The Rise of Artificial Friendship.

?? This is a?signal?from the future.?You can use the?signal?to reflect on yourself, society or your business.?

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Kind regards, Jarno Duursma.

Artificial intelligence | Author | Speaker

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Contact? [email protected] and www.jarnoduursma.nl

The Future of Friendship

In the future, more people will use AI-software as a conversation partner and eventually become friends with a digital 'personality'.

Commercial companies have been developing apps for years that are built solely for this purpose. To engage with lonely people and have them feeling attached to the digital friend.

With the advent of large language models, these apps are getting better. And because they are getting better, more people are using them.

There are many new and old examples of this type of software, from friendly and light hearted to sexually suggestive.

From a commercial point of view, virtual friendship is of course very interesting. Users become attached to a digital friend and thus stay in the app for a long time.

For example, on the website Character.ai, you can create your own AI-chatbot. People spend an average of two hours a day there, with an average of 25 minutes per session. The well-known investment firm Andreessen Horowitz has already invested. (Hint: Follow the money)

The revenue models that can be applied to the group of software users are almost infinite.

Friendship

Some users really have feelings of friendship for their AI-friend. For example, when the company Replika modified their AI-friendship software in 2020, and some virtual friends suddenly had a slightly different kind of digital personality, it resulted in a flood of complaints.

Loneliness is a pandemic

The breeding ground for the success of such AI-friendship apps is clear. We have fewer real, deep friendships and more people worldwide feel lonely.

So, it is likely that a part of our society will turn to virtual AI-friendships. An AI-friendship is easy and practical. You download an app, tell a lot about yourself, you can start and stop whenever you want and you never have trouble or hear any nagging. A conversation with someone who is always available, friendly, and seems interested is superficial, but ideal.

But is this a good development? I do not know. In an ideal scenario, we solve loneliness by seeking contact with each other or by visiting each other. However, this apparently does not happen enough, and I see no change in this trend.

Apparently, we as humans have become increasingly less focused on truly profound contact with other people.

((I have so many questions... how does it impact our social skills if we are increasingly conversing with software? Software that is always friendly, interested, and conflict-avoiding?))

AI-conversation in therapy

On the other hand, I can imagine that people are more likely to tell certain personal, shameful matters to software than to another human because the threshold is lower. That will, for example, be an advantage in a low-threshold form of online therapy where you confide matters to an AI-chatbot that you would not quickly tell friends. And in a certain way, this is an advantage because mental health care, at least in the Netherlands, is completely clogged.

This is my call to action!

But in my honest opinion, AI-friendship is a deterioration of our human cohesion. We are transferring our human connectivity to the digital world and thus the 'forcefield of human connection' (for the lack of a better word) is diminishing. We have seen the previous wave with the rise of social media.

Even more so, psychologists attribute a large part of the cause of the decreasing number of friends and increasing feelings of loneliness to the rise of social media.

... Digital contact can be valuable for some, but it is so important that we continue to feel that we are part of a whole. Of mankind. Of planet earth. That we are loved by other people and that we are able to love other humans of flesh and blood. When we are connected with others, the quality of our life increases.

So, for the holidays: send a WhatsApp message to that friend you haven't spoken to in a long time, or call them. Ask them how they are doing. Listen. Send a nice photo, voice message or funny video to all your friends and family. Visit each other, meet up! Shake hands or hug! Make a connection.

Happy holidays & see you next year!

kind regards, Jarno