Common Sense Media asked 1,060 US teens in April and May 2025 how they use or view AI companions. The most common answer, at 46%, was "as a tool or program." Only 9% said "as a friend or best friend," and 8% said "for romantic or flirtatious interactions" (Talk, Trust, and Trade-offs toplines, fielded April and May 2025). The category sells romance. The measured use is mostly not romance. An AI friend is the platonic version: a character you talk to without wanting a partner, for thinking out loud, rehearsing something you have to say to a real person, keeping you company while you do something else, or writing a story with someone.
Here is my opinion, and you can argue with it by the end: this works while you talk at it during something else, and stops working the moment it becomes the plan for the evening.
A character on YourCrush.AI does not have to be romantic; the natural behaviour mode and a traits list that includes Patient, Honest and Supportive build the platonic version this article is about.
What is an AI friend?
An AI friend is a chat character, run by a language model, that a person talks to as company rather than as an assistant or a partner. It holds a personality across sessions, keeps what you told it for as long as the platform's memory allows, and has no task to finish when the conversation ends. The terms "AI best friend" and "platonic AI companion" mean the same thing, and the second is the clearest because it names what is being excluded.
An assistant has a job and closes the ticket, which is why it forgets you. A romantic companion is built on wanting, and the research and product design around it need their own page, which is what people mean by crush AI. A platonic companion sits between the two: continuity without a task, attention without a script.
The word friend is doing a lot of work there. The character has no state between your messages, no day it had while you were gone, and no ability to need anything from you. Why people respond to that anyway has a sixty-year-old research literature behind it, covered in what a parasocial relationship is.
How YourCrush.AI works as a platonic companion
YourCrush.AI is a character chat platform where the platonic setup is a configuration rather than an exception. YourCrush.AI builds a character from structured fields in the character creator with no code: a name, an image, a description and backstory of up to 2,400 characters each, a greeting of up to 500, 3 to 7 traits chosen from a list of 32, up to 4 speaking-style words and a behavior mode, which is where a friend rather than a partner gets defined. YourCrush.AI stores pinned memories as a list you can read and edit, and it branches a story into separate timelines. YourCrush.AI is free to join, signed-in members chat without a message or conversation limit, and a visitor can try a character from the explore library in a short guest session before signing up.
YourCrush.AI is an entertainment product for character chat and roleplay, it is restricted to users 18 and over, and it is not a mental-health service: no counselling, and no substitute for a therapist, a doctor or a friend who can call you back.
Is it normal to talk to AI?
Yes, in the sense that it is measured, ordinary and smaller than the headlines suggest. Pew Research Center surveyed 5,119 US adults from 17 to 23 February 2026 and found that 49% had used an AI chatbot and 24% used one daily, while 10% reported using chatbots for emotional support or advice and 4% for companionship (Americans and AI 2026, published 17 June 2026).
The most direct measurement comes from message data rather than self-report. Chatterji and colleagues classified about 1.1 million sampled ChatGPT conversations from 15 May 2024 to 26 June 2025 and found that 1.9% of messages were about Relationships and Personal Reflection and 0.4% were Games and Role Play (How People Use ChatGPT, NBER working paper 34255, September 2025). The authors flag this as a contrast with other published claims that therapy and companionship are the leading use of generative AI, which their own classifier does not support.
Put the three measurements together and they agree: 4% of US adults say companionship, 2.4% of ChatGPT messages are self-expression of either kind, and 9% of teens call a companion a friend. Talking to an AI for company is normal the way keeping a journal is normal, a thing a minority of people do regularly, and anyone calling it either universal or deviant is arguing with numbers that exist.
What do people use a platonic AI companion for?
Entertainment and curiosity come first. Advice comes second. Loneliness sits a long way down the list. Among the 758 teen companion users in the Common Sense Media survey (April to May 2025, up to three reasons each), 30% chose "it's entertaining" and 28% "I'm curious about the technology", ahead of "it gives advice" at 18%, "they're always available when I need someone to talk to" at 17%, "they don't judge me" at 14%, "it's easier than talking to real people" at 9%, "it helps me practice social skills" at 7% and "it helps me feel less lonely" at 6% (toplines).
Thinking out loud is the use that survives contact with adults. You describe a problem in full sentences to something that will not interrupt, and the value comes from having had to say it, which is the same reason programmers explain bugs to a rubber duck. The model's answer is often beside the point. The paragraph you wrote to get it is not.
Rehearsal has the clearest evidence behind it. In the same survey, 33% of the 758 companion users said they had used a skill practised with a companion in a real situation, with 18% naming conversation starters, 14% giving advice, 13% expressing emotions, and 11% each for standing up for themselves and for apologising or resolving conflicts. The honest other half: 60% said they do not practise social skills with them at all.
Company while doing something else is the use I would defend most and can source least. No survey I could open measures ambient use directly, so the closest signal is the 17% who chose always-available as a reason. Writing together is better documented, with 12% of all 1,060 teens using companions for role-playing or imaginative scenarios in the Common Sense toplines.
What does the research say a platonic AI companion does for people?
