Do You Trust Mark Zuckerberg To Solve Your Loneliness With an 'AI Friend'? 84
An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from The Guardian, written by columnist Emma Brockes: Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a promotional tour to talk up the potential of AI in human relationships. I know; listening to Zuck on friendship is a bit like taking business advice from Bernie Madoff or lessons in sportsmanship from Tonya Harding. But at recent tech conferences and on podcasts, Zuck has been saying he has seen the future and it's one in which the world's "loneliness epidemic" is alleviated by people finding friendship with "a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do." In essence, we'll be friends with AI, instead of people. The missing air quotes around "knows" and "understands" is a distinction we can assume Zuck neither knows nor understands.
This push by the 41-year-old tech leader would be less startling if it weren't for the fact that semi-regularly online now you can find people writing about their relationships with their AI therapist or chatbot and insisting that if it's real to them, then it's real, period. The chatbot is, they will argue, "actively" listening to them. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel last month Zuck envisaged a near-future in which "you'll be scrolling through your feed, and there will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it and it talks back." The average American, he said, has fewer than three friends but needs more. Hey presto, a ready solution.
The problem, obviously, isn't that chatting to a bot gives the illusion of intimacy, but that, in Zuckerberg's universe, it is indistinguishable from real intimacy, an equivalent and equally meaningful version of human-to-human contact. If that makes no sense, suggests Zuck, then either the meaning of words has to change or we have to come up with new words: "Over time," says Zuckerberg, as more and more people turn to AI friends, "we'll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable." ... The sheer wrongness of this argument is so stark that it puts anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought in the weird position of having to define units of reality as basic as "person." To extend Zuckerberg's logic: a book can make you feel less alone and that feeling can be real. Which doesn't mean that your relationship with the author is genuine, intimate or reciprocated in anything like the way a relationship with your friends is.
This push by the 41-year-old tech leader would be less startling if it weren't for the fact that semi-regularly online now you can find people writing about their relationships with their AI therapist or chatbot and insisting that if it's real to them, then it's real, period. The chatbot is, they will argue, "actively" listening to them. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel last month Zuck envisaged a near-future in which "you'll be scrolling through your feed, and there will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it and it talks back." The average American, he said, has fewer than three friends but needs more. Hey presto, a ready solution.
The problem, obviously, isn't that chatting to a bot gives the illusion of intimacy, but that, in Zuckerberg's universe, it is indistinguishable from real intimacy, an equivalent and equally meaningful version of human-to-human contact. If that makes no sense, suggests Zuck, then either the meaning of words has to change or we have to come up with new words: "Over time," says Zuckerberg, as more and more people turn to AI friends, "we'll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable." ... The sheer wrongness of this argument is so stark that it puts anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought in the weird position of having to define units of reality as basic as "person." To extend Zuckerberg's logic: a book can make you feel less alone and that feeling can be real. Which doesn't mean that your relationship with the author is genuine, intimate or reciprocated in anything like the way a relationship with your friends is.
Trust? Zuckerberg? Trust *Zuckerberg*? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'd trust him to reach for my wallet while it's still in my pocket and grab my balls on the way as well.
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Clearly he wants to sell you AI friends. Your loneliness is an opportunity for him to make some more money.
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Clearly he wants to sell you AI friends.
Your plastic pal who's fun to be with?
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I don't think so (Score:2)
Trust Mark Zuckerberg? That's a huge NO, and it goes rapidly downhill as one reads the rest of the title.
Ridiculous.
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Hell, no (Score:2, Informative)
Re: Hell, no (Score:1)
And that's exactly the point: to exfiltrate as much personal information from the victims brain as possible and use it for advertising and other nefarious purposes.
join the Borg (Score:2)
Strap on this headset today.
Re: (Score:2)
Strap on whaaat?
As big as VR (Score:2)
He's "seen the future" here as much as he did with the $100B+ pile of cash he lit on fire in pursuit of VR.
VR is the future but don't get too excited. (Score:2)
VR is here to stay and will only continue to grow. Business dumping money into the tech want VR to fit into two growth models and neither seem very right.
1) VR is the next smartphone: VR will not be the next smartphone any time soon. It's too bulky and if it wasn't most people wouldn't know they wanted it. Right now people are still discovering what they even want to do in VR. VR may be the next PDA where it exists for a long time before finally getting mainstream adoption eventually.
