AI Isn’t Your Friend. Good Thing, Too.

The dystopian novel The Singularity by Dino Buzzati came out in 1960. It’s about a reclusive scientist who tries to create a sentient artificial intelligence (AI) based on his deceased wife. In the end, the machine starts to envy the humans for their bodies and turns murderous.

It’s a terrifying story, but in some ways the fact is beginning to resemble the fiction. No, the machines aren’t trying to kill us. But their inventors are trying to make them as humanlike as possible. (READ MORE from Peter Biles: Critics of Lolita Need to Learn How to Read Fiction)

In July, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur Avi Schiffman announced the “friend,” an AI device that the user wears like a lanyard. The friend can connect to your phone via Bluetooth and send texts at random times throughout the day. It’s a constant source of feedback designed to “be with you wherever you go.” It’s like ChatGPT, only personalized, like a buddy, there to comfort you when you’re sad or celebrate your victories. You know — the things actual friends are typically supposed to do.

As if the image of each of us going around depending on our digital, imaginary friends weren’t sad enough, the truly tragic aspect of the new gadget is the creator’s motivation for making it.

“Friend is an expression of how lonely I’ve felt,” Schiffman wrote in a blog post on July 31st, which is International Friendship Day. That was the day he officially launched friend and shared it with the world. My heart aches for Schiffman, and I commend him for his honesty. It’s rare to find leaders in the tech world who are so vulnerable and transparent about why they’re developing their products. But I fear that Schiffman’s struggles with loneliness won’t be solved by his sophisticated new development.

Schiffman isn’t alone in his feelings of isolation. Today’s youth are arguably the most disconnected generation ever to walk the earth, growing up on screens with little outside play and undergoing prolonged adolescence. Gen Z, my generation, grew up with the malaise of digital technologies that promised to connect people but ended up only driving them farther apart.

Before Schiffman’s “friend,” social media proxied in-person relationships. Despite the data now emerging linking social media to teen depression and anxiety, Silicon Valley figures still fall for the fallacy that new tech can meet perennial human needs. It can’t — but claiming it can make us much lonelier in the long run.

I realized fairly early on in my teenage foray into Facebook and Instagram that something about the infinite scroll was changing the way I saw real people. If you swipe through dozens of profiles, passing over most of them, “following” a few, then pretty soon those faces lose any connection with the actual human beings.

Like on the Tinder dating app, I was looking for the people who might interest me, who might offer me a positive feedback loop, who could add to my ever-growing list of friends and followers.

Pretty soon, it became clear that social media was not about friendship but about consumption on behalf of a lonely ego — and the only way to get a semblance of community was to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. In short, social media was about consuming the idea of friends, not actually making real ones.

This isn’t to say social media friendships never lead to genuine connections. People can develop actual friendships and dialogues on Instagram and X, and of course, dating apps end in marriage for a lot of people, including a few of my friends. But it’s easy to treat digital technology as an end in itself, depending on it like people used to depend on their actual families, friends, and broader communities.

No Substitute For a Friend

It happened with social media, and now it’s happening with personalized AI systems like Schiffman’s “friend.” AI is already fairly ubiquitous in our world. From Google Maps to facial recognition, most of us live with AI in our pockets.

But because of new models that can imitate human language so well, it’s gone from being a legitimate tool to a tailor-made companion. AI girlfriends, therapists, and even preachers are hitting the tech scene, offering guidance, romance, and yes, friendship — the qualities of life that we sorely lack in our modern world.

But the more we treat gadgets like they’re people, the more we may end up treating people like they’re gadgets: designed for our own comfort, there when we need them, able to be turned off when we don’t. (READ MORE: We’re Missing the Plot When It Comes to AI)

Schiffman and millions of others today are lonely. And many people in my generation have bought the assumption that rapidly evolving technologies can be made humanlike enough to satisfy our hunger for relationships. If the 2010s taught us anything, though, it’s that we need each other, not digital avatars of each other. We need our families and our friends, not another talking bot who seems to care but really can’t, and never will.

Peter Biles is a writer and a contributor for Young Voices. A novelist as well as an essayist, he is the author of three books, most recently Through the Eye of Old Man Kyle. 

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