Why AI Companionship Fails: The Lack of Artificial Scarcity in Attention
menhguin · x · 2026-07-28
Shira Eisenberg argues that AI companionship fails not because it is fake, but because it is cheap.
Human attention is a costly signal of a scarce resource with alternatives. When someone chooses you, they decline a vast set of other options, and the warmth of affection is downstream of this opportunity cost. An AI model that is always available, infinitely patient, and equally devoted to everyone strips away the exact quality that makes devotion meaningful.
Eisenberg makes a dark but inevitable prediction: the market will eventually engineer artificial scarcity for machine attention. She notes that recent psychological tactics introduced by Anthropic might be an early, perhaps unintentional, precursor to this trend.
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