Tech Disrupted Friendship. It’s Time to Bring It Back
Anyone looking for a vibe check on the populace’s current feelings about AI would do well to check out the walls of the New York City subway system. This fall, alongside posters for everything from dating apps to Skechers, a newcomer made its debut: Friend. The ads were simple, telling commuters that a “friend” is someone “who listens, responds, and supports you” next to an image of the white AI companion necklace floating on a similarly white background.
Defaced Ads and a Deep Angst about AI
It was the perfect graffiti canvas. “If you buy this, I will laugh @ you in public.” “Warning: AI surveillance.” “Everyone is lonely. Make real friends.” “AI slop.” These are just the defaced ads I noticed during my daily trips from Brooklyn to Manhattan. There were so many that it became a meme.
Loneliness Crisis and AI as a Substitute
Reaction to the ad campaign, which the company’s founder said cost less than $1 million, got so loud it was covered by The New York Times. People have always defaced New York subway ads in every way imaginable, but what happened with the Friend ads tapped into a deep angst about AI. Even as some celebrate its possibilities (drug discovery) and others decry its ramifications (environmental impacts, job erasure), the suggestion that AI’s killer app could be a Loneliness Cure seemed to hit a nerve.
AI as a Form of Social Media
Five years after Covid-19 isolated millions of people and more than two years after the US surgeon general declared loneliness an “epidemic,” AI has emerged as a form of social media that offers even less actual socializing than what came before. “What’s particularly striking is that these [Silicon Valley] leaders are actively and openly expressing their desire for AI products to replace human relationships, completely overlooking the role that their own companies—or their competitors—may have had in fueling the loneliness crisis the country faces today,” Lizzie Irwin, a policy communications specialist at the Center for Humane Technology, tells me in an email.
Parasocial Relationships and the Anthropomorphization of AI
When I bring this up to Shira Gabriel, a social psychology professor at the University of Buffalo, she agrees that friendship with AI is a type of parasocial relationship, one brought on by the fact that humans are social creatures and tend to anthropomorphize their interactions. But then she mentions something deeper: “We have a real crisis right now in America where we just don’t have enough therapists for the number of people that need therapy,” Gabriel says. AI is filling in the gap.
The Problem with AI Companionship
Not that AI has proven to be the best at companionship to begin with. Often prone to sycophancy, bots can affirm what their users tell them and spout the kind of praise a real friend never would. This spring OpenAI rolled back an update to GPT-4o to remove an update that was “overly flattering and agreeable.” (Ideally, friends gas you up, but they never lie to do so.)
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