Recent tragic cases in the US of teenagers taking their life after emotional conversations with chatbots showed that the inevitable rise of AI ‘friends’ will need proper guardrails.
Editor’s note: This article references cases of suicide. If you need support, please see a list of relevant support lines in Ireland here. And international helplines here.
I have a lot of different friends. I have a friend who I’ve known since I was four and I genuinely feel he is having his best possible time when he looks better than me, but he’s sweet and young at heart and I love him. I have a friend who I only really go out with to party. She is wild and funny and bold and can drink me under the table, but we’ve only had two or three meaningful conversations in 15 years. I love her too. I have a friend who I slagged mercilessly when we were younger and 35 years later it still fills me with immense regret and shame. She knows this. I love her. I have a friend who is always badgering me about my manners and has taken on the role of my mother somehow. She’s amazing and annoying, I love her, too. Our friends, our relationships with our friends – they’re not perfect, but they are ‘real’.
However, if you are looking for a ‘perfect’ friend, then you may be in luck. Several companies are trying to offer you exactly this as a subscription service – platonic pocket pals, if you will. The level of sophistication of these offerings has come quite a ways since Microsoft’s Twitter bot Tay which started innocently enough, but within hours had been corrupted by the internet into a racist monster nearly a decade ago.
Yes, nearly every science fiction writer and filmmaker has warned us of the dangers of human-robot relationships. But what if they were wrong? What if AI can offer us the sort of companionship that a real person could never give?
To dispel any doubts, passing even the strictest version of the Turing test is within a fingertip’s reach. Given enough information and the correct training, we absolutely have the technology today to create a convincing persona that is indistinguishable from a human. It just hasn’t been where the money is.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are productivity tools. They use natural language because it is helpful to users. Although these companies (and others) have made enormous strides towards a seamless human-like interaction, it has not really been their number-one priority.
A space rife with danger
It’s also a space that is rife with danger. The deaths of two American teenagers Adam Raine and Sewell Setzer – both of whom died by suicide after lengthy and deeply emotional conversations with chatbots – were horrific and tragic. That guardrails failed these children casts a long, dark shadow, and the companies involved are currently embroiled in lawsuits filed by the respective parents looking for justice.
It’s undeniable that the AI systems Raine and Setzer used weren’t trained to deal with teenagers with serious mental health issues. But because these friendly AI systems failed doesn’t mean that all systems will fail.
This is what Berlin-based AI start-up Born is betting on. They have recently raised $15m in Series A funding to develop AI companions to “combat loneliness”. The tagline says it all: “We believe that your next favourite human … isn’t.”
Replika has long been established in the FAAS industry (friend as a service) – and your own Replika companion can look and act however you instruct it. A flirty Donald Trump or a bromance with Batman, you can be pals with whomever you like.
Before you look down your nose, you can’t deny these friends serve a need. Replika have 30m daily users who exchange an average of 70 messages per day. The average session length is 15 minutes. That is a lot longer than I spend with any one of my human friends. Is that a good or a bad thing? Truthfully, it’s hard to say.
Loneliness prevalent
Loneliness is higher than it has ever been in many of the world’s most developed countries. Around 20pc of Irish adults report feel lonely most of the time, the highest incidence across all EU countries surveyed in 2022. By contrast, countries such as the Netherlands, Austria and Spain report loneliness rates at or below 10pc.
In an ideal world, the solution to this is more time outdoors, more time doing social hobbies, more time being open to meeting new people and making real friends and companions. Is having a rewarding, fun, casual friendship with an AI also part of the solution? My gut says no, but my brain says it has to be. Numerous studies show that friendship is associated with lower depressive symptoms. Those studies, of course, don’t say that the friend in question has to be human.
LLMs (large language models) are obviously trained on large amounts of language. They can be trained on good, helpful supportive conversations rather than the sewers of the internet. We can build chatbots today that are the best of friends. They could listen empathetically to all of our worries, encourage calm reflection in moments of anxiety and help us cope with negative thoughts with techniques and approaches based on real, clinical evidence.
AI friends won’t be sycophantic, either. They might challenge us if we’re being unfair or get the hump if we’re rude, advise reconciliation if we’ve argued with our partner. Does it matter if the person we are speaking to is real if they help us to be better, happier, less lonely people?
What sort of effect they will have on loneliness or our messy relationships is uncertain, but like so much in the technology world these days, AI friends are coming, whether we are ready or not. Knowing the difference between a good pal and a toxic relationship is going to be more important than ever. So will being a better friend ourselves – because for the first time in human history, we’re about to face some serious competition.
For more information about Jonathan McCrea’s Get Started with AI, click here.
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