AI Girlfriends, Joi Upon Endless Joys, and the Loneliness Epidemic

So I'm deep in a spiral - half fuelled by curiosity, half fuelled by existential dread, and definitely fuelled by the Sudefed I'm downing for my current flu. I just got done deep-diving Bumble's latest attempts to wrangle Gen Z back onto their app for a uni assignment (spoiler: Gen Z would rather flirt via TikTok duets than swipe on painfully curated vo…