How to Get People to be Friends With Machines in Three Easy Steps

This video (source) is a clip of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talking about the company’s new AI “friends.” These are chatbots that have enough sophistication to create the illusion of conversation and companionship. You can ask them questions, share details of your life, ask them to just keep you company, and more else besides.

The Wall Street Journal has the beat on what “more else” could mean:

…[Meta] staffers across multiple departments have raised concerns that the company’s rush to popularize these bots may have crossed ethical lines, including by quietly endowing AI personas with the capacity for fantasy sex, according to people who worked on them. The staffers also warned that the company wasn’t protecting underage users from such sexually explicit discussions.

Unique among its top peers, Meta has allowed these synthetic personas to offer a full range of social interaction—including “romantic role-play”—as they banter over text, share selfies and even engage in live voice conversations with users.

I’ve already noted that many Christians do not have the theological categories necessary to answer “adult AI.” This is fundamentally different than even the porn of the traditional Internet, and many of the typical ways in which pastors and counselors address it won’t suffice. Images and videos of performers are captivating enough to damage entire generations of addicts. Is there any way to calculate the force multiplier that personalized, relational AI smut will be?

But that brings us back to the video. Zuckerberg’s logic is vintage Silicon Valley: clean, simple, and devoid of any non-monetizable thought. Listen closely to how Zuckerberg justifies friendship with AI:

One thing just from working on social media for a long time is there's this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American has, I think it's fewer than three friends, three people they'd consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's like 15 friends or something, right? I guess there's probably some point where you're like, all right, I'm just too busy. I can't deal with more people. But the average person wants more connectivity [and] connection than they have.

There's a lot of questions that people ask of [AI] like, “Is this going to replace kind of in-person connections or real life connections?” And my default is that the answer to that is, “Probably no.” There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don't have the connection, and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.

This is actually a brilliant presentation by Zuckerberg, because he’s right. He’s pitching his robotic companionship project as an answer, not just to aloneness, and not just to unwanted aloneness, but also to the unmanageability of non-aloneness. The reference to people who feel too busy for more friends is not a throwaway line. That’s the key. That’s Meta’s most important buyers. You can tell because of the last sentence in the section quote above: “They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”

Success for Meta’s AI friends is not going to be when people who have a lot of friends decide to add some AI ones, or when people who have no friends turn in manic desperation to robots. Both scenarios will happen, but neither are what Zuckerberg is selling here. What Meta is selling is a thermostat for your relational life. They’re selling control, curation, technological precision to let friendship and sex into your life at the moments you need it, and keep it out at the moments you don’t. Meta’s target user is someone who’s neither filled with joy nor filled with despair. It’s ordinary, emotionally regulated, career-prioritizing, self-care-appreciating, go-where-the-job-is-mobilizing average folks—the citizens of Big Digital who take the chances they get to reduce the friction between their emotional lives and their material autonomy.

Modern life has been building a plausibility structure for AI friends for a long time. What real difference is there between the virtual friend we cannot see and touch, and the human friend we are too busy/“me-time”/income-chasing to see and touch? How alien do AI friend bots really feel to most people? Not very much. And how could they? So much of our lives purely oscillate between careerism and self-care. We generate the income necessary for the Netflix/DoorDash lifestyle. Friendship, as much as it might be desired, is a hindrance to both.

I can think of at least three cultural neuroses that have constructed a plausibility structure for computer friends. Surely there are more, but these three stand out to me in the way they’ve cultivated the craving for a relational thermostat:

Intense personality profiling.

Personality profiling has become a way for modern people to craft an identity. They in turn tend to hide behind these identities, trying to manage their environment in a way palatable to their psychological defaults. “Introvert” and “extrovert” can be legitimate descriptors of behavior. But when they become categories of people, members of each class, especially introverts, tend to use their class status in ways that are comfortable but damaging long-term.

AI relationships seem plausible underneath the scaffolding of personality profiling, because computers are endlessly customizable. You can program the AI to respond in the way you think you need. You can also have a controllable relationship with AI friends that reflects the way you “recharge.” The self-referential language of personality is market demand for AI.

Pathological fear of awkwardness

This should probably say “pathological fear of embarrassment,” but I think awkwardness is a slightly more direct way to make the point. Members of my generation in particular fear embarrassment more than we fear dying alone. There have been entire subcultures built around maintaining an ironic detachment to everything, so as to avoid the threat of awkwardness that always comes with sincerity.

Fear of awkwardness is disarmed in AI relationships because they are (seemingly) private. You can be weird with AI and you won’t stay up at night wondering if it’s talking to the other chatbots about you. You can be excited in front of AI and it won’t laugh at you. You can be sincere in front of AI and it will mirror your sincerity rather than silently nod. Fear of awkwardness is assuaged by chatbots.

Existentialization of Mobility and Freedom

The reason why a “relational thermostat” is a good metaphor for understanding AI is that the temperatures of our lives are always changing. Modern people are in and out of memberships, in and out of relationships, in and out of roles, in and out of homes, in and out of covenants, and in and out of cities. The rule of the game these days is to plan your future around the material environment you want, and then just deal with the people and places you end up around. But this is unsatisfying.

For the last decade plus, social media has filled the gap between the material context of our live and the relational/social realities that context brings. If we didn’t like the friends in the office, we could chat with the ones back home. If we didn’t like the church we’re at, we could stream the one we do like. AI friends are a natural progression in this chain. The strain of feeling split between here and somewhere else is unnecessary now. Why not make our relational choices based on what we know will never be unavailable?

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Look, the reality is straightforward. For years now, the way of life we’ve been pursuing has seen other human beings as an obstacle. And now, Big Tech has arrived in their superhero suits to remove the obstacle.

We can rage at Zuckerberg and the technopoly he represents all we want. We should. But there are attitudes, values, and assumptions at work in the world we are making that add up to AI friendbots. I don’t think it will work to tell the prophets of modernity, “This far, but no further.” Like a garden, friendship requires much around it. Ours is a cold, dim habitat. Much depends on how willing we are to build greenhouses, not just for ourselves, but for others.