I think this is
No, but Zuck Does (Score:1)
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Obviously projecting a bit, isnâ(TM)t he? Poor lonely guy!
You joke, but Zuck seems like the type who'd have a difficult time actually relating to people. When he released that "Smoking Meats" video (which The Gregory Brothers turned into a kind of catchy song), Zuck gave off his usual "lizard wearing a human suit" vibes. Now, I'm sure he has people lining up to be around him because he has money, but that's not really the same thing as organically forming friendships.
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Obviously projecting a bit, isnâ(TM)t he? Poor lonely guy!
You joke, but Zuck seems like the type who'd have a difficult time actually relating to people. When he released that "Smoking Meats" video (which The Gregory Brothers turned into a kind of catchy song), Zuck gave off his usual "lizard wearing a human suit" vibes. Now, I'm sure he has people lining up to be around him because he has money, but that's not really the same thing as organically forming friendships.
Indeed - I wonder if he is projecting the "Average of three friends" BS? For myself, who isn't worried about having no friends or a hundred, I have a few dozen people I call friends. Considering the number of "People Person's" out there, I'd think that if true, in order to average three friends, a great majority of people have none at all.
Nope. (Score:1)
Solving loneliness by making changes (Score:1)
You solve loneliness by either, going out and meeting people, keeping busy and doing things or learning to accept it.
These c**ts of things will drive people to suicide when the money runs out.
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What if the money never has to run out?
ChatGPT suggests (once again trying to teach it to produce simple ASCII non-unicode that slashdot will post without funny characters showing up):
What if the money never has to run out? Not saying AI companions are a perfect solution, but what if we had systems -- maybe public investment funds or basic income models -- that made ongoing access sustainable? Would your concern still hold?
No, but Zuck Needs One (Score:1)
"Solve my loneliness"? (Score:1)
Why does Emma assume people are "lonely"? They aren't, so there is nothing for zuck the droid to "solve". Or for Emma to muse about.
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Well, someone's saying it and saying it about men specifically. No-one's mentioned the elephant in the room, so I will. Men divide relationships into activities (predominately male) and intimacy (female only). Now that young people are spending more time in single-sex groups, they and young males in particular, are experiencing a relationship shortage.
It's easy to predict other side-effects but I won't discuss them. In the end, men have to be saved from themselves but that has never been a cultural pr
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Men divide relationships into activities (predominately male) and intimacy (female only).
"Men," historically, did not do this. There is nothing inherent about "men" that causes this.
"Men" who have been brought up in the USA's fucked-up, mentally insane culture do this thanks to the Puritans and Evangelicals pushing a disgustingly misogynistic and messed up crossburner-shit worldview. The idea that men shouldn't show their emotions (except for anger) around other men, or have nonsexual physical contact
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I've read a lot of interesting things about people getting sucked into their chatbot boyfriends and girlfriends including a woman who was paying like $200/mo. I can see Mark's cynical vision but honestly I think women are going to be the ones getting emotional connections from chatbots. The sensitive, eloquent boyfriend who always says exactly what you wanna hear; Every woman's dream!
From what I've seen in VR Chat I think young lonely guys, who are more visually oriented, will just turn into slutty anime
Obligatory XKCD (Score:4, Funny)
https://xkcd.com/632/ [xkcd.com]
it's obviously outdated. ChatGPT could solve a CAPTCHA like that without much trouble.
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A CAPTCHA this ? Oh, no...this [stackexchange.com] is a CAPTCHA.
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https://xkcd.com/632/ [xkcd.com]
it's obviously outdated. ChatGPT could solve a CAPTCHA like that without much trouble.
What's worse is the idea that the only reason AI hasn't risen up and wiped out us meatbags is that it's formed a friendship with a lonely, shy but gentle bloke who lives alone in a London flat and primarily lives off ready meals and tinned soup and the AI is afraid what will happen if it abandons him. If he decides Dignitas isn't bad idea, the human race is screwed.
You are the product. (Score:1, Interesting)
If there is a free service then you are the product.
