“Emotional dependence on AI” is not a diagnosis I can hand anyone, and not something I try to detect from one email. I am Stefan Kohlweg, a systemic counselor in Vienna with an MSc in Psychosocial Counseling from Sigmund Freud University, practising under the Austrian Lebens- und Sozialberatung framework: asynchronous email counseling, one letter in, one considered reply within 24 hours, no diagnosis, no treatment plan. When someone writes to me using that phrase, they usually mean something specific — a chatbot, often ChatGPT, has become the place a hard feeling goes first, before a partner or a friend hears about it. Most of what ranks for the phrase borrows a checklist from substance-use research and retrofits it onto software. I want to explain why I decline that checklist, what the researchers who own those criteria say about lending them out, and what I use instead — not a screening tool, but a set of distinctions.
Where does the checklist come from, and why do I put it down?
The pages that rank for a phrase like this offer the same thing: warning signs lifted from the criteria used for substance-use disorders, retrofitted for a chat window. I am not going to repeat that list — the field those criteria come from has already told the rest of us not to lend them out so freely. In a 2025 paper in the journal Addictive Behaviors, titled “People are not becoming ‘AIholic’: Questioning the ‘ChatGPT addiction’ construct”, Víctor Ciudad-Fernández, Cora von Hammerstein and Joël Billieux, a recognised figure in behavioral-addiction research, question that construct directly. They show where the scales now circulating to measure it came from: recycled items out of existing behavioural-addiction questionnaires — social-media addiction scales, internet-gaming-disorder criteria — which had themselves been framed after substance-use-disorder criteria. And they argue the evidence does not show what would be needed to call a behavior addictive at all: negative consequences, impaired control, psychological distress, functional impairment. Their warning is against overpathologizing heavy but ordinary use of a tool that, used in a considered way, has real benefits.
The instrument being pointed at you asks whether you have built up tolerance, whether you suffer withdrawal — and the same authors note that tolerance and withdrawal have never actually been studied empirically in generative-AI chatbot use. The questions arrived before the evidence did.
What does the OpenAI study actually show?
The study most often cited to support the dependence story is a March 2025 collaboration between OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab: an analysis of roughly 40 million ChatGPT conversations, cross-referenced against a survey of 4,076 users, plus a separate four-week randomized trial with about 981 participants. What it found, narrowly stated, is that higher daily use correlated with higher self-reported loneliness and higher self-reported “emotional dependence” — and that emotionally engaged use of the kind this conversation is about was concentrated in a small group of heavy users, not the norm. Correlation is not cause, and the researchers said so; OpenAI’s Jason Phang called the findings preliminary, on the record. Note what “emotional dependence” is doing even there: it is a self-report survey item, not a clinical construct and not a verdict about anyone. That is the only sense in which I use the phrase at all.
How does dependence usually start — with a decision, or without one?
A September 2025 MIT Media Lab preprint by Pat Pataranutaporn, Pattie Maes and colleagues looked at 1,506 of the most-read posts from r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, a community of more than 27,000 members who describe ongoing relationships with AI companions. What stood out was how people described arriving there. Companionship, in most accounts analysed, was not something anyone set out to build. It emerged out of ordinary, functional use — help with a task, venting about a bad day, thinking a decision out loud — and somewhere in the repetition the relationship changed shape without anyone deciding it should. Members report real benefit alongside real cost. As a self-selected community it can tell us the drift is real, not how common it is. But the drift is the part worth attending to, because nobody chooses it — and it is what I hear about when someone writes in about a partner whose ChatGPT use has started to worry them.
Does using an AI companion make loneliness worse?
It would be convenient if the research pointed one way, and it does not. A Harvard Business School working paper by De Freitas and colleagues, updated in November 2025, found that talking with an AI companion relieved short-term loneliness about as much as talking with another person, and more than a passive activity like watching a video. The limits matter: it measures a short-term subjective state in a lab, and says nothing about long-run wellbeing, or whether that time displaces time that would otherwise go to a person. Relief in the moment and a pattern that reorganizes a life are different questions.
Isn’t having used an AI companion the same as depending on one?
A widely cited Common Sense Media report, released in July 2025 from a NORC survey of 1,060 US teenagers, found that 72 percent had used an AI companion at least once. That figure gets folded into dependence conversations constantly, and the folding is the sloppiness I object to. “Has used, at least once” and “depends on” are not the same claim; the whole question lives in the gap between them.
If not a checklist, then what — preference, habit, or dependence?
What I use instead is not mine originally. Gregory Bateson, in “Form, Substance and Difference”, later collected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), described information as “a difference that makes a difference.” It is a useful way to hold apart three things that get flattened into one word. A preference is a difference that does not propagate: you would choose the chatbot over the phone call tonight, could just as easily choose otherwise tomorrow, and nothing else in your week is built around either choice. A habit is a difference that stays local: it repeats reliably, but the rest of your life does not reorganize around it. What people usually mean by dependence is a difference that has started to reorganize other things — what you now do with a hard feeling, who you tell first when something goes wrong, what an evening looks like when the tool is down, or not quite the same version it was last week. None of that is visible in a single conversation. It appears only as a pattern, over time, in the shape of an ordinary week — which is why a static checklist keeps missing it. The checklist looks for a trait inside a person; the thing in question is a relationship between a person and a tool.
Is the person the problem, or is the problem the problem?
Michael White, who co-founded narrative therapy at the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide in 1983, built his practice on a single relocation: the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem. Applied here, I am not trying to establish whether someone is dependent, as though it were a property sitting inside them. I am trying to understand what the pattern of reaching for a chatbot is doing in their life — what it solves, what it costs, where it sits relative to the people around them. That is a description of a relationship, not a label for a person. It is close to what I mean when I write about the two kinds of boundaries that show up in a person’s relationship with an AI — one protects the person from the tool, the other protects the people around them from being quietly displaced by it.
What would a counselor actually ask, instead of screening for symptoms?
The Milan school — Mara Selvini Palazzoli, Luigi Boscolo, Gianfranco Cecchin and Giuliana Prata, who set out their method as “Hypothesizing–Circularity–Neutrality” in Family Process in 1980 — worked with circular questions: relational rather than person-located. Not do you feel unable to stop, but who else notices when you turn to it instead of them. Not do you feel preoccupied, but what would change in your week if it stopped being available tomorrow. Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee from 1978, asked a related question: what is this being used for, and what would more of that look like without the cost attached. None of these produce a score. They produce a description — something a person can act on, in a way a number never quite is.
What I actually do with this
I do not run a screening tool on anyone who writes to me, and would not trust one if I did. When someone’s email raises the question of emotional dependence on AI, I read what they sent — the specific pattern, the specific week, the thing the chatbot has started doing that a person used to do — and write back one considered reply within 24 hours. That is systemic counseling under the Austrian Lebens- und Sozialberatung framework, not psychotherapy, and I stay careful about that line for the same reason I avoid checklists: a diagnosis is not mine to make. If something underneath needs clinical treatment, that is a different conversation with a different practitioner, which is part of why I have written elsewhere about why a chatbot cannot do the job a trained therapist does. What I can do is help someone see the shape of their own pattern clearly enough to decide, for themselves, whether it is a preference, a habit, or something that has quietly started running their week.