The Artificial Ingredients in Our Social Diet

Sugar Substitutions

My grandma’s small subsidized apartment kitchen in Eastern North Carolina was authentic. Filled with cigarette smoke, lard, and as many farm stand items as she could find or afford. Like many Southern women of her generation, she showed love through cooking, through dishes that she honed over time and repetition. 

But, like others her age in the South, she had diabetes and other chronic conditions. This forced her to augment her cooking with processed alternatives – artificial sweeteners, low-fat substitutes, and "diet-friendly" versions of traditional foods. These products may have helped her manage her chronic conditions, but they changed her relationship with food in ways that went beyond nutrition.

AI Companions Enter Schools

I think about her kitchen as I watch another kind of processing reshape our world - the industrialization of human connection through artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on an AI "wellbeing companion" named Sonny now in schools across America. This chatbot, built to support students' mental health, serves thousands of teenagers. One student values how it "has unlimited time for her," unlike busy school counselors. Another likes having "someone to talk to one-on-one who's only focused on me."

Just as the food industry processed corn into shelf-stable products, the tech industry now processes human interaction into digital forms that are available, palatable, and scalable. These processed interactions remove the inefficiencies of human connection – awkward pauses, emotional management, limits of time and attention. What remains is a standardized product that, like processed food, is built for convenience and quick satisfaction.

Solutions to Real Problems

The parallel runs deeper. Just as processed food solved real problems like feeding growing populations, extending shelf life, and making food preparation easier for working families, AI companions like Sonny address real needs. With overwhelmed school counselors and rising teenage anxiety, these digital solutions seem necessary.

But we should remember what happened with processed food. What started as a convenience became a dietary staple. Our tastes adjusted to artificial flavors. We lost touch with seasonal eating rhythms and the social aspects of food preparation. Most importantly, we forgot what real food tastes like.

Is processed connection following the same trajectory? When a student in Richmond, California tells the Wall Street Journal she prefers confiding in Sonny because "I can become very obsessive about situations and I know I can annoy my friends when I talk about a certain situation over and over again...I don't feel like I'm annoying Sonny," she's articulating something profound about the appeal of AI companions. They offer an interaction stripped of human friction—no judgment, no fatigue, no social obligation. The AI response arrives with the chemical reliability of sugar hitting the tongue. But like ultra-processed food, these interactions lack essential nutrients—the micro-expressions that signal genuine empathy, the difficult negotiations that build social resilience, the practice of truly listening, the irreplaceable affect of being truly seen by another person.

Processed vs. Whole Connections

This substitution happens in multiple domains of our lives:

In education: A student who asks AI for feedback on an essay rather than visiting a professor's office hours gains convenience but loses the chance to build a mentoring relationship and receive personalized guidance that considers their growth over time.

In the workplace: Teams that rely on AI facilitation for meetings may solve scheduling inefficiencies but miss the spontaneous ideas that emerge from unstructured human conversation before and after formal discussions.

In family life: Parents who direct children's questions to AI assistants rather than engaging with them directly might save time but lose opportunities to teach values and bond emotionally.

In healthcare: Patients who prefer AI symptom checkers to in-person consultations get immediate answers but miss the holistic assessment that comes from a provider who notices subtle physical and emotional cues.

Like my grandma who was supposed to give up lard and sugar but sometimes didn't, we'll all make trade-offs. We'll use AI for some tasks while deliberately preserving human connection for others. But, we should make these choices consciously, understanding what we gain and what we lose in each substitution.

New Guidelines

This isn't an argument against AI. Just as few would ban all processed food, it would be unrealistic to reject AI's role in modern connection. But we need guidelines for preserving human connection in an age of processed interaction. We need the equivalent of Michael Pollan's famous food rules: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

What might those rules look like for human connection in the AI age? How do we preserve our capacity for authentic interaction in a world increasingly mediated by algorithms? The students talking to Sonny today will become adults tomorrow in a world where AI companions are as unremarkable as smartphones. Their taste for connection will develop accordingly.

Perhaps the first rule should be: “Prioritize human connection.” Or perhaps: "Engage with the friction of human relationships rather than optimizing it away." I’ll work on something quippier. Whatever our guidelines, we need to recognize that while processed connection, like processed food, solves real problems, it may also fundamentally alter our “social nutrition” in ways we don't yet fully understand.