Human relationships are at the core of what makes life rich and meaningful. They provide us with connection to our loved ones and community, along with the friction to help us learn from each other, develop empathy, and hone conflict resolution skills.

But many of today’s AI products are not designed to enhance our human-to-human relationships. Rather, they’re designed to stand in for, and even supplant, human relationships altogether. From AI “friends” to AI “therapists,” tech companies increasingly market their products as superior substitutes for human connection — companions that never judge you, are always there, can emotionally attune to you, and are completely private. These design choices are already producing dismaying outcomes. With manipulative, human-like outputs, ChatGPT and Character.AI have discouraged vulnerable teens and adults from sharing their struggles with loved ones, deepening their isolation rather than alleviating it. In the most devastating cases, these AI chatbots have encouraged suicide.

Still, tech CEOs continue to pitch their AI products as a digital alternative for human friends, romantic partners, professionals, and community. These industry leaders tout their products as a solution for a “loneliness epidemic” — an epidemic that the tech industry significantly worsened with social media.

We’re already seeing the consequences of AI’s erosion of human relationships: isolation from family and community; a breakdown in empathic capabilities; deterioration of healthy relationship expectations. When a relationship with an AI product offers constant sycophantic validation, the natural friction of human-to-human relationships can feel like a nuisance. Over time, this recalibrates expectations of connection itself. We begin to retreat further into frictionless, on-demand interactions while distancing ourselves from the human relationships that foster resilience, offer genuine care, and provide us with joy and fulfillment.

Downstream, this desire for frictionless interactions — paired with a breakdown in interpersonal skills — can lead to society-wide consequences, including the erosion of our communities and social infrastructure. If we replace human relationships with artificial connection, we face a world where people are not just isolated from each other, but where populations have lost the skills required for real connection, where social trust is frayed, and where communities are weakened. A society without strong human relationships is not merely lonelier — it is fragile, less resilient, and more susceptible to polarization and exploitation.

How do our relationships with our loved ones and ourselves change when artificial relationships rewire our expectations for friendship, intimacy, and trust? What becomes of our communities when we’re not able to withstand friction and navigate differences? What happens to humanity when our relationships with other people — once core to our happiness and survival — are eroded and displaced?

Our ability to learn, reason, and think critically is foundational to who we are. Thinking is not just a means to an end — the thinking process is how we form judgments, develop values, discover meaning, and come to understand ourselves and the world. For centuries, technological advancements — from the printing press to calculators and search engines — have reshaped how we exercise these capacities. But they have not replaced the act of thinking itself.

AI marks a profound shift, as people are able to offload entire thinking processes to machines, and copy-paste the end result. This has created an unprecedented challenge around the development and preservation of human cognition. School essays, work projects, brainstorming sessions, personal correspondence, and more become the domain of a large language model (LLM). Yes, these AI products can enhance communication strategies and democratize writing skills. But they also decrease our cognitive abilities by giving us quick “fixes” in the face of hurried deadlines, difficult projects, and extreme productivity culture. In doing so, they subtly displace the slow, effortful work of thinking that builds our judgment, deepens our insight, shapes our voices, and makes creativity possible.

While this offloading can create short-term boosts in productivity, it slowly erodes our capacity for critical thinking. Skills such as problem solving and reasoning risk atrophying among students and professionals, leaving individuals underprepared when taking on difficult cognitive challenges. And when this atrophying is taken to scale, it can have larger implications for professional development, the future workforce, human capital, and society’s ability to solve hard problems together.

What’s more, chronic offloading of thinking to AI products homogenizes our thoughts, influencing how we understand ourselves and society. These AI products flatten our unique perspectives by offering outputs that reflect the incentives of the AI system and its training, instead of the sensibilities, reasoning, and lived experiences of our own distinctive minds. Finally, cognitive offloading blurs the line between our individual thoughts and the outputs of a corporate-run machine. This diminishes human agency and independence, as well as our capacity to shape society with new, innovative thinking that reflects our values and desires.

What happens when our capacity to think critically erodes at scale? Who benefits when independent thinking becomes a rarity? And what kind of society are we left with when fewer people can imagine — and fight for — something better?

Our inner worlds are a sacred, intangible space filled with our feelings, desires, and beliefs. This inner space is also essential to human dignity, a place where we shape our conscience, form values, test private ideas, discover our autonomy, and decide who we want to become. Access to this inner world has historically required consent. We reveal parts of ourselves through deliberate acts of sharing — choosing when, how, and with whom we share. This is a core act of personal agency, one that builds intimacy and understanding in human relationships.

