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Help! My friend is replacing me with AI.

What to do if your friends are confiding in ChatGPT instead of you.

In February, the TikTok creator Brittany Panzer posted a video over five minutes detailing the unraveling of her friendship. There was no disagreement, no blowup, not even ghosting. Panzer felt she’d lost her friend to ChatGPT.

At first, Panzer’s friend used artificial intelligence for relationship advice and casually mentioned that she’d consulted the technology in conversation. But over time, Panzer suspected her friend was questioning her own emotions, and perhaps the counsel of friends too; eventually, she hardly recognized the person on the other end of the phone.

“Rather than talking to friends, she talked to ChatGPT,” Panzer says in the video. “After all, in her mind, it was able to do what no human could: be an objective best friend in her pocket.”

The rise of chatbot “friends”

Increasingly, people are outsourcing the basic functions of friendship to AI, and getting reassurance, advice, and camaraderie from the likes of ChatGPT, Replika, Claude, and Copilot. According to a 2025 scientific paper, people commonly interact with AI to address loneliness, to self-disclose about mental health and personal issues, and to garner emotional support and empathy. It’s easy to see why: The technology is always available and generally says what people want to hear. But once you’ve become accustomed to on-demand validation, the appeal of human conversation — with its mess and imperfection and two-sidedness — can start to wane.

Although they may mimic human responses, AI chatbots are not, in fact, human, and a lot of humans find them off-putting. Who wants to give a friend a pep talk only for them to turn around and ask ChatGPT to hype them up, or weigh in on a friend’s important life decision, just for them to say, “Let me see what Claude thinks”? If you suspect your friends are getting their friendship needs met from chatbots, there are ways to reclaim the........

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