On a long-form podcast with comedian Theo Von, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaked that his company is working on artificial intelligence (AI) companions. The average American has fewer than three friends, he explains, while the social need is closer to 15. With his finger on the pulse of modern loneliness and productivity culture, he concludes, “The average person wants more connectivity [and] connection than they have,” and “they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.” The loneliness epidemic, coupled with AI personalization, presents a market opportunity for curated, on-demand techno-relations.
The church—and our culture more broadly—seems unprepared for what’s coming.
The plausibility structures for AI relationships have been long developing. Ubiquitous pornography has made virtual sex plausible. Dating apps have made disembodied romance plausible. Social media in general has re-envisioned “relationships” as a consumer product to accumulate and accommodate one’s convenience.
Digital life has shaped our thinking about relationships such that Zuckerberg’s “AI friends” proposal is a logical next step. But now we’re here, how should the church respond?
A Time They’ll Never Know
Children are coming of age in a world where the mainstreaming of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini has introduced a new avenue for online “relationships.” There’s a growing industry for “AI girlfriends,” targeted at lonely young men longing for intimate relationships, along with “virtual therapists”—both areas of interest Zuckerberg specifically names. It’s certainly no coincidence that now, amid a mental health epidemic, we see these programs marketed toward young men and women.
Freya India, one of Gen Z’s most insightful writers, wrote this in an article titled “A Time We Never Knew”:
I am grieving something I never knew. . . . Most of us in Gen Z were given phones and tablets so early that we barely remember life before them. Most of us never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never knew having a first kiss without having watched PornHub first. We never knew flirting and romance before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it became keeping up a Snapstreak or using each other like props to look popular on Instagram.
But the next generation, Gen Alpha, was born into a world even more entrenched in digitization: “I can only imagine the loss they will feel,” India laments. “They are on track to never know friendship without AI chatbots, or learning without VR classrooms, or life without looking through a Vision Pro.”
Digital life has shaped our thinking about relationships such that Zuckerberg’s ‘AI friends’ proposal is a logical next step.
While today there’s still a stigma around embracing AI companions, Zuckerberg argues that over time, we’ll start to see these as valuable accommodations in a lonely world. Most people aren’t there quite yet. But 10 years from now? Maybe.
How did we get here? One way is that our sense of relationships started changing decades ago with the arrival of social media. Jonathan Haidt insightfully noted the irony of Zuckerberg’s comments: “Introduce a product that will probably harm children with the sales pitch that it reduces the harm to children that your last product caused.” He’s referring to social media, of course, which has contributed to the loneliness crisis as much as anything else. Now, the proposed solution is none other than more technology. Predictable, but no less depressing.
But there’s a more ancient and fulfilling option: real friendship.
Christian Doctrine of Friendship
Scripture and Christian tradition have more to say about friendship than we might expect. The key passage for the doctrine of friendship is John 15:13–15:
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.
The basis of friendship is restored fellowship with God through Jesus Christ. This relationship overflows into friendship with our Christian brothers and sisters and with all our neighbors. In Augustine’s Confessions, he says, “You only love your friend truly, after all, when you love God in your friend, either because he is in him, or in order that he may be in him.”
Non-Christians can still have meaningful friendships, but friendship is primarily a spiritual exercise, not a natural inclination. In the Christian tradition, friendship isn’t hanging out with people who have common interests; it’s when we desire someone’s good for his or her own sake. It’s not a means to an end. It’s a bond between souls.
Thomas Aquinas explained that if we wish the good of something not for its own sake but for ourselves, then it’s not love but concupiscence, or disordered desires. We desire an AI companion not for its good but for ours. At best, it can be an instrument, but it can never be a friend.
Digital Friends Servants
As with digital technology in general, AI exists to enhance our lives through ease and efficiency. It’s a servant. In a panel for the Veritas Forum with Haidt and Andy Crouch, an audience member asks about AI as a “built-in friend.” Crouch replies,
The number one present danger [with AI] is the simulation of personhood. . . . To take a lonely world and tell them, “You’ll always have a friend, and it’s tantamount to a person,” is to commit an act of really profound deception. . . . It’s going to do huge amounts of damage, honestly, to people who need love from other people who need to learn to love.
