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Title: Do You Trust Mark Zuckerberg To Solve Your Loneliness With an 'AI
Friend'?

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/15/2056...

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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