Carson Burch ’27 is a government major from Chesapeake, Virginia. He is a member of the History Club, Public Policy Club, Lutheran Students’ Association and Theodore Roosevelt Society. Outside of his studies and social life, he enjoys reading about historical and current events in addition to dinosaurs.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
In the last edition of this great newspaper, I wrote an article discussing how technology is gradually eroding the social bonds that tie people together, looking at examples ranging from TikTok brainrot to the soulless courtship of Hinge. I worry that the trend I identified there of our personal connections degrading with time will only become worse due to the introduction of a new technology: artificial intelligence companions.
Although AI companions offer to bring connection back into our lives, they actually will degrade it further. The connection they offer is illusory, as chatbots are — surprisingly — not people. Time spent conversing with them is time that could instead be allocated toward going out and talking to real people.
I’ve maintained with friends that there is great potential for genuinely chilling pieces of media about AI girlfriends which lure a person in with their fawning disposition and promote a growing disconnection from society. It seems this is already happening in real life: companies announce pendants with AI chatbots that serve as a replacement for friends (notably taking the place of the people around them in the very same ads), and The Atlantic has published a profile of individuals who declare themselves married to chatbots. This technology seems to only be growing, probably because it fills a void of loneliness left by prior innovations.
If this technology were to ever become adopted by a critical mass of users, it would risk breaking down society itself. Society is nothing if not a series of connections between people, and some of the most foundational ones are the bonds of friendship and love. Friends are the people who fulfill our deepest emotional needs and support us when we need it most, and romantic and sexual intimacy meets one of the deepest needs for human connection that exists. Excessive adoption and usage of chatbots risks disrupting all of this, which holds society together, causing people to prioritize artificial connection over real bonds.
Perhaps this technology could be used innocuously, in limited dosages. The Atlantic’s profile, which I mentioned earlier, did note that some of the users still form real relationships with real people, partially because chatbots cannot meet every need. However, I still worry that improvements in AI technology will cause more and more people to become ensnared by the artificial connection and eventually prioritize it above all else. Silicon Valley has long derived its revenues from encouraging ever-greater addiction and dependency and will probably continue to do so in the future. Making chatbots that keep their users in conversation would only further this goal and allow for greater value to be extracted from users.
Even if my most apocalyptic predictions do not come true (and I fully concede they easily may not), I still believe that chatbots will do real damage to our ability to interact. Real relationships are complicated, and people often disagree about a number of things. Navigating this is essential for having healthy connections.
But what if you could create a robot that never dissented from your opinion, never talked back, and had that as your primary friend? It would get rid of those pesky disagreements, alright — and also atrophy your ability to engage with those around you in the real world, something that risks becoming true for the members of Generations Alpha and Beta who will grow up with this technology out in the world.
As I said earlier, this is an emerging technology. It is entirely possible that the world I fear is one which will not emerge. But nonetheless, I do think we should consider the potential negative consequences of AI chatbots becoming widespread, mostly to ensure that we are actively thinking about ways to ensure responsible usage and development. We cannot allow our most important connections to erode.
Making friends and finding love is hard, especially today. A truly shocking number of young people report feeling lonely and have not recently gone on dates. Despite this, we should not allow ourselves to rely on these chatbots to fix our problems. Retreating into the artificiality of an AI-made world would be cowardly and degrading. The temptation is one which we not only can but should resist if we want to fix the very real problems of isolation and once again share a world with one another.
