Friendship is an important part of most people’s lives. They can be complex and dirty, but a good friendship is worth it, because, as Aristotu said, “Nobody would choose to live without friends, although he had all other items.”
Mark Zuckerberg has a possible solution for those wishing to create new friendship: creation of new friends using AI. It is only a minor renovation of the approach, which is famous for other things, CEO of Meta, making the word “friending” as an action. Human friendship with warnings about ways that no AI can do, Zuckerberg explained on one podcast Hosted by Dwarkesh Patel that people like to associate with AI chatbots like Meta AI about their personal life.
And since most Americans have very few friends they would like, place for AI as an alternative. “As the personalization kicks into the loop and AI starts knowing you better and better, it would be really compelling,” Zuckerberg said.
But compelling conversation does not mean real friendship. AI is not your friend. This can not happen. And the more we try to make it one, the more we misunderstand both AI and real friendship. AI is a tool. A wonderful, sometimes dazzling, often depressed tool, but a tool that is not different from your text message autoclation or your easy Swiss Army Army knife. It is designed to help you and make your life easier.
This is not an existence. It has no internal monologue. It is all surface and syntax. A robot parrot that reads the Internet instead of mimicking your catchfrays. Mimicry and scripted sympathy are not real connections. They are performing only without emotion.
The real friendship is not only about anyone who is helping you all the time, selflessly, without asking for something in return. If you read your friend and they respond on the basis of a probability matrix, they are not really your friends. While I love a clean UI as much as the next person, I do not confuse it with love.
Best of all, an AI friend is a pet. But not even a hot, wigley dog or a decision cat. Like a beta fish or a tamgotchi. A reactionary appearance you can project emotions. It is always there, sure. But it does not care you. And deeply, you know it.
AI therapy
Meanwhile, on another podcast with Ben Thompson, Zuckerberg suggested that even though you do not have a human doctor, you should be at least AI. Therapy is expensive, and is a mental health crisis with greater demand than supply. If an AI chatbot can step inside and provide comfort to someone who is struggling, it is difficult to argue that it is a bad thing. And this is not a bad idea in isolation, but the details can be difficult.
While some chatbot-based wellness apps have shown the promise, they are required only due to heavy resource intervals in providing mental health services. After all, a trained physician does more than relying on your words or large, clear emotional tone. They pick up without thinking. They recognize when a smile hides your spiral. They make decisions that cannot do algorithms.
Most importantly, they are tied to morality, in a way no program can match. They are licensed. No matter how hard AI’s rules are now, it takes all that there is a change in programming to upload their emotional goods in a server farm. It wants to offer mental health services before mentioning the irony of a social media company when their products are often associated with deteriorating teenage mental health and a digital addiction that can distinguish people from real friends.
I talk to AI tool every day. I think AI can be very useful. I think my automatic coffeekar can also be very useful, even if I have more likely to shout to it to go fast to naked my soul. And AI can support the physician, increase education, and provide customer service at 3 pm without normal hold music. But this is not surrogate for human connection.
We are not at a point where I am afraid that everyone will withdraw from messy, inconvenient, flaw human relationships and will choose a chatbot’s hygiene, low-resting option that always agree with us. But this does not mean that it has something to look forward. You cannot scale friendship, and you should not encourage people to choose software to work for real friendship. An AI will treat you the same as it treats everyone, and, as Aristotu also said, “A friend for everyone is a friend for someone.”
