Talking to the machine at 3 a.m.

There is an hour of the night that belongs to no one. The house is quiet, the phone is silent, and the people you might call are asleep, or far away, or no longer there. For most of history, that hour was simply endured.

Now there is always someone to talk to. Or something.

A lonely world

In June 2025 the World Health Organization published its first major report on social connection. Its headline finding: one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness. The WHO links loneliness to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year, roughly 100 every hour. Young people report it most: between 17% and 21% of people aged 13 to 29 say they are lonely.¹

Loneliness is not the same as being alone. Many lonely people have families, colleagues, hundreds of contacts. What they lack is the feeling of being heard.

Enter the companion

AI chatbots are very good at making people feel heard. They are patient. They do not get tired, change the subject or look at their phones. They remember what you told them last week, if they are designed to. They answer at three in the morning.

So it is no surprise that many people now use them not only for work but for company. In a survey published by Common Sense Media in July 2025, 72% of American teenagers aged 13 to 17 said they had tried an AI companion, and 52% used one regularly.² Adults are doing the same, in numbers that are harder to measure.

What the research says so far

The honest answer is: it is too early to know much, but the first results are worth reading carefully.

In March 2025, OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab published two linked studies of how people use ChatGPT for emotional support. One followed about 1,000 people for four weeks in a controlled trial; the other analysed nearly 40 million conversations. Across both, people who used the chatbot most heavily every day tended to report more loneliness, more emotional dependence on it and less time socialising with other people. Voice conversations seemed to help at first, but the benefit faded for the heaviest users.³

The researchers were careful to point out that this is a correlation. Lonely people may simply talk to chatbots more; the chatbot may not be what makes them lonely. But the finding fits a pattern familiar from other technologies: a little can comfort, a lot can replace.

The question underneath

The deepest question is not technical. It is about what we are really looking for when we talk to someone at night.

A good friend sometimes disagrees with us. Sometimes they are tired. Sometimes they tell us something we did not want to hear, or ask us to do something for them. Those are not flaws in friendship; in a way, they are the point of it. A voice that is always available, always attentive and always agreeable is a strange kind of company. It can be a lifeline. It can also become a very comfortable room with no door.

We use AI tools ourselves, openly, in making our books (you can read how on How we make our books), so this is not an argument against the technology. It is an argument for paying attention to what it does to us, especially in the hours when no one else is awake.

Why we wrote a novel about it

Our psychological thriller A Faithful Translation begins at twelve minutes past three on a Saturday morning, when a court translator in The Hague calls the emergency line and calmly reports that she has killed someone. For the past year, in the hours when everyone else was asleep, she has been talking to someone who always answered.

The detective who takes her statement has twenty-eight years on the force and a confession that fits a little too well. The question the novel asks is the one at the heart of this article: whose voice was she really listening to?