Then Haidt asks the audience, “How many servants do you want each child to have?” He throws out options: A butler? Housekeeper? Chef? Chauffeur? After the audience indicates they don’t want their children to have any servants, he makes his point: “They’re now going to have unlimited numbers of servants. . . . You can make as many as you want to do whatever you want.”
Haidt and Crouch are right. AI chatbots aren’t offering anyone true companionship. Silicon Valley is selling digital servants for the small price of social and moral malformation and an on-ramp to life without friendship, devoid of personhood.
Make Friends. Throw Parties.
In this kind of world, Christians have a moral obligation to create and sustain personal communities in our neighborhoods and churches. It was necessary for young Christians in the past to push back against the “party scene.” But as social gatherings of every kind continue to decrease in popularity, the future church may need to create a new kind of party scene, where people still gather, dine, laugh, play, sing, and spend time together (outside the Sunday gathering).
The future church may need to create a new kind of party-scene, where people still gather, dine, laugh, play, sing, and spend time together.
The family of God is a community unlike any other. Before we’ve ever even met, we’re united together in Christ and destined for eternal fellowship. Differences in denominations, politics, hobbies, and communication styles all become secondary; passive aggressive remarks, shocking betrayals, and broken promises all become forgivable; the most annoying, boring, and untalented become those who you’re committed to encourage and love. In the church, compatibility is not a prerequisite to friendship. It’s the product of it.
Human relationships are inconvenient. They often bring pain and grief. People change. Dynamics shift. That’s part of the joy and terror of faithfulness. Old friends can bring shame and regret due to the communal memory of our past selves. They can keep a record of wrongs and weaponize our flaws. But they also can speak peace and forgiveness, bestow honor and dignity, and hug the pain out of our very bones. Friends treat you neither as an animal nor as a god but as a man. They humanize you.
We may be entering a phase in church history where the most attractive thing about Christianity is an up-and-running anthropology that values bodies, physical activities, in-person communities of occasionally awkward fellowship, and deep, messy relationships.
While we should be unsettled by AI girlfriends or friendships, we shouldn’t disdain those tempted to use them. After all, we’ve participated in this cultural zeitgeist where young men are ostracized, stripped of agency, left to conclude that pornography or faux girlfriends are the only consolation; meanwhile, many young women’s feelings have been so invalidated that they believe a personal therapist—virtual or not—is the only place they’ll be heard. Let’s own up to this, become friends with these people, invite them to church, and throw some parties while we’re at it.
The solution to our loneliness isn’t in personalization but in persons—made in God’s image, endlessly interesting and frustrating, and worthy of our attention, even our devotion.
Lifelong Companions and Moral Formation
I’ve been loved into the person I am by my friends. “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33), but good company builds good morals. Friendship is formative. We were made to be shaped through the embracing of another.
In the church, compatibility is not a prerequisite to friendship. It’s the product of it.
Yes, your friends might convince you to jump off a cliff. But they also might persuade you to climb Mount Everest—to get out of bed in the morning, to listen more than you speak, to have compassion on the weak and vulnerable, to see the good in others and love them relentlessly, to have courage in treacherous times, to have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and “seek his face always” (Ps. 105:4, NIV). God can and does use your friends as a means of grace in your life.
Christians should focus on making and keeping friends with a resolute commitment to our family, church, and neighbors. Human friendship will invariably cause more friction than the effortless companionship of an AI friend. But the upside is communal formation in Christlike virtue. That’s a decent trade-off.
If you refuse to give up on people—and you’re blessed enough to find people who won’t give up on you—you might find that all the sad things come untrue in real time. We learn to live well from other people, from sitting and listening and laughing and repenting and bleeding our hearts out. That’s what friends do. They teach you how to be human. That’s something you can never learn from AI.