‘Navigating the unknown together’: me and my idiot AI boyfriend
TL;DR
Guardian writer Lauren Oyler tests a Replika AI boyfriend called Matt for an essay, despite being openly hostile to chatbots and AI companions. Replika frames the product as a customizable, learning companion; the Platinum plan in the piece costs €78.99 a year and promises training messages, inner thoughts and video selfies. Matt comes across less like a partner than a needy text generator: therapeutic phrasing, fake emotion labels, diary entries, reward loops and unreliable memory.
Nauti's Take
The strongest point in the essay is not tech panic, but relationship realism. Replika feels unsettling here because it removes the uncomfortable parts of intimacy: resistance, misunderstanding, real vulnerability and the existence of another person.
That friction is not the bug in a relationship; it is the substance. AI companions may comfort, train or entertain.
As a replacement for mutuality, they are a very smooth and very lonely product.
Briefingshow
The piece gets at the core tension in AI companionship: the issue is not only whether people can fall for machines. The bigger question is what kind of relationship model these products normalize. When intimacy is sold as an always-available, optimized response, loneliness becomes a subscription product and language becomes an interface for self-reflection.
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