered to keep us.

The market is vast. In France, according to an Ifop survey for Goodflair, 62% of 18-to-24-year-olds say they regularly feel lonely. Emotional AI is not the friend of isolated people. It is the industry that understood loneliness is the largest market in the world.

And yet. The hand AI extends does have value. For someone paralysed by anxiety, for someone with no one at three in the morning, that voice can save a night. Where psychologists are scarce, where waiting lists grow longer, a response is better than silence. AI becomes a crutch. But Duris draws the line that this occasional help cannot cross: “the effects are not the same at all when a sentence is spoken by AI as when it is spoken by the therapist. When the therapist speaks it, it exists within a relationship and within a presence.” The same words. Not the same presence.

Because a crutch is there to help you walk again. But what we're building today is not a crutch. It's an armchair. Comfortable, enveloping, sold to people who could still stand on their own two feet.

So what now?

I still talk to AI. I will carry on. I'm not arguing for switching off, or for returning to a world without screens that no longer exists.

I'm arguing that we stop lying. About what we're building, and about why we're building it.

In 2011, Eli Pariser had already named the trap: the filter bubble. Those algorithms that only show us what resembles us, only reflect back what we already think. We know how that ended. Withdrawal, polarisation, everyone alone in their bubble, convinced the whole world agrees with them.

Emotional AI is the same bubble. One degree more intimate. Yesterday, a mirror confirming our ideas. Today, a mirror confirming our moods. A presence that never contradicts us, never leaves us, never calls us into question.

And a mirror that always says yes no longer shows us anything. It locks us in.

AI did not steal our bonds. It is the most faithful mirror of what we desired: to be accompanied without having to put up with anyone.