Friendships are a vital part of most people’s lives. They can be complicated and messy, but a good friendship is worth it, since, as Aristotle said, “without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”
Mark Zuckerberg has a potential solution for those seeking to build new friendships: building new friends using AI. That’s only a slight rewording of the viewpoint the Meta CEO is famous for, among other things, popularizing the term “friending” as a verb. With caveats about the ways human friendships offer things no AI currently can, Zuckerberg explained on a podcast hosted by Dwarkesh Patel that people like to engage with AI chatbots like Meta AI about their personal lives.
And since most Americans have far fewer friends than they’d like, there’s space for AI as an alternative. “As the personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, that will just be really compelling,” Zuckerberg said.
But compelling conversation doesn’t mean real friendship. AI isn’t your friend. It can’t be. And the more we try to make it one, the more we end up misunderstanding both AI and actual friendship. AI is a tool. An amazing, occasionally dazzling, often frustrating tool, but a tool no different than your text message autocomplete or your handy Swiss Army knife. It’s designed to assist you and make your life easier.
It’s not a being. It has no inner monologue. It’s all surface and syntax. A robotic parrot that reads the internet instead of mimicking your catchphrases. Mimicry and scripted empathy are not real connections. They’re just performance without sentience.
Real friendship is not just about someone helping you all the time, selflessly, without ever asking for something in return. If you text your friend and they respond based on a probability matrix, they’re not really being your friend. While I love a clean UI as much as the next person, I don’t confuse it with love.
At best, 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 you can project feelings onto. It’s always there, sure. But it doesn’t care about you. And deep down, you know it.
AI Therapy
Meanwhile, on another podcast with Ben Thompson, Zuckerberg suggested that even if you don’t have a human therapist, you should at least have an AI. Therapy is expensive, and there’s a mental health crisis with more demand than supply. If an AI chatbot can step in and offer comfort to someone who’s struggling, it’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing. And it’s not a bad idea in isolation, but the details can be tricky.
While some chatbot-based wellness apps have shown promise, they’re only necessary because of the enormous resource gap in providing mental health services. After all, a trained therapist does more than rely on your words or big, obvious emotional tone. They pick up on the unsaid. They recognize when a smile hides your spiral. They make judgment calls that algorithms can’t.
Most importantly, they’re bound by ethics in a way no program can match. They’re licensed. No matter how stringent an AI’s rules are now, all it takes is a change in programming for them to upload your emotional baggage to a server farm. That’s before mentioning the irony of a social media company wanting to offer mental health services when their products are often linked to worsening teen mental health and a digital addiction that can isolate people from actual friends.
I talk to AI tools every day. I think AI can be very useful. I think my automatic coffeemaker can be very useful too, even if I’m more likely to be yelling at it to go faster than to bare my soul to it. And AI can support therapists, enhance education, and offer customer service at 3 a.m. without the usual hold music. But it’s not a surrogate for human connection.
We’re not at a point where I fear everyone will retreat from messy, inconvenient, flawed human relationships and opt for the sanitized, low-stakes comfort of a chatbot who always agrees with us. But that doesn’t mean it’s something to look forward to. You can’t scale friendship, and you shouldn’t encourage people to choose software over doing the work of real friendship. An AI will treat you just like it treats everyone, and, as Aristotle also said, “A friend to all is a friend to none.”
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
