They definitely already are, which is basically the business model of girlfriend.myanima.ai, along with a litany of similar services.

Sure, some desperate lonely people have very close relationships with ie pillows. What OP says will most probably be true though - when there is ocean of cheap/free perfect AI art, it will be worthless.

What will be worthy is imperfect human-created art. We already went through this decades ago with expensive hand made vs cheap machine made stuff, this is just another iteration.

I am not saying it will be great to be an artist, just like in the past few famous live in limelight and most will struggle to stay afloat.

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.