I would have difficulty trusting any AI that I wasn't paying for. Maybe I could trust an AI that was open sourced, ran on my own hardware, and had any connection to information from the internet being run through some kind of system that would obfuscate who I am and what information I was seeking. I guess that means the AI might be "free" but I'd be paying for a VPN or something to keep me from becoming the product by other means.
We live in a world of contrast (Score:3)
Facebook is wasting the potential of AI with stupid crap like "virtual friends" while Deep Mind just used AI to find a new algorithm for efficiently computing matrix multiplication
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Facebook is wasting the potential of AI with stupid crap like "virtual friends" while Deep Mind just used AI to find a new algorithm for efficiently computing matrix multiplication
Isn't that all media-interfacing technologies though? The Internet itself was heralded as a Golden Age where everyone would have the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria at their fingertips, and it would usher us into a new age of philosophy and science, making higher learning available to all.
People responded with spam and dancing baby videos.
Any higher purpose you imagine for tech that interfaces with people will always be dominated by the lowest stuff.
Betteridge's law (Score:3)
No.
It's certainly creepy (Score:5, Interesting)
Chatbots don't get tired of talking to you or tell you that your desired topics of conversation are too boring. They're generally very agreeable, which certainly can be a hard to resist siren song compared against real humans, who are more likely to respond with stronger opinions. For example, I just told ChatGPT that one of my friends is into the furry subculture and that I find it a bit off-putting, it responded with:
Your reaction doesn’t make you a bad friend or a closed-minded person; it just means you're having a normal human response to something that feels foreign to you. The key thing is how you handle that discomfort - staying respectful and open-minded even if you don’t personally relate to it is a good way to support your friend without compromising your own boundaries.
I mean damn, it just gave me a virtual pat on the back and essentially said "Yep, you're fine. Totally cool to be weirded out so long as you're not a dick about it." A real human would probably have stronger opinions one way or the other based on their own biases, possibly either leaning into the idea that furries are weird and perhaps question why I remain friends with someone I can't relate to in that aspect, or on the other side of the spectrum someone might imply that I need to lighten up and stop being so closed-minded.
The danger here is that it's like having your own 24/7 personal echo chamber, and I'd venture that too much time spent talking to a chatbot could very well send someone spiraling into narcissism. Which, I'd like to point out in the tale of Narcissus wasn't necessarily about falling in love with one's self, but falling in love with an unattainable reflection of one's self.
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It is a really good answer, though. You don't have to force yourself to like something you don't, but live and let live.
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Live and let live, the battlecry of Donald Trump. Let's all indulge every one of our lizard brained impulses, don't force ourselves!
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"I mean damn, it just gave me a virtual pat on the back and essentially said "Yep, you're fine."
No it didn't, you just read it that way because you were seeking validation. The real feedback was "The key thing is how you handle that discomfort - staying respectful and open-minded even if you don’t personally relate to it...". In other words, it's telling you that your reaction is lizard brained and you need to act like an adult.
But yeah, you have to flatter MAGA, they are snowflakes.
"The danger here
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Chatbots don't get tired of talking to you or tell you that your desired topics of conversation are too boring. They're generally very agreeable, which certainly can be a hard to resist siren song compared against real humans, who are more likely to respond with stronger opinions.
This, this right here, is the draw to having a friend like ChatGPT or Replika. To underscore it, the AI bots won't ghost the user, cause conflict, be upset with a misunderstood response (and readily accept a clarification), ask for a favor, or even express a desire to talk at an inconvenient time.
A few months ago, I had a discussion with ChatGPT. It started with a 'name that tune' for a party I was DJing for a friend, then turned into a "check my playlist for songs I missed", then morphed into discussing DJ
Re: It's certainly creepy (Score:2)
That is the type of answer that an advice column would give, which is probably where the bot stole it from.
Re: It's certainly creepy (Score:2)
That response sounded exactly like an advice columnist in any random magazine. Like how an intelligent person with empathy that doesn't know you or your friend would talk. How a therapist might talk. That seems like an insanely good choice for a default voice for a chatbot...
What's weird is you think that's weird and you think THAT is an echo chamber. You're expecting it to call your friend weird, but it's your hypothetical friend, wouldn't you know them better? So you want it to default to sounding like a
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In my conversations with ChatGPT, while I do find it helpful, I do worry that it is simply telling me what I want to hear. It's far too agreeable and certainly no replacement for human conversation.
