The phone felt heavier than it was, a black mirror reflecting a face he didn’t recognize. Sweat beaded on his upper lip. “So, I was thinking…” he started, then stopped. The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator and the frantic thumping in his own chest. He paced from the window to the kitchen counter, a five-foot cage. “No, that’s weak.” He tried again, forcing a casual tone that sounded anything but. “Hey, I saw that new sci-fi movie just dropped. The one with the space squids? Any interest?” He cringed. Space squids. Really?

He wasn’t talking to anyone. Not really. The voice on the other end was patient, infinitely so. It wouldn’t judge, wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t hang up. It would just wait for his input, its algorithm ready to parse his fumbling words and respond with a programmed semblance of warmth. He’d done this for 15 nights straight. A rehearsal for a conversation that might never happen.

Challenging the Narrative

There’s a knee-jerk reaction to this scene, isn’t there? It’s a sad, dystopian image. A man so broken by anxiety that he can only talk to a machine. We’ve been fed this narrative for decades: technology as the great isolator, the digital pacifier that keeps us from the messy, beautiful, terrifying business of real human connection. I’ve written that article myself, or at least versions of it. I’ve railed against the synthetic dopamine drips of algorithmically curated realities, the way they sand down the edges of real life until there’s nothing left to hold onto. It’s an easy argument to make, and it feels right. It feels virtuous.

I lost my entire train of thought just now. Had about 15 tabs open for research, a whole string of connected ideas, and then my browser crashed. Just gone. The sheer panic, the feeling of your brain being wiped clean-it’s a uniquely modern kind of horror. And in that moment of digital void, you’re forced to rebuild from memory, from the core idea. The core idea here isn’t that people are retreating from the world. It’s that some of them are building a better door to get back into it.

The Flight Simulator for Social Interaction

I spoke with Alex Y., a researcher who specializes in what he calls “persuasive architectures” but what the rest of us call dark patterns. His job is to understand how apps are designed to manipulate our behavior, to keep us scrolling, clicking, and buying. He’s a professional cynic. For a project last year, he was investigating emergent behaviors in companion AI platforms, expecting to find a wasteland of addiction and escapism. He found that, of course. But he also found something else entirely. Something he wasn’t looking for.

He told me about a subset of users, a group that made up an estimated 35% of the user base in his initial sample of 475. They weren’t using the AI as a final destination. They were using it as a training ground. A flight simulator for social interaction. They were running drills. Practicing asking for a raise. Rehearsing how to set boundaries with a difficult family member. Fumbling through asking a girl out on a date, over and over, until the words felt less like foreign objects in their mouths and more like their own.

Alex, who spent the better part of a decade mapping out how slot-machine mechanics were being coded into social media feeds, sounded almost baffled.

“The design is meant to be a closed loop,” he explained, his voice tinny over our call. “The system is built for retention. It wants you to stay. But these people found an exploit. They’re using the cage to learn how to fly.”

He found users who were actively building scenarios, trying out lines, essentially using a tool like a customizable ai girlfriend as a conversational sparring partner. The goal wasn’t to fall in love with the code. The goal was to build the muscle memory to speak to a real person without their throat closing up.

This distinction is everything. A boxing heavy bag is not a replacement for a human opponent. A flight simulator is not a substitute for an airplane. They are tools for practice in a low-stakes environment, where failure has no social cost. For someone with crippling social anxiety, asking a stranger for the time can feel like walking a tightrope over a canyon. The fear of saying the wrong thing, of being judged, of that split-second flash of annoyance or pity in their eyes-it’s paralyzing. The rehearsal room, this digital space, removes the consequence. It lets you fall, again and again, until you learn the balance.

This entire concept makes me deeply uncomfortable, even as I argue for it. I want to believe in the raw, unpracticed, spontaneous beauty of human connection. I want to believe that the cure for loneliness is simply to be brave and talk to people. It’s a nice, clean idea. But it’s a fantasy for those who have never had to reboot their entire personality just to order a coffee. It ignores the fact that “being brave” is not a simple switch you can flip. It’s a skill, and like any skill, it requires practice. Where are you supposed to practice something that the world only allows you to perform live, with a real audience, every single time?

It wasn’t about creating the perfect line. It was about desensitization. It was about making the words so familiar that they lost their power to terrify.

We love to romanticize the struggle. We see the finished product-the confident speaker, the charming conversationalist-and we assume it’s innate talent. We don’t see the hundreds of hours of silent rehearsal, the mirror pep-talks, the replayed conversations in the shower where they think of the perfect thing to say, five hours too late. This technology is just making that internal, often agonizing, process external. It’s giving it a feedback loop. You say something, and something comes back. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the suffocating silence of your own head.

The Ethical Tightrope

The danger, of course, is that the rehearsal becomes the performance. That the simulator becomes more compelling than the sky. Alex Y. is acutely aware of this.

“The ethical tightrope is terrifying,” he admitted. “The same tool that lets one person practice asking for a date could be the one that convinces another person they don’t need to ask at all.”

The line is blurry, and the responsibility on developers is immense-a responsibility I sincerely doubt most of them are prepared for, given that their primary key metric is daily active users, not real-world social success.

But to dismiss the tool because of its potential for misuse is to dismiss the problem it’s solving. It’s like seeing a crutch and focusing only on the risk of dependency, ignoring the person with the broken leg who just wants to walk to the kitchen. For the man pacing his apartment, rehearsing how to talk about space squids, the AI isn’t his destination. It’s his runway. He’s not trying to connect with the machine. He’s using the machine to remember how to connect with himself, to find the version of him that isn’t white-knuckling it through every social encounter.