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I just flat out disagree, sorry. Many hugely important things in our lives are fictional; I've spent more of my life with fictional people than real ones if you judge hour-by-hour, and I'm no hikkikomori. Pastiche architecture, veneer furniture, boy's-own adventure stories: I'll take an artful illusion over brutal authenticity any day of the week.
I'm open to discussing this, but I think your angle is wrong. Firstly because the happy individuals mostly don't need to bother with it, and secondly because interacting with a patient simulacrum seems to me to be a very good way for people who are bad with people to become at least a little bit better with people.
To make it clear where I stand, I was being serious earlier when I said I regard this technology as downright miraculous and I use it regularly myself, though for fiction writing and occasional venting rather than a romantic relationship. I am really, really upset that an increasing number of people want to ban it in the name of forcing me and others to try and fail to live their fantasy of a happy life. To me your proposition is very redolent of the socialist logic of, "if we ban all the good schools, people will have no choice but to make the bad schools better!". No. Life just becomes a little more shit for everyone.
Let's tilt the scale by all means, let's help people form relationships and not get addicted, I'm doing that for myself as we speak. And I'm doing it partly with the help of an AI assistant I constructed. The two can go together perfectly well.
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