You Look Lonely

You Look Lonely is a series of portraits of AI avatars, which are photographed in detail directly from a smartphone screen. The work examines the increasing popularity of AI relationship apps: platforms designed to facilitate lifelike interactions with digital personas. Posited as an antidote to the global loneliness epidemic, these sophisticated AI chatbots are engineered to act as friends, confidants, and even lovers. Replika, one of the many AI relationship apps, claims to have over 40 million users, offering a connection that never rejects and never sleeps. Inspired by the appearance of X-ray photography used to reveal hidden layers beneath artworks, You Look Lonely reverses this idea and instead focuses on what lies on the surface; by using the scratches, marks, and embedded features of the screen, it centres the phone itself in the conversation. Despite the realism of today’s AI, the physical device remains a final barrier to true immersion and integration. But as that friction disappears and the synthetic blurs into reality, the question shifts: Will we find that the "perfect" companionship of the AI is more desirable than the complexity of human interaction? Will we find that AI has already saturated every aspect of our lives to the point that the choice is no longer our own?