Why Gen Z Won’t Buy AI Friends — And What We Can Build Instead

This fall, New York City became a test case for what happens when artificial intelligence tries to enter our most intimate spaces. Friend.com, a wearable AI pendant promising to be your “always-on companion” for $129, plastered the subway system with slogans like “I’ll never bail on dinner plans.” The backlash was swift. Posters were defaced with graffiti that read “Make a real friend” or “AI is burning the world.” Some were ripped down entirely. Online, people built a digital museum of vandalized ads. It wasn’t just snark. It was a visceral rejection of the idea that friendship can be manufactured by machines.

In my academic years—Oxford, Harvard, deep dives into social neuroscience—I often returned to the idea that belonging isn’t an optional comfort, it’s a biological imperative. The Pack Theory suggests humans evolved to live in groups, with neurochemical systems tuned to signal who is “in” our circle. Here’s how that plays out in our brains. Oxytocin, the bonding and trust hormone, has been shown in research from UC Berkeley to play a critical role not only in romantic or parental bonds, but in friendship formation. In animal models such as prairie voles, when oxytocin receptors are blocked, social bonds form more slowly and selectively. Stanford scientists suggest oxytocin’s evolutionary role in social living may even predate its function in pair bonding. Endorphins show up in group synchrony — laughter, singing, shared movement — and correlate with social joy in ways that go beyond simple reward. Dopamine, by contrast, is immediate: tied to novelty and anticipation, easily triggered by a notification or chatbot ping, but less sticky for long-term bonding. The upshot: AI companions may reliably spark dopamine surges, but they are not (at least so far) wired to evoke oxytocin or the endorphin-based warmth that cements real belonging.

This distinction matters because we are living through what the Surgeon General has called a loneliness epidemic. Surveys show that more than 70 percent of Gen Z report regular feelings of loneliness, the highest of any age group. Globally, around 80 percent of young adults say they have felt lonely in the past year. The consequences are profound: increased risk of depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, and early mortality. In other words, friendship — or its absence — has become one of the most consequential public health issues of our time.

And yet, paradoxically, Gen Z is also the most digitally connected generation in history. Young adults maintain sprawling networks across Instagram, FaceTime, Discord, and LinkedIn. They can track hundreds of acquaintances in real time. What they lack are friends who are physically close, free at the same moments, and interested in doing the same things. A like, a FaceTime, or a group chat is not the same as showing up in the same room. The result is a generation drowning in digital touchpoints but starved of synchronous, local belonging.

That explains the uneasy reception to AI “buddies.” They can be amusing, even comforting, but neurologically the experience remains second-tier. Our brains evolved for mirroring: the smile that triggers a smile in return, the shared rhythm of laughter, the surge of oxytocin when someone taps your shoulder. These embodied signals don’t fire through a pendant or a chat window. Her imagined otherwise, but reality is more stubborn. Friendship is not dialogue alone. It is co-experience. It is memory stacking — remember when we… It is continuity over time, not just constant availability.

That realization was the starting point for building Clyx. Today it is absurdly easier to stay home and scroll than to see a friend. A single tap delivers food, rides, or streaming entertainment. Seeing someone in person requires ten steps of planning. That hidden friction is one of the drivers of modern loneliness. Clyx is designed to remove those steps: mapping everything happening in a city, overlaying it with your social graph so you can see where friends are actually going, and eliminating the logistics that kill momentum. The platform goes further by nudging continuity. Our compatibility engine highlights potential connections at events and keeps them alive afterward, reducing the burden of reaching out cold. Most importantly, we’ve introduced Programs: three-part workshops, run clubs, or creator-led sessions that repeat with the same small group. That repetition is intentional. First time, you’re strangers. Second time, you’re familiar. By the third, you greet each other as friends. In that rhythm, oxytocin has room to flow.

The goal is to make spending time with friends as easy as staying home. Profiles on Clyx reflect what people actually do — the communities they join, the activities they attend — not a curated highlight reel. It’s less about image, more about lived activity, closer to Strava for your social life than Instagram.

For Gen Z, this is not cosmetic. These are the years when identity and long-term relationships should be taking root. If those years are spent mostly in solitary scrolling, the effects reverberate across a lifetime. That’s why the backlash to Friend.com’s subway campaign mattered. It wasn’t just irritation at an ad. It was a collective instinct to defend something we know deep down: that the chemistry of friendship is still — and will remain — human.