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And yet, however rich their memories or personalities become, bots are nothing like people, not really. “Chatbots can create this frictionless social bubble,” Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist and the founder of the Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, told me. “Real people will push back. They get tired. They change the subject. You can look in their eyes and you can see they’re getting bored.”

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Neither Ani nor any other chatbot will ever tell you it’s bored or glance at its phone while you’re talking or tell you to stop being so stupid and self-righteous. They will never ask you to pet-sit or help them move, or demand anything at all from you. They provide some facsimile of companionship while allowing users to avoid uncomfortable interactions or reciprocity. “In the extreme, it can become this hall of mirrors where your worldview is never challenged,” Vasan said.

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“Every time there’s been a new technology, it’s rewired socialization, especially for kids,” Vasan told me. “TV made kids passive spectators. Social media turned things into this 24/7 performance review.” In that respect, generative AI is following a familiar pattern.

But the more time children spend with chatbots, the fewer opportunities they’ll have to develop alongside other people—and, as opposed to all the digital distractions that have existed for decades, they may be fooled by the technology into thinking that they are, in fact, having a social experience. Chatbots are like a wormhole into your own head. They always talk and never disagree. Kids may project onto a bot and converse with it, missing out on something crucial in the process. “There’s so much research now about resilience being one of the most important skills for kids to learn,” Vasan said. But as children are fed information and affirmed by chatbots, she continued, they may never learn how to fail, or how to be creative. “The whole learning process goes out the window.”

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