By Mallory Mattingly
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that artificial intelligence could be used for emotional support.
“Already, one of the main things we see people using Meta AI for is talking through difficult conversations they need to have with people in their lives,” Zuckerberg said on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast. “‘I’m having this issue with my girlfriend. Help me have this conversation.’ Or, ‘I need to have a hard conversation with my boss at work. How do I have that conversation?’ That’s pretty helpful.”
Related: AI Dangers Keep Emerging: What You Need to Know About Chatbot ‘Companions’
“As the personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, that will just be really compelling,” the CEO continued. “Here’s one stat from working on social media for a long time that I always think is crazy. The average American has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has a demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s something like 15 friends or something.”
“But the average person wants more connection than they have. There’s a lot of concern people raise like, ‘Is this going to replace real-world, in-person connections?'” Zuckerberg added. “And my default is that the answer to that is probably not. All these things are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don’t have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”
However, experts are warning people that this is not the case. People who use AI companions are the most vulnerable to being harmed by them because they already experience loneliness, according to Relevant Magazine.
“Social media was a gateway drug to AI companionship,” Dr. Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told CNN. “First, we talked to each other through machines. Now we talk directly to machines. We became accustomed to looking to a screen for attachment.”
The reality is that true “intimacy requires vulnerability.”
“What AI offers is connection without vulnerability,” Turkle said. “You are not getting a sustaining form of intimacy and connection. You are getting a non-nourishing combination that may give the sense of a quick fix, but is not sustaining.”
“We are giving away what’s most precious about being a person in order to have this friction-free pseudo-relationship,” she added.
While Zuckerberg is promoting AI companions, these fake relationships risk fostering emotional dependency and deepening social isolation by replacing the messy, vulnerable and necessary complexities of real human relationships.
Read Next: ‘I Want to Have My Normal Brain Back’: Teens Catch on to AI Dangers
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
– Content: +1Share:
– Content: +2