AI Friendships: The Opposite of Connection

Image: Badly edited by author

“The average American has fewer than 3 friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends. The average person wants more connection than they have.”

I've started with this quote because, at first glance, it appears sensible. We are in a loneliness epidemic, after all, driven in part by smartphone addiction and a reliance on social media platforms to connect to others. Unfortunately, those platforms have morphed into dopamine centres that exist to keep our eyes fixed on screens and not the world around us. There are plenty of other factors at play, including societal shifts, pandemics, a rising mental health crisis and more.

But this is not a sensible quote, and for two reasons: who said it, and why they said it.

This supposed gap in what friends we have and wish we had is something Mark Zuckerberg sees as an opportunity to exploit with personalised AI friends.

He claims they could supplement — he means supplant — your laughably small group of 3 or fewer friends.

Before I dive into why I hate everything about the idea of forming friendships with AI, I'll put something out there first. Fifteen friends?! Who has time to manage the complexities of that many relationships in their lives on top of family, spouses, kids, work, health and general living? I think there's something blissful about slowly closing ranks as you move through life, only keeping those around you who truly support you, understand you and care for you. That's how it has worked out for me anyway.

Maybe this notion of more friends is better is a construct that serves only to make us feel like we need more friends — a sort of scarcity mindset — which, as Zuckerberg goes on to explain, most of us don't have the time for, and therefore AI companionship presents itself as a perfect solution?

The cynic in me can't help but feel that it is all by design.

Think of it this way:

1. Mark Zuckerberg created a 'social network' that, while it started with good intentions, slowly dismantled the connections between humans in real life.

2. Hiding behind a mission to "connect the world," it released increasingly addictive features that led to more screen time, polarisation and isolation.

3. Now, he wants to introduce AI' friends' as a solution to the problem his platform not only contributed to, but also profited from to the tune of tens of billions every quarter.

4. Humans then become dependent on the AI relationships they've developed with Meta's models. The platform proceeds to bleed users dry for marketing data points and starts to subtly recommend products or services to them in the form of stealth marketing.

Too cynical? Perhaps. The argument can be made that this is just the platform moving with the times, having little choice but to go all-in on AI to keep shareholders' wallets fat with bills.

But there's no denying it's all a bit gross.

The answer to loneliness can't be a focus on less human connectivity and an increase in relationships with entities that don't exist, can it? We've seen the effects of this already with social media, and the realisation that most of the connections formed on these platforms mean nothing beyond the screen, serving little purpose beyond clicking the like button on your latest post. You know, real meaningful stuff.

I always return to the question: Who wants this? Or, a better question is, has it gotten so bad that we actually do want this?

In this interview, Zuckerberg talks about the stigmatism right now surrounding the concept of AI friendship, and how "we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why [AI companionship] is valuable, and why the people doing these things are rational for doing it and how it is adding value."

Yes, wrong to stigmatise. Yes, AI companions will help some people. But, in some ways, that stigmatism is all we have left, a final barricade keeping us from surrendering our agency, our relationships and our brains to AI. We cannot have a societal shift where we live with headsets on and AI pendants around our necks, interacting with fully generated friends that are engineered, tweaked and tuned with hyper-personalised algorithms, trapping everyone in their bubble. Is that the future of connection?

I've long thought the idea of the Metaverse and how it could improve human connections was ironic because you were only building these connections in a virtual world, while in reality, you were actually isolating yourself. But at least there are people behind these digital avatars exist. With AI, we even lose that part. It's just a computer trained to learn everything about you and then engage with you in whatever way it calculates to be correct.

That's not friendship. That's not connection. That's an algorithm masquerading as such, all while stealing your data and your intimate thoughts.

I'm not too concerned with the implications of this in the short term. Enough of us exist who have grown up before technology, or at least understand what it was like before it became so intrusive and overbearing on our lives. Most of us can push back and draw a line in the sand. But I have seven young nieces (all 11 or younger), and I can see already the influence technology is having on them, and the fact they have no idea that they are being influenced, and no understanding at all of the wider forces at play. It's really fucking scary.

They are going to be absolute suckers for stuff like this. And where will that leave them in future? And then where will it leave a society that's supposed to function on the backs of entire generations who've been raised with minimal human connections?

The first step is obvious — age gate AI products, and change education curriculum as fast as possible to try to teach children what it means to grow up in an AI-driven world, and how to deal with the challenges coming their way.

Oh, wait, you've also just remembered that Big Tech has long lost any sense of dignity and responsibility. It won't surprise you to read that Google wants to roll out AI chatbots to children under 13.

Children represent more figures on a growth chart.

Much like social media, this shit needs regulated, and quickly, before it's too late. Don’t forget, many of the tech overlords that try to force these “innovations” down our throats either restrict or completely block their own children from smartphone and social platform use. They know what’s under the hood, and they know how bad it is. You think they’ll be signing their own children up for this? Of course not. That in itself tells the true story.

Relationships are key to the human experience, and surely we can start with a fundamental — the core definition of a friend is to be at least a real human.

AI is not and will never be human.