alt Hacker NewsThe masses won't think it's awful though, and that's the thing that will facilitate its explosion as a commonality across the planet. The masses are extremely lonely all over the planet. Along with desperately loving entertainment, they desperately want companionship.
Just as human intelligence is merely one form of intelligence, human companionship will be merely one form of companionship. AI friends will offer a new type. And for the masses it's going to feel very real and very legitimate. They'll like their AI friends as much or more than they like their human friends.
And the fake friend explosion can happen first quietly, which eliminates the initial shame phase problem. Nobody will have to know you have fake friends, or how much you interact with them. Until it's common it'll be viewed as shameful (pathetic, proof of social ineptness) and mocked by society, then it'll be normalized. This idea isn't novel, it's extremely obvious and right now we're just waiting for a few pieces of the LLM puzzle to get to the point where they're good enough to facilitate high quality artificial friends.
It'll happen shockingly rapidly when it sparks; slowly at first and then in the span of 3-5 years we'll go from nobody having or being willing to admit to having artificial friends, to everybody openly discussing it. It will then seem more odd to not have artificial friends, like people that refuse to own smartphones or use the Internet. People will start commonly referring to their artificial friends by name in conversations with other human friends. These behaviors will become entirely socially normal.
"Yeah I had Alice clean the house before I went on vacation." Every major personal robot, every artificial friend, will get a name. Humans name their vehicles, so they're definitely going to name their $10k-$20k house bot and the artificial friends they spend large amounts of time with. When you go on a long drive (etc), your artificial friends will be there to keep you company, and they will remember your life events as well or better than you do (if you give them access to that recording/memory capability).
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> Humans name their vehicles, so they're definitely going to name their $10k-$20k house bot
huh. I can only think of one friend I've ever known who named their car.
Anyways, not saying I necessarily disagree with the rest of what you say, but it's out there, for sure. We're a good distance away from an AI that can meaningfully act like a friend.
(Though who knows what AI will look like in even 10 years? I'm not ruling this out)
Maybe some people will like to have artificial friends with genuine two-way relationship, but I think most of us want artificial servants. Robots that clean our house, keep us company, or maybe even act as romantic partner without asking anything in return. Maybe some of them will feel like friends, but in the end, we are their owners and they are our servants. Genuine friendship requires freedom and autonomy for the other side to walk away if they so choose, and are we really going to give that to our AI bots? I doubt it.