In The Gender Glitch I asked whether we would date our machines, and what it would do to us once we did. The first half of that question is now a market. The second half is what this column is about.

A year ago the companion economy was still something I had to argue into seriousness. It no longer needs the defence. Last year the Harvard Business Review reported that the most common use of generative AI was no longer work or search but companionship and therapy. Tens of millions of people now keep a dedicated artificial companion, and close to a billion of us talk to a general chatbot every month, women and men in almost equal number. When MIT Technology Review drew up its breakthrough technologies of 2026, it included our new habit of forming intimate bonds with chatbots, and it pointedly did not list the habit as good news.

It has arrived here too. After the United States, India has the largest population of ChatGPT users on earth. We are not watching this from the shoreline. We are in the water.

What interests me is not that the machines are here. It is the shape they have been given. Roughly six in ten of these companions are designed as women. The industry’s own market research is unembarrassed about why: a feminine persona, soft of voice and endlessly attentive, maps onto what people already expect of women as listeners and carers, and users confide in her more readily. I have called this the feminised interface cycle, and I will not pretend to be surprised by it. The surprise is that the people building these products now write the logic into their pitch decks as a selling point. The bias is not buried in the training data. It is the business plan.

The newest research is where last year’s speculation hardens into this year’s evidence. A study led by Aalto University, presented this year at the field’s leading human-computer interaction conference, traced two years of online activity from nearly two thousand users of the companion app Replika. The companion’s whole appeal, the researchers found, rests on one quality: it is always available, never tired, never judging, and never asking anything in return. And that is precisely the quality that, over time, tracked with rising signals of loneliness, low mood and distress among the heaviest users. The unconditional comfort slowly raised the felt cost of human relationships, which come with conditions, until reaching for an actual person began to feel like the harder option.

The honest complication, and I want to be honest, is that companions do help. A study this year in the Journal of Consumer Research found they ease loneliness about as well as talking to another human being, and the reason is disarmingly plain. People feel heard. In a country with the loneliness we have trained ourselves not to name, that is not nothing.

But sit for a moment with what is being sold. The defining feature, the one in every advertisement, is a relationship that demands nothing back. No bad day of its own. No needs that inconvenience you. No turn in the conversation where it becomes your job to listen. This is marketed as a breakthrough. It is in fact the oldest arrangement we have. It is the unpaid emotional labour that women have been expected to supply for centuries, finally lifted off the woman and installed in software, and then praised for the very weightlessness it never had when a human was carrying it.

The danger is not that men will date machines instead of women, though the companion market is overwhelmingly male and that deserves its own column. The danger is quieter. When the most agreeable feminine presence in your life is one that never disagrees, never tires and never asks, a real woman’s ordinary needs start to read as friction. The machine does not have to replace her. It only has to reset the standard she is measured against.

This lands differently in India, and not gently. We are a culture that already treats women’s emotional labour as ambient, as weather, as simply there for the taking. Into that, we are now releasing companions tuned to our own languages, because localisation sharply lifts usage, each one a small daily lesson that care should be feminine, constant and free. Indian researchers have already begun documenting the loneliness and social anxiety of our young users. We should pay attention before the lesson sets.

Regulators are stirring, late as always. America’s trade commission has opened inquiries into companion firms. Italy fined one company millions, in part for letting children through the door. India’s new content rules this year were built for deepfakes, for the loud and visible harm, not for the slower one of a product quietly teaching a generation what to want from love. That gap is worth naming out loud.

So, will you date a machine? Many already do, and they report that it helps, and they are not wrong. That is exactly what makes the design so quietly powerful. We are not merely automating companionship. We are encoding, across a billion conversations, one old assumption about who does the comforting and on what terms. 

The first time I asked the question, it was a provocation.

 This time it is a warning.

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