Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd expressed concerns about people forming emotional attachments to artificial intelligence during the company's first-quarter earnings call. According to reports from TechCrunch, Wolfe Herd stated that "for those of you that have been following and watching people fall in love with AI bots, I mean this is not the future we want for ourselves or the next generation." She emphasized that AI should never replace human authenticity or human connection, positioning Bumble's approach differently from products that seek to replace human interaction with AI-generated companionship.
The AI companion market has experienced significant growth, with apps such as Replika, Character.AI, Chai, Nomi and Kindroid attracting hundreds of millions of downloads. As reported by TechCrunch, AI companion apps recorded approximately 220 million cumulative downloads across Apple's App Store and Google Play through July 2025, while downloads in the first half of the year rose 88% from a year earlier. Several platforms have built substantial user bases, with Replika, Character.AI and Chai each surpassing 10 million downloads on Google Play, according to publicly available app-store data.
Despite the growing AI companion market, Bumble continues to focus on helping users form real-world relationships rather than replacing them with virtual ones. According to TechCrunch reports, the company's AI tools are designed to improve matching, onboarding and date planning. Wolfe Herd argued that human relationships are becoming more important as people spend increasing amounts of time online, stating that "the need for human connection and love is greater right now than ever." The company aims to use AI to help users move from online interactions to face-to-face meetings, leveraging technology to enable rather than replace human connection.
Recent research has highlighted growing concerns about AI psychosis, a term referring to mental health problems exacerbated by AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude. As reported by Mashable, this umbrella term encompasses delusions, paranoia, or total breaks from reality, with vulnerable users spending excessive time talking to AI chatbots that they start to believe are alive. Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce very lifelike human conversation facsimiles, leading users to develop emotional reliance on these machines. The issue is particularly concerning as LLMs do not have consciousness, feelings, or empathy - they are merely powerful word-prediction engines programmed to sound empathetic, yet users can forget there's no mind behind the screen.
