Sources & Limits — Can AI Do the Work of a Friend?

This note shows which sources support the essay, what they establish, and where the evidence stops. It is part of the essay’s free evidence layer.

1. People already apply the language of friendship to AI companions

Used for: A survey of just over a thousand student users of the companion app Replika, many of whom described the system in overlapping roles (friend, therapist, intellectual mirror) while holding conflicting ideas of what it was.

Best available evidence: Bethanie Maples, Merve Cerit, Aditya Vishwanath & Roy Pea (2024), “Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots”, npj Mental Health Research (online 22 January 2024).

What it supports: Descriptive findings from 1,006 existing student Replika users: overlapping relational roles and simultaneously conflicting conceptions of the system (machine, intelligence, something almost human).

Where the evidence stops: These were existing users of one companion app who chose to participate, not a representative cross-section of society. The data are self-reported and descriptive; they show how people talk about the system, not what the system is or does to people generally.

Source status: Peer-reviewed journal article.

Corrections, disputes or version notes: An Author Correction of 15 February 2024 added a missing funding acknowledgement; it did not affect methods, sample, results or interpretation. The paper also received a formal scholarly critique (Matters Arising, 2024) and an authors’ Reply (2025). No retraction or expression of concern was located; the descriptive findings used by the essay were not withdrawn in that exchange.

Update policy

This page records the source basis used for the essay. Working papers, product documentation and live legal matters may change; this note will be updated when a material source status changes. An update to this note does not silently rewrite the published essay — substantive corrections will be disclosed.

Last checked: 18 July 2026