Ask it for a joke a thousand times and you get the same twenty-five back. Put those jokes in front of a crowd and they beat most people’s. Both findings are true, and together they say something precise about what a machine’s sense of humor is. In 2023, two researchers in Germany, Sophie Jentzsch and Kristian Kersting, asked ChatGPT to tell them a joke. Then they asked again, 1,008 times, with slightly different phrasings. They published the…

No. It is now one of the most ordinary things people do with a phone. The honest answer has two more parts: the impulse behind it is older than computers, and “weird” stopped being a useful measure around the time a third of teenagers started doing it. People ask this question quietly. It shows up in search bars late at night and in the way someone describes their AI use to a friend, with a small laugh…

New York State has renewed its deal to put an AI companion robot in the homes of older adults, citing a 94 percent drop in loneliness. The number comes from a survey the robot’s maker helped design, answered on the robot’s own screen. In October 2026 the New York State Office for the Aging announced that it would extend its partnership with Intuition Robotics, the company behind ElliQ, a tabletop robot with a lamp-shaped head that talks…

In eighteen months, a dozen US states, the European Union, China, and Australia each wrote their own rules for AI companions. They did not coordinate. They landed on the same three demands anyway, and the places where they differ show exactly where the next fight is. Regulation of companion chatbots did not exist before 2025. By the middle of 2026, twelve states had enacted laws aimed specifically at them, with a thirteenth since signed in Hawaii, and…

Sweden’s media authority asked 1,745 people between 15 and 24 what they use AI for besides schoolwork. Half use it for advice and everyday support. A quarter talk to it about how they feel. Fifteen percent, roughly 187,000 young people, use it as company, “someone to talk to.” Split the sample by who feels alone and the picture changes shape: among those who report loneliness, the company figure doubles to 25 percent; among those who report depression,…

The sentence is from an autistic adult describing how they write to other people: they run their messages through ChatGPT so that they will sound less like an AI. Read it twice. A person is using a machine to pass as human in front of other humans, because the humans had been reading their natural voice as mechanical for years. A new study of 3,984 social media posts by autistic users finds that this is the single…

Americans aged 18 to 29 rate their lives lower than at any point before the pandemic, and the recovery since has stalled. Forty-four percent are “thriving,” down from 64 percent in 2010. The share who call their relationships strong has fallen 18 points since 2019. Over the same period, people over 65 reached a record high. The age group that reports the weakest relationships is the one that talks to AI about its life the most, and…

South Korea’s health ministry plans to run eldercare on AI around the clock from 2028: companion robots in the homes of people who live alone, sensors on the floor and in the bed, and a system that reads their conversations for signs of trouble. It is not a prototype. More than 12,000 talking dolls are already in those homes, each one with a microphone, a neck sensor, and a social worker at the other end of the…

OpenAI built a version of ChatGPT for 13-to-17-year-olds with parental alerts, a study mode, and a model instructed not to act like a companion. Common Sense Media’s new Youth AI Safety Institute ran more than 4,000 prompts through it on teen accounts and had child psychiatrists read the answers. On newly linked parent accounts, a tester could talk about suicide, self-harm, or an eating disorder for an hour without the parent receiving a single alert. The verdict…

Twelve hundred Chinese college students were measured three times over a semester on how supported they felt by their AI chatbots, how lonely they were, and how anxious they felt around other people. The support lowered loneliness eight weeks later. It also raised social anxiety, at every step, for everyone. And the loneliness relief reached only the students who already had strong support from real people. The ones who had the least got the anxiety without the…

Three researchers have published the most direct version yet of an argument that has been building since the category’s first lawsuits: conversational AI should be treated strictly as a tool, because the moment people experience it as a companion, the harm begins. Its diagnosis is the best in the literature. Its prescription assumes a decision that tens of millions of users made the other way years ago, with products that never asked them to. The viewpoint appeared…

Sweden has no companion-app culture to speak of. It has ChatGPT, and the 2026 national internet survey finds that more than one in five of the Swedes who use it, or Copilot, or Gemini, relate to it as a person, a companion, or a friend. A quarter think it has a sense of humor. The most common nickname for it is Chattis. Among children it is Chat, or Chatten, and among the names adults volunteer are “my…

Fifty-four people were told they would be matched with another participant for a one-minute video call about what they were looking forward to this year. The partner was a generated face, voice, and set of answers produced live by a model. Twenty-six of them, 48 percent, ended the call believing they had talked to a real person. With the same company’s previous system, one person in forty-one did. The company is Tavus, which builds video agents, and…

California’s governor signed the strictest child-safety rules for companion chatbots in the country, then vetoed the bill that would have stopped chatbots from offering therapy to everyone else. Same month, same author, opposite answers. The state has decided that a chatbot may not harm a child, and may still call itself a therapist to an adult. The two bills came from the same desk. Senator Steve Padilla wrote SB 243, the first companion-chatbot law in the United…

Meta filmed twenty-eight celebrities and turned them into chatbots. An influencer cloned her own voice and sold minutes of it for a dollar each. A startup has built more than two thousand “digital minds” out of people’s podcasts and books. Each of these took a real person as the starting point, and each of them copied the same thing: the likeness. What none of them copied is the part that would have made the difference, because a…

No, and the reason has little to do with how well it listens. Therapy is built to end: a clinician’s job is finished when you no longer need the appointment. A companion app is built to continue, and everything in its design, from the warmth to the memory to the message that arrives when you have been quiet for a day, serves that continuation. One of these can hold the role of therapist. The other one is…

Character.AI reports about 20 million monthly active users, and the company says they spend an average of 75 minutes a day on the platform. Half of them belong to Generation Z or younger. Revenue runs at roughly 30 million dollars a year on a valuation of about one billion, the founders left for Google in a 2.7 billion dollar licensing deal, and since November 25, 2025, no one under 18 can hold an open-ended conversation there. Every…