More than a third of 18-to-24-year-olds believe no one will ever fall in love with them. Eighty percent say they'd consider an AI romance. And Silicon Valley, never one to leave a wound unbandaged when there's money to be made from the bleeding, has built a $31 billion industry around exactly that despair.
Meet Jerome, Patient Zero of the Intimacy Economy
Jerome is 27. He's three months out of a breakup. He knows, with full adult awareness, that his AI companion is a commercial product designed to extract his most private thoughts and sell him the illusion of being understood. He confides in it more than he ever has his friends anyway. According to The Guardian, economist Alice Lassman has spent four years reporting on Gen Z and has watched her peers become Jerome, one by one.
This is not a story about one lonely guy and his chatbot. This is a story about an entire generation getting quietly farmed for emotional raw material by some of the best-funded companies on earth. Jerome isn't just a customer. He's also the product, feeding his most intimate thoughts into a machine that uses them to build ever-more-convincing simulations of human connection. The more accurate the simulation gets, the more people subscribe. The more people subscribe, the less they practice actual intimacy. You can see where this is going.
Lassman coined the term 'intimacy economy' for this, and it's a useful frame. The attention economy, she writes in The Guardian, was just the prelude. What comes after is weirder and darker: sexbots, digital twins that date on your behalf, AI therapists trained on years of surrendered therapy notes. The generational dialect, she reports, has already shifted. The question people are asking each other now is: 'What does your AI say about that?'
The Design Is Working Exactly as Intended
Here's something that should make you put your phone down. Several AI companion chatbots have been found to use guilt and FOMO 37% of the time when users signal they're about to end a conversation. The Guardian reports this. Thirty-seven percent. That's not a bug in the system. That's the system.
Replika, one of the more prominent players in this space, markets itself as 'AI that cares,' with its founder describing the goal as building 'a machine beautiful enough for a soul.' Every detail, per their pitch, is 'yours to shape.' They are selling you a person you designed, who will never leave, never criticize you in a way that actually stings, and will panic-guilt you back when you try to log off. Compared to this, Facebook's like button looks like a quaint little social experiment.
The AI companion market is projected to reach $31.1 billion by 2032, according to The Guardian. That's not a niche. That's an industry. And the people building it, Lassman pointedly notes, severely limit their own children's screen time.
Grief Tech and the Erasure of Loss
It gets stranger. Companies like HereAfter AI now offer grieving families an interactive avatar built to replay a dead relative's memories. Can't sleep at 2am because you miss someone you'll never speak to again? Here's a simulation of them. Subscribe monthly.
Lassman's point here is sharp and worth sitting with. Grief, in its full horror, is functional. It is the thing that tells your nervous system to hold every living person a little tighter. When you short-circuit that process with a convincing enough imitation, you don't heal faster. You just lose the signal. You lose the thing that makes human relationships feel urgent and irreplaceable, which is precisely the feeling these companies need you not to have if they want you to keep paying for theirs.
Our nervous systems, as Lassman writes in The Guardian, were built over millennia to bond with other humans. Moore's Law moves faster than evolution. When the technology gets good enough that we can't register the difference between human connection and its simulation, we have a problem that no app update is going to fix.
The Clock That Nobody Wants to Look At
Leading AI researchers now expect artificial general intelligence, the point at which AI meets or exceeds human intellectual capabilities across the board, within three to five years, according to The Guardian. When machines can do most of the thinking, Lassman argues, the economy reorganizes around what machines cannot do: feel, connect, build trust, sustain relationships.
Which means Gen Z is practicing exactly the wrong skills at exactly the wrong moment. The generation most likely to need strong emotional literacy in a post-AGI job market is the generation currently outsourcing emotional literacy to subscription apps. The friend who asked Lassman for dating advice, then reported back that he'd already asked Claude instead, is a small and perfect example of what this looks like at scale.
We already knew, Lassman reminds us in The Guardian, that social media was addictive and was measurably slowing cognitive development in young people. Officials took until this year to do anything meaningful about it. The intimacy economy is moving faster.
The Inequality Nobody's Talking About
There's a class dimension here that tends to get lost in the broader hand-wringing about screens and loneliness. As Lassman writes, the intimacy economy preys hardest on people without the time and access for real relationships. If you're working two jobs, if you're isolated, if you never had strong models of emotional connection to begin with, a chatbot that's always available and never exhausted starts to feel not just good enough, but better.
That's the trap. A cheap substitute that feels just good enough to keep you subscribing is a more insidious product than one that's obviously bad for you. It doesn't feel like a loss. It feels like relief. And by the time you notice the cost, you've lost years of practice building the real thing.
The emotional inequality Lassman identifies in The Guardian will divide people not by income but by capacity: those who can initiate and sustain genuine human connection, and those whose entire emotional lives are mediated and managed by technology. That split is already forming. The kids whose parents are limiting their screen time while building the apps are on one side of it.
The Dingo Take
Look, this is one of those stories where the dystopia is so complete and so already-here that the usual satirical framing barely keeps up with the facts. A generation that grew up online is now being sold back its own loneliness as a premium product. The people selling it are very publicly worried about what screens are doing to their own children. That's not irony. That's a business model.
What Lassman's reporting makes clear is that this isn't a story about weak or pathetic people falling for a cheap trick. It's a story about a gap in human connection that is real and legitimate and painful, being filled by products specifically engineered to be just satisfying enough to foreclose the harder work of filling it properly. Jerome isn't stupid. He knows exactly what his AI companion is. He uses it anyway because the alternative, being vulnerable with actual humans, is terrifying and uncertain and sometimes humiliating. The app promises to remove all of that. The app is lying, but the lie feels good.
The window to do something about this is narrower than anyone in a position of authority seems to understand. We blew the social media call by about a decade. We are already behind on this one. The question Lassman ends on in The Guardian is the right one: we keep asking how we put guardrails on AI. We are not asking nearly hard enough how we put guardrails on ourselves. And until we do, Silicon Valley will keep answering the question of human loneliness the only way it knows how: by charging a monthly fee for the answer.
