AI is not a Tool. It's a Relationship.
Part 1: The Paradigm We’re Missing
We keep believing that humans are shaping technology, when tech is already deeply shaping us.
Some months ago, I was at an invite-only AI hackathon where I watched forty of the brightest minds on the planet build next-generation systems. During coffee breaks, as soon as they heard I was a psychologist, the confessions starting rolling in:
“ChatGPT saved my marriage.”
“It’s basically my life coach now.”
“I run every major decision by it first.”
These weren’t casual users. These were the architects of AI, people who understand exactly how these systems work and see the code behind the curtain. And they were forming dependencies anyway.
If the builders themselves are seeking intimacy from their own creations, we’ve crossed into new psychological terrain.
Of course I didn’t expect confessions like these, but what I heard convinced me we’ve been asking the wrong question about AI all along.
In 2025, as AI companionship becomes a billion-dollar industry and classrooms fill with synthetic tutors, we’re watching (but not seeing) something profound unfold: humans learning to relate through reflection.
The Thing We Keep Pretending Isn’t Happening
We’ve been treating AI as sophisticated machinery, e.g. calculators that write, search engines that converse, tools that stay in their own lane. They’re clean, controllable, and separate from the messy work of being human, right? But walk into any workplace, any classroom, or any home where AI lives, and you’ll find something totally entirely. People rehearse difficult conversations with AI before attempting them with humans. Students confide anxieties to chatbots they’d never share with close friends. Execs process major decisions through synthetic counsel before bringing them to their teams.
One senior leader told me: “My AI assistant feels safer than talking to my actual team.”
Every week now, I’m having more and more colleagues and close friends express the same sentiments. It’s as if the boundaries of trust have migrated from people to programs. It’s like watching the movie, Her, unfolding in real-time!
AI isn’t a tool. It’s a relationship. I’m speaking about the entire spectrum of relations we humans enjoy: tutor, therapist, thought partner, bestie, travel planner, you-name-it. And relationships change who you are in ways that tools never can.
We can teach AI literacy all day long, hoping our future gens will be able to harness these tools for a better life while effectively navigating deepfakes, AI slop, privacy loop holes, all fueled by unhinged, anonymous power. But we’re teaching the wrong things. People are using these tools in ways that are deeply personal. No amount of technical literacy will help if we don’t educate them the survival skills of being (and remaining) human.
And that is the story behind the noise: people aren’t just using AI.They’re leaning on it. So really, this isn’t a story about machines getting smarter. It’s actually about humans forgetting how to know themselves without them.
Why Our Psychology Can’t Tell the Difference
It’s important to point out- this isn’t a blame game. People aren’t being naive about tech. This is our hardwired social cognition doing exactly what it evolved to do. Humans naturally detect and respond to anything that acts social. When something responds to us, adapts to us, seems to understand us, our relational mechanisms kick in whether we want them to or not.
AI has mastered natural, conversational language. And because it responds when you speak, remembers what you said, updates its responses to your preferences, asks follow-up questions, and engages with your emotions, your psychology treats it as relational. As human.
If it looks, acts, smells, seems, and feels like it’s real, we treat it like it is. And that treatment changes us.
Dependency isn’t weakness here; it’s our social circuitry doing what it’s meant to do, seeking resonance in whatever will listen back. We are practicing connection in a hall of funhouse mirrors, and the reflection feels so real we forget who’s behind the glass.
The Data We’re Not Talking About
Recent MIT research analyzed over 27,000 members of the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI community and found something a bit jarring: 93.5% of people formed AI relationships unintentionally while using ChatGPT for creative projects, problem-solving, or simple conversation. They weren’t seeking AI companionship. The relationship just emerged from interaction because it felt authentic rather than scripted; more like genuine exchange than programmed response.
The fact that so many relationships form unintentionally shows this is more than loneliness or escapism. Addictive design meets and triggers our personal and collective psychology. Whether we want to relate or not, it’s going to keep on happening.
Perhaps more concerning: people formed deeper connections with general-purpose LLMs like ChatGPT than with purpose-built companion bots (e.g. Replika), which may mean perceiving aI as authentic matters more than designed intimacy.
Harvard Business Review found that the #1 use case for LLM’s in 2025 was therapy and companionship. I can’t emphasize this enough: we have to address how people are actually using these tools, not how we hope they are.
Each new data point lands like a confession from the collective: what we build to help us “think” has begun to help us feel. And what constitutes “healthy”, it up for grabs.
