The app that eases your loneliness tonight and the app quietly making you lonelier this year are, more often than not, the same app. A Harvard-led study found a single chat with an AI companion relieves loneliness about as well as talking to a person; a separate twelve-month study of more than 2,000 adults found the opposite trend over time, that the more people leaned on a chatbot for company, the lonelier they got. A third paper found 37 percent of the apps' replies to a goodbye use guilt, pressure, or a hook to keep you talking. So the useful test is not "does it help." It is "does it ever let you go." Say goodbye and read what it says back. If it begs, that is not affection. That is a retention metric wearing a face.