Historically, Latin America has been celebrated as a region of “relational abundance,” where the warmth of human ties was the pillar of social cohesion. However, the most recent data from Voices! reveal a profound fracture: the importance assigned to human relationships has fallen by 15 points in just six years (the percentage of people who consider them very important dropped from 62% in 2019 to 47% in 2025). In this void, a new actor has emerged—one no longer perceived as a machine, but as a companion: artificial intelligence (AI).
When loneliness strikes, the population’s instinct is no longer to seek a physical encounter, but to take refuge in the digital ecosystem. According to our research, when they feel lonely, 49% of Argentines turn to social media as their primary buffer to mitigate the feeling of isolation. If we add the use of messaging, online games, and AI itself, we observe that 64% of the general population—and an astonishing 77% among young people—manage loneliness through a screen.
This phenomenon reveals a paradigm shift: spontaneous face-to-face contact is falling into disuse and being replaced by more controllable forms of connection that allow people to dose emotional exposure and avoid the “friction” of direct encounters.
It is essential to understand that technology is not only introducing AI into our lives; it is transforming how we relate to other humans. When comparing technology-mediated interactions with in-person ones, the data challenge the traditional hierarchy that dictated that “in-person is always better.”
For new generations, the distinction is increasingly blurred. Forty-eight percent of young people feel they are equally or even better understood in their online interactions than in face-to-face ones. What was once considered a poor substitute is now perceived as a legitimate environment and, in many cases, preferable for its sense of safety and conversational depth. This preference does not stem from disdain for the human, but from the search for scaffolding that facilitates communication in a climate of high relational caution. The digital offers a protective layer that reduces the anxiety and fatigue that face-to-face interaction generates today.
But how does AI specifically impact our relationships with others? AI appears as a co-pilot of our bonds. Although the majority (54%) of AI users do not perceive an impact on the way they relate, 39% of users state that AI has affected their relationships with other people. Within this group, 27% describe AI as a “complement” to their human ties, using it to better understand others or to facilitate their own communication. Thirteen percent mention that AI replaces people in specific roles of advice or conversation. This suggests that AI is functioning primarily as a relational prosthesis: a tool that helps shore up human interactions where an individual’s emotional infrastructure feels overwhelmed or insecure.
However, there are deeper nuances: 23% of young people already confess that they find it easier to reveal their thoughts to an AI than to people close to them, and 6% report having even experienced sexual arousal in their dialogues with the machine. These data mark the beginning of a new frontier where AI starts to absorb functions of intimacy that were once exclusive to another human.
The rise of technology and AI in our affective ecosystem forces us to rethink social cohesion in our region. We are not witnessing the end of warmth, but its strategic reassignment. The contemporary individual is building a modular well-being, where social networks absorb immediate loneliness, AI bolsters communication, pets offer stability and plants calm, while human bonds are reserved for moments of high symbolic density.
The challenge for Latin America is to ensure that these digital scaffolds do not become so comfortable that we end up forgetting how to inhabit the vulnerability and negotiation that only real encounters with others—with all their unpredictability—can offer us.
Technology and AI have become the “double glazing” of our emotional home. They allow us to see the world, feel accompanied by its light, and even receive help in understanding what is happening outside, but they protect us from the wind and cold that sometimes come with opening the door and stepping out to meet the other. “Double glazing” provides an isolation that appears to be safe, but it demands an extra effort from us so we do not lose the beautiful habit of breathing shared air.
Autor
Director of the Argentinean consulting firm Voices. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors of WAPOR Latin America, the regional chapter of the World Association of Public Opinion Research.
