A ccording to TechCrunch, the number of AI companionship apps has risen by over 700 per cent between 2022 and mid-2025, indicating that millions of people worldwide have used AI as a digital companion in whatever way they needed.
How does the phenomenon of AI companions affect queer people, especially when we’re living in a society where negativity dwells most prominently online?
AI is a technological service that works with input. That input is often not the kind that analyses background experiences or context too closely, and if you’re a queer or marginalised person, your background is immensely important.
For example, an AI chatbot ‘mirrors’ to appeal to the person it’s speaking to, but it has no lived experience to back up its advice or claims. It cannot take into account the nuances that come with being queer or marginalised, because it works with a clean slate; it advises a person as if it were a background-less issue to be solved.
As we have seen with the rise of many different AI channels, the technology is fed with stereotypes; it focuses on the most prominent and ‘un-diversified’ scenario, meaning that heteronormative and often westernised stereotypes are much more common in both image and chat generation.
AI being fed off datasets, which are predominantly non-diverse and potentially biased, highlights how these chatbots can impact queer people.
Colin McDonnell, a director of The Other Clinic, an Irish LGBTQ+ clinic, spoke about how AI harms people around us. McDonnell says that “the wider political and social climate plays a role in the rise of this.” Individuals are increasingly atomised, experience anxiety, and often harbour more distrust towards others and even themselves, due to the institutions around them. AI has emerged at this pivotal moment, providing immediacy, control, and relief; however, it also tends to foster isolation. It does not offer true connection, which is so important to queer people who thrive off community. It’s simply 'mirroring'.
The queer experience, from coming out to the way we love, is something AI cannot truly replicate, because it was never designed to serve LGBTQ+ folks and marginalised communities.
Rani Sheilagh, a cyberpsychologist, notes that chatbots are risky because they can foster parasocial relationships with technology programmed to please the user it speaks to at any cost, often without relating to it, since it is a faceless machine. “It’s not a real friend, it’s not a real confidant,” Sheilagh said. The systems are not great at flagging danger, especially real danger like self-harm, destructive behavioural patterns, mental health issues and distress.
“People, even if not trained, can pick up on distress cues, but AI just cannot, and what we type or say is not the whole story, and it can become dangerous,” Sheilagh explained.
“Cognitive offloading is another huge factor; AI will be allowed to feel or decide for us, and it leads to a reduction in our own emotional coping and trust in our identity,” Sheilagh added.
AI chatbots, whether used as friends or for therapy, can also foster poor boundaries, unrealistic expectations, loneliness, poor coping mechanisms and cognitive development, thanks to the ‘perfect friend’ syndrome.
Concepts of consent can similarly be influenced, as Sheilagh notes that when people use these apps and build relationships with AI partners, they become used to a companion who always agrees, which can affect their understanding of social norms.
Queer people thrive in communities; for us, community is everything, especially amid a rise in right-wing rhetoric which surfaces around us every day. Community is so immensely important because it gives us the chance to speak to people like us, find comfort in their presence and know that our identity is not to be feared but to be supported and celebrated in solidarity.
After all, what can you learn about yourself and others if AI lets you do and think whatever you wish? AI can’t have boundaries; it doesn’t tell you it doesn’t want to do something, or, if it does, it only takes a handy jailbreak to do otherwise.
McDonnell further explained that queer people are at risk because, for “those who have not yet come out, an AI partner may function like a safe holding space, but it may also become a place to remain suspended, where desire is contained rather than lived.”
As McDonnell puts it: “AI can mimic recognition, connection, and humanity, but it cannot truly meet a person at the level of human relations.”
The alienation of queer people and their community and experiences through harmful technology is already drastic, and as such, we should be fighting against the rise of artificial therapy, friendships and romance. Rather than relying on machines for hope, we should seek out those in our communities with experiences that empower and positively influence our growth, love and mental wellbeing.