Building Bridges, Not Feeds

Sophia Gombos

I used to think of AI the way most people my age do: a tool for cold outputs. Something that spits out numbers, drafts an email, generates a caption for a post no one will remember scrolling past. Efficient, maybe. Impersonal, definitely. I didn't think it had anything to do with the relationships that actually mattered to me.

That changed this summer, when I started working at LifeText.ai, a small startup building something like a Patreon for text messages. The idea is simple: life-improvement influencers (people who spend their careers giving advice on physical health, motherhood, career growth, mental health, whatever their corner of the internet needs) could show up in their subscribers' phones not as another post to scroll past, but as a text message. A daily check-in. A voice in your pocket instead of a face in your feed. I came in expecting an operational role, the kind of internship where you make sure things run, forms get filled out, tickets get closed, nothing breaks. Necessary work, but not the kind that leaves a mark. Instead, I ended up leading projects, including designing our How-To page, a hub built to house everything a user needs to know to actually use the platform. I didn't just hand off a spec and wait. I worked closely with the team that coded it into the website, going back and forth, refining, solving problems together. That process reshaped something for me too: I stopped thinking of the platform as some faceless digital product and started seeing it as something built, piece by piece, by actual people sitting in meetings with me. Even before I ever talked to an influencer, I was already learning that there were real people behind every layer of the technology. But it was the conversations with the influencers that made that lesson impossible to unlearn. I got to talk to the influencers themselves, the people whose voices were going out to thousands of subscribers every day. One of them, a mental health influencer, told us he wanted the ability to send voice messages instead of just text. Not because it was flashier or more novel, but because he wanted to be vulnerable with his subscribers in a way that typed words couldn't quite carry. He knew that hearing a crack in someone's voice, a pause before they say the hard thing, does something a perfectly punctuated sentence never will. He wanted his practices to actually land, to feel like they were coming from a person who'd been through it too, not a caption. That request stuck with me. Here was someone using the platform not to broadcast more efficiently, but to be more human through it: to close the distance between himself and the people trying to heal, one voice memo at a time.

That's when it clicked for me: AI isn't inherently the opposite of connection. It's a bridge, or it's a wall, depending entirely on what you build it to do. An algorithm optimized purely for engagement will hollow out a relationship every time. It'll show you what keeps you scrolling, not what helps you grow. But the same underlying technology, pointed at a different goal, can close distance instead of manufacturing it. It can put a real person's voice in another real person's pocket, every single day, at a scale no single human could sustain alone.

I don't think this erases the risks people rightly worry about: the feeds, the dating apps, the surveillance, the ways algorithms quietly decide who we see and who we trust. Those concerns are real, and I carry them too. But my summer at LifeText.ai taught me that the question isn't "does AI kill connection." It's "who is this AI built for, and what is it optimizing toward?" A platform built to hit engagement metrics will always trade connection for attention. A platform built, deliberately, by people who've talked to the humans on both ends of the message, to deepen a relationship that already existed will do the opposite.

If I get to help build the next generation of these tools, that's the distinction I want to hold onto: not whether AI touches a relationship, but whether it was built to serve the people in it or just the numbers behind them.

Meet the Author

Sophia Gombos is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania studying Finance and Business Management with a minor in Computer Science. She is driven by a belief that technology is only as good as the human relationships behind it. This spring, she joined LifeText.ai, an AI startup, where she manages financial reporting for 2,000+ influencers and led the development of the platform's How-To and Updates hub. On campus, she's involved in Wharton Undergraduate Founders and Funders, Consult for America, and Phi Gamma Nu, and channels her creative side through Pan-Asian Dance Troupe, Kbeats, and PennYo A Cappella, where she serves as Marketing Chair.