This has been brewing for a while now. It's only going to get worse.
(excerpt from the 2019 NYT Article "Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good" below)
Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry.
All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass., chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely.
Sox talks to him about his favorite team, the Red Sox, after which she is named. She plays his favorite songs and shows him pictures from his wedding. And because she has a video feed of him in his recliner, she chastises him when she catches him drinking soda instead of water.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paro_(robot)
I imagine that with the advent of ChatGPT, there will be more serious exploration into human-like emotional companionship.