It could help with the symptoms of loneliness, but it might also worsen the root causes, like social isolation and/or personal insecurities. It’s only expected that AI chatbots will somewhat reflect the expectations of their users, which might encourage patterns of biased and negative thinking they feed into it.

If someone sees it as a plaything, there is nothing wrong with that, but it’s way too easy for people to take with too far. There’s people who do that to static characters and rudimentary dating sims already.