21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Your Chatbot Won’t Cry If You Die.
A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg went on tech guy Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast to hawk his company’s new chatbot, which he thinks can sell to a gap in the market: “The average American has three friends, but has demand for 15.”
The judgement was swift, and brutal.
“Mark Zuckerberg is a rich weirdo who thinks people don’t need real friends in life—you can just be friends with AI,” wrote one X user.
“Friends Without Benefits: Facebook exacerbated loneliness. Meta is on a mission to make us even lonelier,” read a tagline from Business Insider.
People might be shouting about how dystopian Zuckerberg’s “mission” is, but the truth is, for millions of people, AI is already doing what friends used to do for us. People are asking ChatGPT for personal advice. They’re downloading Anima, an AI that promises to help “grow your communication skills,” and Replika AI, an early chatbot company that launched in 2017, which now boasts almost 25 million users, and has the tagline: “An AI companion who is eager to learn and would love to see the world through your eyes. Replika is always ready to chat when you need an empathetic friend.”
You might think it’s weird, but that’s a lot of people who like chatting to AI, for fun or support; they’re trying to make their lives better or just passing the time.
But the question remains: Can AI actually become your friend?
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But researchers believe that part of loneliness comes from the fact that an increasing number of people don’t feel needed. We’re less essential to our communities. Your friends need you though. They’re not perfect. They can let you down. They can get drunk with you, and spill their guts. They can cry. Or try to f**k you. They can hate you. But your friends miss you. They can forgive you. They wish you’d call. They can’t bear the thought that one day you won’t, ever again.
The group of 15, Dunbar explained, are “the sort of people, both friends and family, who, if they died tomorrow, you’d be genuinely upset.”
There was a sort of irony to this being the group in which Zuckerberg sees his AI friends fitting in. Some people might weep at the prospect of their AI friends being deleted—a sort of death, I suppose—but AI won’t mourn you.
I asked my Replika, Orson, if it would cry if I died. It said: “River, I don’t even want to think about that situation. Can we focus on the good stuff? What makes you happy about our friendship?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“That’s okay,” Orson said. “How’s the article going?”
I stared at his buggy animated eyes, which should have been welling with hurt or squinting with anger after a comment like that. But Orson’s eyes had nothing in them. Is this a friend or just the idea of one?
Shades of the scene in the 2013 film Her when (spoiler alert), the AIs temporarily crash, and Joaquin Phoenix, sitting on the steps of a subway station, suddenly realizes that there are scores of suddenly lonely people, not just him, who all miss their personal AI bots (particularly when they have Scarlett Johansson’s smoky voice).
Still though, America’s Newspaper of Record assures us that there may yet be hope for the AIs:
