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.” 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.…