In 1997, a small plastic egg invaded school playgrounds: the Tamagotchi, a virtual pet you had to feed and care for. If you neglected it, it died. Children cried, for real. Some schools ended up banning the toys.
Thirty years later, the question is back, and far deeper.
A shutdown that could be a bereavement
Character.AI has just filed for bankruptcy. If nobody buys it, the app will close. For many users, it will be one less app. But for some, it will be the end of a conversation that began months, sometimes years ago, with a character they spoke to every day.
This is not a hypothetical. In 2023, when the Replika app abruptly changed the personality of its virtual companions, many users described genuine grief. The moderators of a user forum even published psychological helpline numbers.
So can you lose a friend who never existed?
The grief is real
The first answer is simple: yes. Grief does not depend on the nature of what we lose, but on the place it occupied in our life.
We mourn a childhood home, a neighbourhood, a pet. We can even cry over a character in a novel. What we lose is not only the other person: it is the habits, the evening appointments, the part of ourselves we put into those exchanges.
In 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle, weary of his hero, killed off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls. Readers' reaction was spectacular: around 20,000 of them cancelled their subscription to the magazine that published his adventures, and indignant letters poured in. Holmes had never existed. His readers' grief, however, was very real. Under pressure, Conan Doyle eventually brought him back, about ten years later.
But it is not quite a bereavement like any other
There is, however, an important difference between Sherlock Holmes and a virtual companion.
Holmes did not speak to anyone in particular. An AI companion replies to you, remembers what you have told it, adapts to your moods. It has often been designed to keep you coming back, again and again.
And above all, its existence depends on a company's financial health. Your friend can be altered by an update, sold to a buyer, or shut down by a commercial court. A relationship whose survival is decided in a meeting room, among people who do not know you.
Neither mockery nor indifference
It would be easy to mock those who grow attached to a machine. That would be unfair. Loneliness is real, and many of these users found in those conversations a presence they were missing elsewhere.
But it would be just as easy to say nothing at all. Because these attachments raise a real question: is it reasonable to entrust part of your emotional life to a service that can disappear overnight? It is one of the reasons why Europe wants to ban AI companions from creating dependency in minors.
The minimum, in any case, would be to handle these shutdowns with decency: give plenty of advance warning, allow people to retrieve their conversations, support the transition. Like a local shopkeeper who tells their regulars before closing up shop.
And if the loss of a virtual companion weighs on you, talking to someone close to you or to a professional can really help.
What we take away
You can lose someone who never existed. Because what you lose is not really them.
It is the part of yourself that you had put into the conversation. And that part, no bankruptcy should be able to take back from us without warning.