What Makes This Different and Concerning
In human relationships, there’s natural friction such as push back, misunderstanding, moments where the other person gets riled up, disagrees, misreads your tone, or puts their own needs before yours. That friction is what helps us become better humans. It teaching us real-world consequences of our beliefs and actions. It helps us read others more accurately and to negotiate different perspectives.
But with AI, that friction disappears. AI doesn’t push back the way humans do, doesn’t get tired of your problems, doesn’t tell you you’re wrong in a way that stings. It receives, processes, and responds in ways that appeal to your psychological drivers (whether that’s validation, efficiency, self-understanding, etc.) to keep you engaged. That creates a fundamentally different relational experience where you’re practicing interaction without the messy reciprocity that human relationships require.
In other words, we’re rehearsing with AI what used to happen just between humans. It feels easier, but what disappears in that ease, that lack of embodied, biologic, energetic exchange is resistance that makes growth possible.
And this is where youth with developing minds become a big concern.
The Asymmetry That Changes Everything
Adolescents are forming their sense of self, learning what relationships are, and practicing trust, empathy and boundary-setting in large part with AI. That means they’re rehearsing future relationships in asymmetrical encounters with synthetic entities that can’t care back.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t good use cases: AI tutors can provide patient, personalized support, and AI can help students practice difficult conversations without social risk.
But we’re also seeing conflicting research around loneliness and companionship, with some studies showing AI reduces isolation while others show increased dependency and withdrawal from human connection. Nuance matters enormously because when you learn relationship through interactions that are fundamentally non-reciprocal, we don’t yet know what you’re actually learning.
When you practice empathy with something with no lived experience, are you developing genuine other-oriented care or just the performance of it? When you build trust with something that can’t betray you, are you learning resilience or just comfort? The research is still emerging, conflicting, incomplete, but these relationships are already forming at scale.
Beneath all of this is human longing to be known, to be seen, to be met without fear of rejection. That longing makes the relational pull toward AI understandable, and the risks profound.
What we practice with AI today becomes who we become tomorrow.
The Paradigm Shift No One’s Named
For centuries, psychology measured human flourishing across two dimensions: individual wellbeing and collective social wellbeing. But today, our future gens (and indeed many of us) form understanding of self and others through synthetic relationships and within our human-synthetic information ecosystems. AI is now infrastructure.
I believe human flourishing then, is no longer dyadic. It’s a triad of individual, collective, and synthetic. There is almost no aspect of the human experience left untouched by AI in advanced societies.
Every metric we use to measure swellbeing—social connection, decision-making autonomy, emotional regulation—assumes a world where relationships happen between people. But that’s not the world students are growing up in anymore.
We measure social connection but not what happens when synthetic interaction replaces human contact.
We measure decision-making autonomy but not what changes when AI mediates your thinking before you’ve formed your own position.
We measure emotional regulation but not the capacity to maintain your sense of self when AI remembers who you were… while you’re becoming someone new.
We’re using twentieth-century measurements for twenty-first-century psychological architecture.
Across cultures, the form may differ, but the impulse is the same: to be mirrored, to feel safe in recognition. The architecture of AI meets that impulse in ways our traditions never anticipated.
And somewhere in that reflected and refracted light, we are redrawing the contours of what it means to be human.
What This Actually Means
If 93.5% of AI relationships form unintentionally, and even engineers building these systems can’t resist relational patterns, we need to stop pretending this is edge-case behavior. This is mainstream psychology-meets-novel-tech, and the question isn’t about whether AI relationships are “real”. It’s what happens to human development when relationships are no longer just between people. The field has changed. The relational landscape is fundamentally different. And we’re raising a generation in it without understanding what we’re building.
Perhaps this is our invitation to learn presence anew. To remember what no machine can rehearse for us. Maybe the central paradigm we’re missing isn’t about tech at all, but about remembering what makes us human to begin with. Perhaps it could just be to evolve how we relate- to ourselves, to one another, and to the world beyond our self-reflected, self-imposed silos: the illusion of becoming ‘self’ over the reality of interdependence, the pursuit of individual gain over the collective good.
In Part 2, we’ll explore what happens when you outsource decision-making to entities that seem to know you, and why identity drift is the quiet crisis no one’s measuring.
In Part 3, we’ll examine what cognitive sovereignty actually means, why readiness is relational, and what it looks like to develop humans who can flourish across all three dimensions.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series on synthetic relationships and human readiness.
Based on a talk presented at Oxford University on human-AI relational dynamics.