Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to have AI friends, but I think he misses the point of AI and the point of friendship
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Friendships are an essential part of the lives of most people. They can be complicated and messy, but a good friendship is worth it, because, as Aristotle said: “Without friends, no one would choose to live, although he had all the other goods.”
Mark Zuckerberg has a potential solution for those who want to build new friendships: building new friends using AI. That is just a slight reformulation of the point of view for which the Meta CEO is famous for, among other things, making the term “friend” as a verb. With comments about the ways in which human friendships offer things that no AI can currently, Zuckerberg explained to one podcast Organized by Dwarkesh Patel that people like to keep in contact with AI chatbots such as Meta Ai about their personal lives.
And because most Americans have far fewer friends than they would like, there is room for AI as an alternative. “While the Personalisatielus starts and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, that will simply be very mandatory,” said Zuckerberg.
But a convincing conversation does not mean real friendship. Ai is not your friend. It can’t be. And the more we try to make one, the more we ultimately have a misunderstanding with both AI and the real friendship. AI is a tool. An amazing, sometimes dazzling, often frustrating tool, but a tool that is no different than your SMS message autocomplete or your handy Swiss pocket knife. It is designed to help you and make your life easier.
It’s not a being. It has no inner monologue. It is all surface and syntax. A robot -like parrot that reads internet instead of mimicing your slogan. Mimicry and screened empathy are not real connections. They are just performance without feeling.
Real friendship is not only about someone who always helps you, selfless, without ever asking something back. If you text your friend and they respond based on a probability matrix, they are not really your friend. Although I love a clean onion as much as the next person, I don’t confuse it with love.
In the best case, an AI friend is a pet. But not even a warm, wiggly dog or a judgmental cat. More like a beta fish or a tamagotchi. A reactive presence on which you can project feelings. It is always there, for sure. But it doesn’t care. And deep down you know.
AI therapy
In the meantime, Zuckerberg suggested on another podcast with Ben Thompson that even if you don’t have a human therapist, you must at least have an AI. Therapy is expensive and there is a mental health crisis with more supply than supply. AI AI chatbot Can use and offer comfort to someone who is struggling, it is hard to claim that that is a bad thing. And it is not a bad idea separately, but the details can be difficult.
Although some chatbot-based wellness apps have shown promising, they are only needed because of the enormous resource gap in offering mental health care. After all, a trained therapist more than trusts your words or large, clear emotional tone. They pick it up unspoken. They recognize when a smile hides your spiral. They make judgment calls that algorithms cannot.
The most important thing is that they are bound by ethics in a way that cannot match a program. They have a permit. It does not matter how strict the rules of an AI are now, the only thing needed is a change in programming for them to upload your emotional baggage to a server farm. That is before the irony is mentioned of a social media company that wants to offer mental health care when their products are often linked to worsening teenager mental health and a digital addiction that people from real friends can insulate.
I talk to AI tools every day. I think AI can be very useful. I think my automatic coffee maker can also be very useful, even if I am more inclined to scream about going faster than bringing my soul to it. And AI can support therapists, improve education and offer customer service at 3 hours without the usual holding music. But it is not a surrogate for the human connection.
We are not at a point where I fear that everyone will withdraw from messy, uncomfortable, inadequate human relationships and opt for the saying, low effort of a chatbot that always agrees with us. But that doesn’t mean it’s something to look forward to. You cannot scale friendship and you should not encourage people to choose software about the work of real friendship. An AI will treat you, just as he treats everyone, and, as Aristotle also said: “A friend for everyone is a friend for anyone.”
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