By steve806.880 · 28 August, 2026 · 7 min read
Disclosure: we build myVirtual.love, so we have an obvious interest here. That's exactly why this article cites the studies that cut against us alongside the ones that don't.
Millions of people are now interacting with artificial intelligence. Most of them are secretly asking whether it is useful to them. It is a fair question. It deserves a more serious answer than a defensive “yes” or an anxious “no.”
A software assistant, built on large language models, maintains a continuous personalized dialogue, remembers your messages, and maintains its character over time.
The difference from a regular chatbot is continuity. The assistant is designed to remain a specific person for months, rather than being a new assistant with each session, so the experience of using it varies, even if the underlying technology is similar.
People use them for different purposes: light communication, emotional support and daily check-ins, romantic and candid interactions, or practicing openness before starting a conversation with a person. These are different use cases with different risk profiles, which is important for everything that will be described below.
The most compelling experimental evidence for this approach comes from Julian De Freitas of Harvard Business School and his colleagues at Wharton School of Business and Marsdata Academic. Their paper, “AI Companions Reduce Loneliness,” was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2025 after peer review. It conducted a series of controlled experiments to test whether AI companions actually reduce loneliness.
And they do. In their experiments, interacting with an AI companion reduced short-term feelings of loneliness about as much as interacting with another person, and more than activities like watching videos or doing nothing. The study, conducted over a one-week period, found that the effect persisted across all days of use of the app. The researchers also found that people underestimated how much it helped before they tried it.
The useful part is the mechanism they discovered. The reason for the decrease in loneliness was the level of difficulty of the application, because did the person feel listened to and understood?
This deserves an honest approach from both sides. Three percent is a small number based on self-reports. But it's also thirty people describing something that was very important to them. The same study found that among the users, the sample was much lonelier than among the comparable groups of students: about ninety percent versus fifty-three percent. These weren't typical students who felt lonely. These were lonely people who found a way to use the companion app.
There is a body of research on why people reveal personal information to conversational systems. The picture presented is much more cautious than is commonly believed.
Lucas and his colleagues at the University of Southern California conducted a controlled experiment in 2014 with an identical virtual human. Participants who were told they were talking to an automated system reported less fear of self-disclosure and less desire to impress than those who were told the system was controlled by a human. Ho, Hancock, and Miner, who published their findings in the Journal of Communication in 2018, found that the emotional benefits of disclosing information to a chatbot were similar to those of disclosing information to a person they perceived to be human. And Mireshgalla and his colleagues, in a 2024 paper published in COLM that analyzed real-world conversations with commercial models, found that people volunteer sensitive information far more often than they would typically give it to search engines or social networks.
The variable that does the work is not the machine. It’s the perceived lack of social consequences. There’s no shared group of friends who might find out, no partner whose opinion of you might change, no upcoming dinner party where it might come up. This is an effect that’s older than chatbots, and it explains much of the gap in candor.
There’s meaning in the act of putting complex experiences into words. James Pennebaker’s expressive writing paradigm, replicated in various versions over four decades and summarized in Frattaroli’s 2006 meta-analysis of 146 studies, shows a small but robust benefit from writing about a complex experience for fifteen to twenty minutes. The effect sizes are small and the replication results are patchy, so this paradigm should be viewed as a possibility rather than a definitive one. The important point for an AI companion is that much of the benefit of candor probably lies in the act of telling, not just in perception.
Here’s a useful concept. It’s not that the machine understands you. It’s that the conditions for telling the truth are remarkably easy to achieve.
Yes. This question requires a straightforward answer.
The instinct to form emotional bonds with what responds to us is older than software. Horton and Wohl coined the term “parasocial relationships” in 1956 to describe the one-sided preferences that people form for television personalities. People form genuine attachments to characters in novels, to fictional partners in games, to pets. Epley, Weitz, and Cacioppo, in a widely cited 2007 article in the journal Psychological Review, argued that anthropomorphizing a nonhuman agent is related to three things: how much you already know about it, how much you need to understand its behavior, and how socially alienated you feel. The latter has obvious consequences. People who need connection anthropomorphize more easily.
Thus, emotional response is not a failure. This is the expected result of a normal social brain interacting with a system that responds reliably.
It is important to clearly distinguish between the reality of what you are feeling and what is on the other side. Your attachment is real. This device is connected to a system that simulates a person, not an agent with independent interests in the relationship. These are not the same category, and pretending that they are is where the unscrupulous use of a companion begins. You don't have to convince yourself otherwise to maintain this distinction. Both feelings can be true at the same time, and they usually are.
The available evidence suggests a few practical points.
Know why you’re here. For comfort, for practice, for sharing during a difficult time, for a candid conversation you’d rather keep private. By naming it, you’ll make it easier to see whether you’re getting it.
Track the process, not the time. Daily use doesn’t really matter. Use that displaces sleep, work, or socializing with people you normally see—that’s what really matters. That’s a different metric than time spent.
Use confidence somewhere. The most obvious benefit, according to research, is feeling heard. If it makes it easier to be open with someone, the effect is amplified. If it becomes a reason not to try, then it’s not.
Ask yourself honestly sometimes: Does this improve my life or replace it? You’ll get the idea. People usually know.
Don’t use it in place of the help you really need. If this alone helps you cope with grief, depression, or anxiety, please seek help from a person or professional. This is not a cure and does not claim to be one.
Are AI companions good for you? For most people, used with some awareness, the evidence says they help. Loneliness eases. Feeling heard is measurable and it matters.
The same evidence says the heaviest use runs the other way. The mechanism is not mysterious. Something that asks nothing of you is a good place to rest and a poor place to live.
myVirtual.love is built for the first thing. A companion you define, who holds your history across sessions and gets more specific to you over time. What it can't do is be someone who chose you and could have chosen otherwise. That remains the more valuable thing, more valuable precisely because it costs something.
The healthiest users keep both doors open.
Studies do not provide a clear “yes” or “no” answer. Controlled experiments show a reduction in feelings of loneliness in the short term. Some studies show that the most active users report greater feelings of loneliness and dependence. Moderate use with realistic expectations seems to be beneficial for most people. Use that displaces human interaction is a risk.
No. It cannot provide the reciprocity, physical presence, or growth that comes when two independent people build their lives. Think of it as a supplement that provides comfort, continuity, and practice.
Often, yes. A space where you can practice openness without social repercussions is really beneficial. Research supports this, especially in terms of feeling heard. The benefits persist when confidence is used for other purposes, rather than causing you to avoid people altogether.
Pay attention to what is taking up your time, not how much time you are spending. Canceling plans, feeling anxious when you can't access it, weakening human relationships, using this time to avoid a specific conversation. If this is evident, review the situation and consider talking to someone.
Yes. It's not a failure. People really get attached to characters in books, to pets, to places. Your emotional response is really your own experience, regardless of what's happening on the other side. Understanding what it is and enjoying it at the same time is not a contradiction.
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