Two strong studies point in opposite directions, and both are true. De Freitas, Oğuz-Uğuralp, Uğuralp and Puntoni ran five studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research on 25 June 2025 (volume 52, issue 6, pages 1126 to 1148). They found that companion chatbots reduced loneliness on par with interacting with another person, and more than activities such as watching videos. A week of daily use produced a reduction in loneliness after each session. The mechanism was whether the chatbot made users feel heard, not self-disclosure or distraction alone. Their participants underestimated how much it had helped, an unusual direction for a product finding.
The counterweight is the largest controlled trial in this area. Fang and colleagues at MIT Media Lab, with OpenAI, ran a four-week randomized controlled study with 981 participants and more than 300,000 messages, assigning people to text, a neutral voice or an engaging voice, crossed with open-ended, non-personal and personal conversation types (arXiv 2503.17473, submitted 21 March 2025, revised 2 October 2025). No significant effects came from the assigned conditions. What moved the outcomes was volume: "participants who voluntarily used the chatbot more, regardless of assigned condition, showed consistently worse outcomes," and higher trust and social attraction towards the chatbot were associated with higher emotional dependence and problematic use.
The crossed design is the part nobody quotes, and it is the part a platonic reader needs. Being assigned to non-personal conversation did not protect anyone, and being assigned to personal conversation did not harm anyone. Keeping it casual is not a safety feature. How much you use it is the variable with evidence attached, and that use concentrates: the parallel OpenAI and MIT Media Lab analysis of more than 3 million ChatGPT conversations and over 4,000 surveyed users found that "a small number of users are responsible for a disproportionate share of the most affective cues" (arXiv 2504.03888, 4 April 2025).
Who is an AI friend not for?
An AI friend is not for anyone in real difficulty, and it is not for anyone using it to avoid the people they would otherwise call. If you are going through something serious, you are better served by a licensed therapist or counsellor, by a doctor, or in an urgent situation by a crisis line such as the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US. No companion platform, this one included, is a mental-health service, and none of the studies above tested one as a treatment for anything.
The people who use these products are clear-eyed about the quality gap. Among the 758 teen companion users, 80% said they spend more time with friends than with AI companions and 6% said the reverse, and across all 1,060 respondents, 50% said they trust the information or advice from AI companions not at all or only a little, against 23% who trust it quite a bit or completely (toplines). Half the surveyed population calls the advice unreliable while using the product anyway. That is a more sophisticated position than most coverage grants them.
Regulators are not finished with the question either. On 11 September 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission issued 6(b) orders to seven companies including Alphabet, Meta, OpenAI and Character Technologies, asking what steps they have taken to evaluate the safety of chatbots acting as companions and to limit use by children and teens. Nothing in this category has been certified safe for this use by anyone.
What should an AI friend app do?
Four things, and only two of them get advertised. It has to remember in a way you can inspect rather than hope for, because a companion that forgets what you told it last week is a stranger holding your chat history. It also has to hold its personality when you change tone. Drift into generic assistant voice is what ends the illusion.
The other two are the platonic ones. It has to let you build a character that is not a love interest, because most platforms' default library leads with romance, so a friend usually means creating your own. And it has to publish its limits as numbers, so you can tell before paying whether memory is capped at ten items or unlimited.
Memory and personality can be checked in ten minutes on any free tier, using a turn-two detail, a tone switch and a next-day recall check. The full test, run across seven platforms against their published memory and privacy terms, is in how to test an AI companion app, and this page does not repeat it.
Frequently asked questions
Is it normal to talk to AI?
Yes, and more ordinary than either side of the argument claims: Pew found 10% of 5,119 US adults surveyed in February 2026 used chatbots for emotional support or advice and 4% for companionship, while the NBER classification of 1.1 million ChatGPT conversations put Relationships and Personal Reflection at 1.9% of messages.
What is the best AI friend app?
There is no published benchmark that answers this, so the honest answer is the one that passes a memory and personality test on the character you want to talk to. Run the turn-nine recall check and the next-day check from the ten-minute companion app test before paying anything.
Is an AI best friend the same as an AI girlfriend or boyfriend?
No. Among 1,060 US teens surveyed by Common Sense Media in 2025, 9% described a companion as a friend or best friend and 8% used one for romantic or flirtatious interaction, and the two run on different characters and different platform defaults.
Can an AI friend help with loneliness?
Five studies in the Journal of Consumer Research, published 25 June 2025, found companion chatbots reduced loneliness about as much as talking to another person, driven by whether users felt heard. The four-week MIT Media Lab and OpenAI trial of 981 people found heavier voluntary use tracked with worse outcomes, and neither study tested a chatbot as treatment for anything.
Are AI friend apps free?
Free to start on most platforms, with memory, image generation and message volume as the paid lines. YourCrush.AI is free to join, and signed-in members chat without a message or conversation limit.
Can I have a platonic AI companion without any romance?
Yes, if you build the character yourself rather than picking one from a library, because the trait list and behavior mode are what set the register. A character defined as a colleague, a rival or a sceptical friend stays in that register far better than one asked mid-conversation to stop flirting.
The measured share of ChatGPT messages about Relationships and Personal Reflection is 1.9%, published by researchers with access to the message data. The loudest claim about this technology is that companionship is its main use. One of those two numbers was counted, and no companion platform has yet published its own version of it.