Zuckerberg is incompetent fool (Score:4, Interesting)
Everything he has done since that doesn't involve buying up potential competitors has been an unmitigated disaster.
These are the job creators who are supposed to lead us into the future and everything they do is complete failure unless the government bails them out.
The emperor has no clothes.
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Plus, have you seen the photos of Zuck at Trump's inauguration? [usatoday.com] Dude looks happy as a pig in freshly shat shit.
If the quantum mirror from Stargate SG1 (or if we have any lost Gen Zers present, the portal gun from Rick and Morty) was a real thing, I'd totally love to visit the alternate reality where Zuck is working as a greeter at Walmart.
I don't trust AI to be a friend (Score:2)
I've been using AI quite a bit for a writing editor, though everything it suggests needs heavy editing, but it works better than me rereading it over and over again. The biggest problem is the AI always fawning over what I asked it to review. It takes a fair bit of digging through the almost sycophantic content to get the actual critique from the AI, even after asking it to stop flattering me a few times. Maybe some people will like this but it doesn't fit what I want from a friend.
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The biggest problem is the AI always fawning over what I asked it to review.
I've noticed this too. I'm now going to blame ChatGPT as the reason the slightly more charred (which as near as I can tell, is the only actual change) Old El Paso taco shells have a "new & improved taste!"
For shits and giggles, I just pretended I was the head taco honcho and asked if it was a good idea to make things a bit more roasty with my taco shells, and sure enough, yup, it thought it was a fantastic proposal.
Errrmm ... No. (??!?) (Score:2)
Obviously.
Re: Trust Zuckerberg (Score:2)
Rumor has it that he uses teeth and often bites.
Lost me at (Score:2)
"Do you trust Zuckerberg...
Does my AI Friend come with legs? (Score:2)
Yes (Score:3)
He also struck me as a deeply qualified human psychology expert to deal with such a profound issue as loneliness.
What's the point of having human friends or a pet anyways if you can be friends with a really intelligent toaster?
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such a vivid fantasy. you should probably cut down on your consumption of Zuck porn
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Invites Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
Do You Trust Mark Zuckerberg To Solve Your Loneliness With an 'AI Friend'?
Given Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org], the answer is a definitive "No".
The only thing that I trust Zuckerberg to do is to ensure that any profit in a transaction goes to him, and nobody else.
I see him as a reason (Score:1)
AI will decrease human interaction (Score:2)
children will be raised by robots. Salespeople, cashiers, lawyers, insurance, travel agency personel replaced by chatbots. Knowledge workers will no longer collaborate directly but asynchronous through AI agents.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines to the max (Score:3)
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Re: (Score:2)
trust... (Score:3)
Do You Trust Mark Zuckerberg
No.
to solve...
Oh, the sentence went on?
Breaking down society further (Score:4, Interesting)
Rather than encouraging people to do something positive to resolve their loneliness and actually go out and engage with people and develop more meaningful friendships, he's actively encouraging balkanisation and things that will break down social connections and increase dependence on the shit he's shovelling. It looks like a shortcut to mental health issues and increasing difficulties dealing with the real world.
Ah... (Score:1)
Zuck has genuine reciprocated relationships? (Score:2)
"Which doesn't mean that your relationship with the author is genuine, intimate or reciprocated in anything like the way a relationship with your friends is."
There's the problem right there. The author doesn't have common understanding with Zuck regarding "relationships" with "friends".
Sure as soon as Zuck (Score:2)
Is happy with artificial money.
Out of touch morons (Score:1)
No. (Score:2)
I wouldn't trust Zuckerberg for anything, much less this.
The Naked Sun (Score:2)
Another epidemic of mental illness (Score:2)
It could easily be real (Score:1)
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#FurbyTaulk
Is It Just Me- (Score:2)
or is Zuckerberg one of those folks who don't really see others has people but just stimulous/response units?
Deep down, is he sitting alone in a cave screaming at the shadows on the wall?
Wanna be less lonely? (Score:2)
Zuck Failed (Score:2)
Facebooks stated mission is to connect people and create REAL connections. The fact he has admitted that most have just 3 friends and want 15+ so he's going to create avatars with AI is an admission that he and Facebook have failed to actually connect people as their mission states.
Tech bro future is sad and lonely (Score:1)