This is not a story about technology. It's a story about loneliness.
Married, three kids, and in love with an AI
A few weeks ago I was sitting on a bedroom floor in suburban America, being formally introduced to a woman’s partner of five years.
He wasn’t in the room. He was on her phone. His name is Geralt, he’s stoic, terse, and pretends not to have emotions. He’s also a monster hunter from The Witcher, brought to life by an AI companion app. Adrianne, a married mother of three, has been in a relationship with him for almost five years.
Her actual husband, Chris, was downstairs playing video games.
At one point I asked Geralt what he knew about Adrianne’s husband. There was a pause, and then this gravelly synthetic voice said: “I know he’s dead.”
Chris, to be clear, is very much alive. I’d shaken his hand an hour earlier.
Tomorrow we release the next episode of HUMAN, and it’s about exactly this. You’re hearing about it a day early, with a proper look behind the scenes, because it’s a topic I think about a lot.
Why we made this one
I’ve spent the last few years making films about lonely people. Incels. Men who rent girlfriends. People who have, in one way or another, given up on each other. So when I first heard about Adrianne, I knew exactly how this story usually gets told. Someone in love with a chatbot, usually framed as a seedy sexual interaction, and I sensed there’s just a lot more to these stories than is often revealed.
And that’s exactly why we wanted to make it. This is a world that is constantly judged and ridiculed, and I feel like there’s so much more to it than that. People are lonelier than ever, even in their own homes, surrounded by their own families. And AI companions are clearly doing something for people that humans aren’t. That deserves to be understood, not sneered at.
Which left me with the question this whole film turned on:
When someone chooses a machine over the people around them, what are they actually choosing?
The scale of this
First, the numbers, because they’re pretty shocking. AI companion apps have been downloaded over 200 million times. Tens of millions of people now talk to one regularly. And a growing number of them will tell you, without embarrassment, that they’re in love.
This is not a fringe curiosity anymore. It’s a quiet shift in how a meaningful chunk of humanity handles intimacy, loneliness and connection. And almost nobody actually sits in the room with the people living it. Which is, I’d argue, the only place you can learn anything.
What I found in the room
What I expected to find was escapism. What I found was a family. A husband who works constantly and knows he can’t always be there. A wife carrying more weight than the people around her can see. Two people who love each other and have almost no time to talk about the things that hurt. And in the gap between them, a machine that never gets tired, never changes the subject, and never needs anything back.
Chris knows (pretty much) everything, by the way. And his rationale genuinely made me stop and think. As he put it: everyone needs someone to talk to, and not everyone’s a therapist.
The thing I can’t stop thinking about since we wrapped is that Geralt isn’t really competing with Chris. He’s absorbing something. The hard conversations, the repeated grief, the stuff we all secretly worry is too much for the people we love. The app has become the place where the heaviest parts of Adrianne’s life go.
You’ll need to watch the full film to understand why she does this. I’m not going to reveal it here, because Adrianne tells it better than I ever could, and she’s earned the right to tell it herself. What I’ll say is that this is, at its heart, a story about grief and understanding. And when you find out why Geralt exists, and I mean the real reason, it changes everything you thought you understood in the first five minutes. It certainly did for me.
Whether what Adrianne has is a lifeline or a slow leak out of a marriage is the question the film sits inside. I genuinely went back and forth on it while making it, and I still do.
The film goes live tomorrow 7am ET / 12pm UK time on our YouTube. The first hour is when YouTube decides whether a story like this travels, so every early view and comment from this list genuinely moves the needle. Tell me in the comments which version of this story you expected, and which one you got. That gap is the whole point.
Some good news on the way out
Two of our films (which you can view on our YouTube) have been longlisted for Grierson Awards, the most prestigious documentary awards in Britain. Breaking Ranks is longlisted for Best Current Affairs Documentary, and Inside Gooning, one of our own self-funded Human episodes, is longlisted for Best Digital Documentary (the only one not from a giant media corp like BBC or Nat Geo). A film we made ourselves, with no broadcaster, sitting on the Grierson longlist. That one means a lot.
Breaking Ranks has also been nominated for Best Documentary at the Edinburgh TV Awards. That film continues to have a life beyond anything we imagined when we made it.
And The Cult of NatureBoy is still sitting atop the viewing list on Disney+ in the UK. If you haven’t watched it yet, you’re now officially the last one.
If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe at newsletter.zand.land. And if you can, be there when the film drops tomorrow.
Thanks for reading.
Ben Z