The scene
A late-night chat window returns a paragraph of perfect warmth. The person may sleep. In the morning they may feel helped — or untouched, as if comforted by a card from no one.
Named frame, limited claim
Horton and Wohl (1956) described para-social interaction: intimacy felt toward a figure who cannot know you back. The paper is seventy years old and was about mass media. It is cited as a named vocabulary, not as a trial of 2026 companions.
Direct equivalence between model fluency and human empathy is not supported. Some users report reduced loneliness in some moments. That can be true without collapsing relief into care. Care that cannot remember you, refuse you, or be hurt by you is a different psychological object.
Youth and crisis: disclosure, routing that actually routes, no dwell-time optimisation against distress. PSYTECH is not a clinic.
Evidence & provenance2 sources · production record
Source record
Sources stay inspectable so the boundary between reporting and interpretation remains visible.
- 01
- 02PSYTECH News editorial constitution — PSYTECH — House method: scene → claim → named evidence → implication. Editorial, not clinical.
Production
Editorial production
Human review
Not recorded for this release