Having pets improves your mood and health. In a measurable way. So people already have "effective" relationships wit their pets. What's the difference between an effective relationship and an affective one?
Oh I'm not saying that having a relationship with an AI is a bad thing per se. I actually enjoy the discussions with the LLM models, even the small ones that I run locally, in a way superior rate than the conversations that I often have with human beings, and pretty sure I'm not the only one. I didn't create yet an "entity" with some kind of persistent memory which will turn into my personal daily assistant (my personal Jarvis) but that's definitively in my to do list.