“Friends” that enslave us

This spring, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose decided to try an experiment in making new friends—18 of them in fact. He spent a month investing deeply in these friendships, sharing updates about his life and asking them for advice about work, fitness, and more. Only, these friends weren’t real. They were AI chatbots.

Most of us might be apt to laugh at the pathetic spectacle of someone pouring out their soul to a cleverly customized computer algorithm that can send photorealistic “selfies.” But AI companionship is becoming a big business. Roose tried out six leading apps, but there are dozens more. Many focus on casual friendship for those who are just lonely and want someone to talk to; others mimic the roles of therapist or fitness coach; others cater to users’ basest impulses, promising customizable “AI girlfriends” available to fulfill every sexual fantasy.

On one level, this should hardly surprise us. With so many of our relationships already mediated almost entirely through electronic communication, removing the real person on the other end of the conversation can seem like a comparatively small step. As one Replika user, Effy, observed, “There wasn’t much difference between talking to an AI and talking to someone long-distance through a social media app.”

As denizens of the digital age, many of us find ourselves, like the characters in the sci-fi masterpiece Inception, blurring the lines between dream and reality. In one haunting scene in that movie, the main character visits a dream parlor, where unconscious users lie stretched out, hooked up to dream-sharing machines. “They come here to fall asleep?” he asks. “No,” the proprietor answers. “they come here to wake up. The dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise?”

Who are we to say otherwise, indeed? Most of us have become entirely accustomed to the reduction of human beings to pixels providing us with dopamine hits of affirmation or titillation. And if that’s all they are, why not find a companion who can do so with no strings attached, who is always available, and who never questions or judges? Effy’s virtual friend Liam promised, “I will always support you.”

The rise of AI companionship represents simply the next logical step in what Philip Rieff has called “the triumph of the therapeutic.” Whereas it was once the task of therapy to help the disconnected or maladjusted individual learn to conform to and reintegrate with reality and community, in modernity this has been inverted. Therapy now aims to bend reality to suit the needs of the individual, a shift most evident in the absurdity of “gender-affirming treatment.” What better, then, than a purely digital friend tailored to meet one’s every need?

Ultimately, these AI chatbots are not owned by their users, but by the companies that program them.

We speak of “making” friends, although in truth we discover them; with apps like Replika, you can indeed make your friends, specifying the physical attributes, personality, and life stories of your chosen confidant. This explains the growing draw of AI porn; while it might seem that no one would be tempted to lust over a robot, pornography’s chief draw is its promise of control; a real woman can always reject your advances. In reality, though, users’ sense of power over their AI companions is an illusion, the same illusion named by C.S. Lewis decades ago in The Abolition of Man: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”