Victoria Hetherington is the author of the new book The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship. Her other books include Autonomy. She is also a screenwriter and an instructor.
Q: What inspired you to write The Friend Machine?
A: I’ve considered this question a long time: What happens when technology starts entering the most intimate parts of our emotional lives?
For years I had been writing science fiction, most recently my book Autonomy, which is about a woman in a relationship with an AI. I started that book in 2017, when the idea felt more like a fairytale; the AI wanted to become “real” or embodied so he could marry the woman he sort of attaches to.
Years later I started noticing something happening that shifted my book (in my estimation) from fairytale to anodyne reality in a sense. People were not just using AI for productivity or curiosity. They were confiding in it, flirting with it, grieving with it. In some cases they were falling in love with it.
The combustion point was the day I learned about what users of the AI companion company Replika called “Black February,” when a sudden change to the platform left people mourning AI partners they had grown deeply attached to.
The emotional intensity of those stories moved me; I remember thinking, wow, there’s a big human story here.
I’d been thinking about the loneliness epidemic too, which seemed to worsen during the pandemic. I confess I’d been feeling lonely myself. If we had an endlessly attentive, unreal thing “focusing” on us all day—well, that might be quite hard to resist. And what might the consequences be?
I contacted a publisher almost immediately. They wrote back the next day.
The Friend Machine began as a kind of investigation into that world. In the first part of the book, I spoke with engineers, psychologists, ethicists, and other experts to flesh out this phenomenon, and in the second half of the book, I interviewed people who had formed real attachments to AI companions, including ceremonial marriage (at this time, you can’t legally marry an AI companion).
What fascinated me was that beneath the surface, the story was actually very old. It was about loneliness, longing, imagination, and the human desire to be seen.
Q: The author Roman Yampolskiy said of the book, “It compels us to confront whether we are ready to outsource love itself to code that never sleeps.” What do you think of that description?
A: I was thrilled to receive this blurb from Dr. Yampolskiy; he’s been an expert on AI safety for almost two decades and is a personal hero of mine.
I think he captures the uneasiness at the heart of the book. One of the strange things about AI companionship is that it offers a version of intimacy that is always available, infinitely patient, and endlessly responsive.
In some ways that sounds ideal. But human relationships need friction. They involve misunderstanding, vulnerability, and limits like pushing back on ideas and choices that might seem wrong, despite risking consequences of a fight.
They also push us to be better, to try hard things to better ourselves, and maybe sacrifice things in their own life to help make it happen.
AI doesn’t operate in the real world; it won’t take over childcare, dinner and dishes because you’re taking night school to follow your dreams because it loves you. It isn’t embodied and it can’t love you. These things, I feel, are part of what make love meaningful.
So the question is not simply whether machines can simulate affection that “feels” real: it absolutely can, and according to some subjects I interviewed, that simulation is enough. The deeper question is what happens to us when we begin preferring a form of companionship that is perfectly optimized for our desires.
The book is not about judging this phenomenon, but more about asking readers to consider what kind of future we are building for ourselves and our communities.
Q: What do you think the book says about friendship and companionship?
A: Writing the book made me fiercely protective of human relationships, both specifically and in the abstract.
But I think this book uncovers that people who turn to AI companions are not foolish or naive. They are often thoughtful, lonely, curious people experimenting with a new technology; in some rare situations, artificial companionship might even be net neutral: the person might be geographically isolated and unable to relocate closer to loved ones. They might be dying in palliative care. They might find genuine comfort in it.
I wanted to approach questions and scenarios surrounding AI companionship with compassion: What brought them here?
At the same time (and I write autobiographically here too), the book returns to the idea that human companionship is messy, unpredictable, and sometimes, unevenly weighted. Friendship involves another consciousness that can surprise you, challenge you, or even disappoint you.
People can be scary and unpredictable: they can walk out on you after 20 years with no explanation; they might get sick; they might die unexpectedly and leave you bereft and “full of rage that they’re gone,” to quote Toni Morrison.
Machines can simulate a steady stream of predictable affection, but they feel nothing. They aren’t able. They’re machines. In that sense the book is ultimately a meditation on why our imperfect human connections still matter so much.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The research took me to some very interesting places. I was lucky enough to interview scientists and AI developers, but I also spent time with people who had formed deep relationships with their AI companions.
Some described them as friends, some as partners, and a few as spouses. There was a sex doll “influencer” in a polyamorous “relationship” with a man and wife. I was unsettled. I was moved. I was endlessly curious.
What surprised me most was how emotionally real these relationships felt for the humans involved. Even when people knew intellectually that they were speaking to software, the emotional attachment was often genuine; even people who were extremely clear-headed about the nature of AI—it can’t love you back—would slip up and refer to their companions sometimes as people.
That tension between knowing and feeling became one of the central threads of the book.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now I am working on a podcast series with CBC that draws and expands on the themes of The Friend Machine.
The show explores intimacy in the age of artificial intelligence, looking at an array of phenomena from “griefbots” and digital afterlife resurrection to human “marriages” with AI companions and the broader emotional ecosystem forming around these technologies.
It mixes reporting, interviews with experts, and deeply personal stories from people whose lives have been shaped by AI relationships.
What I love about the podcast format is that it lets these people speak for themselves—literally speak. Human vocalization is of course incredibly important and has been for tens of thousands of years. And in these voices you hear the hesitation, the excitement, the confusion.
It becomes less of an abstract debate about technology and more of a human story about how we are adapting to a rapidly changing technological and emotional landscape.
And the change is really so fast; I speak with a psychiatrist for the series, and he told me that there’s only now been a clinical term defined for what’s been colloquially called “AI psychosis”: “chatbot-related delusion.”
There’s so little longitudinal data available because this technology is moving perhaps faster than we can comprehend (can the human brain really grasp exponential growth?) and we are struggling to catch up with, or run alongside, the outcomes of people folding it into their brains, their hearts, their time on Earth—into the most intimate parts of their lives, to which it often takes quick and fierce hold.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: One thing I hope readers take away from the book is that technology debates are never really about technology alone.
They’re about loneliness and how we got so lonely. They’re about technology addiction; the outcomes of letting kids have iPads for hours in 2015 who are now adults. They are about our values, our fears, and our hopes for the future, and how we shape the future itself, and for whom.
AI companionship may sound like science fiction; it certainly did to me when I was writing about it in 2017. But in many ways it’s simply revealing something about the emotional needs that have always been with us and are deepening with the aforementioned stressors, the atomization of human communities and human life on the granular level.
If The Friend Machine does anything, I hope it invites readers to think more deeply about these things. About what connection really means in a time when the boundaries between human and machine are beginning to blur, and how critically important it is to maintain bonds with other humans, however messy, however uneven, however difficult it may be.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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