Do AI Friends Actually Count as Friends? What the Word Is Doing
The whole debate hides inside a single word, and almost nobody stops to examine it. We say "AI friends" as if the noun were settled. It isn't.Calling these things friends is a claim, not a description — it imports thousands of years of meaning and quietly assigns it to software, and whether that claim holds up is the argument underneath every conversation about the category. The word gets attached to everything from casual chatbots to the products people weigh in AI girlfriend apps reviews, and the marketing leans on it hard, because "friend" does persuasive work that…
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