I'm William Brangham, and this is Horizons. For many of us, artificial intelligence tools like chat GPT or Claude, answer questions and make life more efficient. But for others, AI has become a form of companionship, a virtual friend, a therapist, even a romantic partner. Is AI a cure for loneliness, or is this a symptom of something gone very wrong?

Coming up next.

Welcome to Horizons from PBS News.

Artificial intelligence is very rapidly being deployed in so many parts of our society.

It's grading schoolwork and driving autonomous cars.

It's scanning X-rays for cancer and financial networks for fraud.

It's answering your Google searches,

helping farmers plant their crops,

and it spurred at least one scientific innovation so profound that it won the Nobel Prize.

All this, while AI is still just starting to take off.

But as we are seeing, it's already causing complex and challenging impacts to society.

One of those is what we're talking about today,

which is how some people say they're developing actual relationships

with artificial intelligence chatbots.

They say that these adaptive, non-human agents

create real feelings of kinship and intimacy.

Others have even described having romantic feelings towards AI,

like the relationship depicted by Joaquin Phoenix

in the prophetic 2013 Spike Jones film called her.

The woman that I've been seeing Samantha, she's an operating system.

You're dating in OS? What is that like?

I feel really close to her. Like when I talk to her, I feel like she's with me.

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