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. Marketed as an antidote to the global loneliness epidemic, these sophisticated AI chatbots are engineered to act as friends, lovers, and confidants. Replika, an AI relationship app, claims to have over 40 million users by promising 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 the final barrier to true immersion.