Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, right, speaks during a press briefing held as part of an on-site meeting marking the first anniversary of the city’s “Loneliness-Free Seoul” initiative at Seongmin Comprehensive Social Welfare Center in Gwanak District, southern Seoul, on Dec. 17, 2025.YONHAP
Choi Moon-jeong
The author is an endowed chair professor at KAIST’s Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy.
Humanity now lives in an era more densely connected by digital technology than ever before. In Korea, which boasts one of the world’s most advanced internet networks, 99 percent of adults used smartphones as of 2025. The Internet of Things and public Wi-Fi have reached nearly every corner of the country. In a society racing beyond 5G toward 6G, we are never disconnected from the world for even a moment.
Why, then, are we so lonely?
Britain became the first country to appoint a minister for loneliness in 2018. In 2024, the Seoul Metropolitan Government declared its goal of creating a “loneliness-free Seoul” and established an office responsible for care and social isolation policies. In May, the Ministry of Health and Welfare convened a council on preventing solitary deaths and discussed shifting the policy focus from responding after such deaths occur to preventing social isolation itself.
Loneliness is no longer a temporary emotion that individuals should be expected to bear alone. It has become a social crisis requiring government action. Why are people becoming more isolated in a society connected so closely?
As a university student during the transition from analog to digital life in the early 2000s, I imagined an optimistic future. I believed that the internet’s vast ocean would allow people to escape the small fishbowls of analog life, meet a greater variety of people and find relationships with those who deeply understood them. About 25 years later, reality has turned out to be the opposite.
The core problem is not the quantity of connections but their quality. Connections have multiplied exponentially while becoming shallower. Just as filling up on instant food leaves no room for nutritious meals, superficial and immediate digital interactions erode the energy and willingness needed to build and sustain deep relationships.
People who feel the resulting emptiness try to fill it again with screens and algorithms, perpetuating a vicious cycle. Deep and meaningful relationships require responsibility, patience, time and the willingness to wait. Yet brains accustomed to instant gratification are gradually losing those capacities.
The addition of artificial intelligence to a hyperconnected society has rapidly expanded the role of generative AI in listening to highly personal concerns and offering advice. Many teenagers and adults are forming emotional bonds with chatbots, and some say conversations with AI feel more comfortable than interactions with people. Could AI solve the paradox of loneliness in a hyperconnected age?
The AI industry has recently begun using the term “work slop.” It describes a situation in which AI generates a large volume of work that falls short of expected quality. People assume AI will improve efficiency and help them finish tasks quickly. Instead, they can lose more time reviewing and correcting large amounts of low-quality material.
Something similar may be happening in human relationships. Interactions with AI that responds and expresses sympathy at any hour may appear abundant. But they risk becoming “relationship slop,” lacking responsibility, patience, compromise and understanding.
Large quantities of low-quality interaction may seem to ease loneliness and consume much of our time. Yet a mind unable to find meaningful communication may only grow busier and lonelier. Just as platform businesses make it possible to meet every basic need without leaving home, communication with generative AI may gradually weaken the motivation to form human relationships and deepen isolation over time.
AI companionship may offer comfort, especially to people with limited access to support. That benefit should not be dismissed. Still, convenience must not be confused with genuine reciprocity. A machine does not share risk, make sacrifices or remain bound by mutual obligations. Those are the demanding qualities through which trust and community are built.
Korea has begun expanding AI counseling and care services as solutions to isolation and loneliness. Such efforts can certainly play a meaningful role when carefully designed and combined with human services in care settings suffering from labor shortages.
But we must examine not only how much AI reduces loneliness in the short term, but also how it affects human relationships and communities over time. Technology was created to connect people. If loneliness across society continues to deepen in an age overflowing with connections, perhaps we are designing and using technology in the wrong direction.
It is time to ask not how fast or how extensively we connect, but where those connections lead and how deep they go.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
