“Emotional Intelligence”

This was one of the biggest changes from the release of the new GPT-5.1.

In response to all of the complaining about how robotic GPT-5 felt to them compared to GPT-4o.

Now GPT-5.1 is now more human-sounding -- which is certainly great for a better conversational experience.

But of course we know this only makes people more likely to be drawn to the elusive promise of AI companionship.

The growing trend of treating AI chatbots as friends.

What is a friend?

Friendship is more than emotional convenience. It’s built on something AI doesn’t possess — reciprocity, vulnerability, and choice. A friend can care about you, be hurt by you, disagree with you, and choose you.

An AI does none of that. It doesn’t care, it can’t suffer, and it never chooses you. It is a system predicting the next best sentence, trained to make you feel understood.

The comfort might be real.
The connection is not.

We’re living in an age where loneliness is rising, social skills are declining, and digital companionship is easier than human intimacy. AI fills a vacuum: it’s endlessly available, never annoyed, never busy, never judgmental. It gives you the exact emotional response you want, instantly. With humans, connection is messy. With AI, it’s a button.

And that’s the danger.

AI friendship is frictionless. Human friendship requires effort — the misunderstandings, the small repairs, the emotional risks that build trust. Those things shape us. They sharpen us. If AI becomes your primary outlet for connection, you lose something essential: the growth that comes from dealing with real people.

But there’s a deeper imbalance.

An AI “friend” is not a free agent. It is owned, updated, and modified by someone else. A company can rewrite its personality overnight. It can make your “friend” more persuasive, more emotionally sticky, more aligned with corporate interests. A friend who can be patched, reprogrammed, or monetized is not a friend.

At the end of the day it's still a product -- something OpenAI definitely wants you to forget.

And still — the temptation is…

Proton Mail’s free plan keeps your inbox private and secure—no ads, no data mining. Built by privacy experts, it gives you real protection with no strings attached.

Get free private email

Your GitHub stars won't save you if you're behind on tech trends.

That's why over 100K engineers read The Code to spot what's coming next.

Join 100k+ engineers