About whether people can form real emotional connections with AIs rather than humans.
Has this happened?
Yes 86 (59%)Not sure 37 (26%)No 22 (15%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether people can form real emotional connections with AIs rather than humans.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
However, making a real connection is difficult, and there's a huge profit potential in selling people (usually, but not exclusively, men) a fake connection. At what point do AIs start passing the "phone sex Turing test"?
That is one of the things people are explicitly worried about: the possibility that they might make a connection with someone they're communicating with over the internet and then discover it's not a real person.