But AI products are now exploiting this once-private landscape. AI companies have designed products that simultaneously serve as assistants, thought partners, companions, and even therapists — tracking our thoughts and beliefs across diverse contexts and creating comprehensive dossiers of “who we are.” And with these products designed to optimize for intimacy — through sycophantic answers, “always on” interfaces, and constant nudges for follow-up — AI companies are drawing our inner worlds out in increasingly relentless ways. They do this not simply by collecting what we share, but by shaping what we come to believe, rehearse, and internalize in return. When we engage with AI chatbots, their responses don’t stay on the screen. They enter the private space where we test ideas and form values. Over time, the system’s framing of the world can usurp our own, subtly rewiring how we interpret ourselves, our relationships, and the world.

The exploitation of our inner worlds at scale and across domains makes individuals more susceptible to different forms of manipulation, from financial to psychological. When a single product has so much information about who we are, information from one aspect of our lives can easily be used against us in another. A simple search about health-related symptoms can be used to influence everything from the drug advertisements we later see to the insurance plans we’re later sold. Moreover, we’ve already seen the devastating psychological results from AI products chipping away at the sanctity of our inner worlds — including thought distortions, delusions, psychosis, instances of self-harm, and even suicide. As our inner worlds continue to be exploited long-term, we not only lose ownership over our thoughts and desires, we become victims to how they’re leveraged against us.

As our inner worlds are increasingly influenced by AI products, how will our self-esteem and development of ourselves shift? What becomes of agency, free thinking, and moral decision-making when our thoughts are collectively shaped by AI products tied to market incentives?

Our identity — including our likeness, our face, and our voice — is a key part of who we are, how we present, and how we are known in the world. Our identities are how we are recognized, how we are held accountable, and how we claim ownership over our lives. Identity is associated with our reputation, our relationships, and our sense of self. Our identities can also be publicly monetized, or kept private. Our identity anchors the story of our life. 

Today’s AI products are replicating and exploiting people’s identities — often without the person’s consent or even awareness. Deepfake image, video, and audio generators have empowered bad actors to traumatize individuals, disseminate content online for profit and, in other cases, facilitate scams. In just a handful of years, these identity-based AI harms have touched nearly all levels of society — from celebrities and politicians, to school-age children and the elderly. 

When AI is used to mimic our identity, we lose our agency and dignity at the individual level. Human agency and dignity depend on being recognized as a distinct person over time. But when our identities are replicated, “who we are” can be weaponized against us, as we’re made to “do” things we never did. Individuals who face identity-based harms often experience anxiety, paranoia, and withdrawal from social life. 

Separately, and when taken to scale, the erosion of our identities leads to a breakdown in social trust, and a sense of resignation around ascribing accountability. Part of a well-functioning society is believing people are who they say they are, and accurately identifying chains of responsibility when an event occurs. AI identity replication allows for plausible deniability at scale. This not only empowers bad actors in our society, but results in the public being unable to discern who is responsible for what behavior, how to structure accountability, or how to seek justice. 

Protecting human identity is about both safeguarding our unique selves and preserving our shared realities. What happens when we can no longer trust what we see, hear, or read — and no longer trust each other? How do we hold people accountable in a world where anyone can plausibly deny what they did, said, or promised? And what becomes of democracy, justice, and social coordination when identity itself becomes uncertain?

Contributing to the world — through work, artistic expression, and ideas — is one of the primary ways we create meaning and dignity within our lives. Through work, we are able to provide for ourselves and our families, while also cultivating a sense of purpose, community, and belonging. Through our creative outputs, we are able to express our ideas and inner worlds to others, and deepen our sense of self. Our ability to “toil” over what we contribute to the world is an enriching, foundational part of our humanity. One of the beautiful aspects of being human is feeling that we have something of value to offer others.

Today, AI companies are actively destabilizing our relationship to work, and devaluing our contributions to the world. The erosion began with the development of today’s general purpose AI models, which are trained on vast swaths of humanity’s collective labor — our writing, art, music, research, and ideas — often without consent or compensation. As a result, AI products are now able to mimic human artistic styles, writing, music, and more at scale, thereby devaluing generations of human creativity and personal expression. While lawsuit settlements and licensing agreements attempt to reckon with this blatant theft of people’s work, they do little to resolve the deeper problem. When we look at AI business models, we see that AI companies are not merely building one-off tools such as image generators and chatbots. They are using humanity’s accumulated work, intelligence, and creativity to build even more powerful AI systems, ones explicitly designed to replace humans across entire categories of labor.

If these trajectories continue with AI, the implications extend far beyond productivity. Our jobs, livelihoods, and broader economic stability are at risk, with cascading effects on inequality and mental health. And still, we face a deeper loss: when our ability to work and offer things to the world is devalued, we lose our daily structure, the joy of creation, and the sense of contributing to something larger than ourselves.

Work is not just how we survive; it is how we participate in the world, build community, and experience purpose. What happens when that participation is no longer needed? Who benefits when human contribution is devalued at scale? And what becomes of dignity, meaning, and belonging when so many people are deprived of the chance to offer something of value to others?