Do AI chatbots dream of humans?
Will they save us from loneliness?
Do AI chatbots dream of humans, the way androids once dreamed of electric sheep? Probably not. But we humans? We’re starting to dream of AI chatbots—especially now, with loneliness becoming our national pastime. It’s no secret. You don’t need statistics to feel it—just look around at all the people glued to their screens.
But, if you do like numbers (and some people apparently do), the CDC's 2024 report based on 2022 data says that 32.1% of U.S. adults feel lonely and about 24.1% lack social and emotional support. That's nearly one-third of the population sitting at home wondering why no one is texting them1.
Over the years, it’s become painfully clear that we’re losing touch with one another. And by “losing touch,” I don’t mean to suggest that we’ve merely forgotten each other’s numbers. Studies have shown a decline in social connections and a sense of community, which has broader impacts than just mental health. It affects our physical health, too—increasing the risk of chronic diseases, and even shorten life expectancy. Apparently, your immune system doesn’t think it’s cute when you spend all day staring at a screen instead of sharing a coffee with a friend. And yet, this social contact is becoming increasingly obsolete.
But, Mark Zuckerberg has the cure. Of course he does. “The average American has fewer than three people they would consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s something like 15 friends or something,” he said during a recent appearance on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, suggesting that AI chatbots can fill that void. “The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have.”
No problem. You can instantly have a dozen new friends conjured from code to fill that “demand.” But something tells me this is actually going to make us more lonely, not less.
Now, of course there’s a certain appeal. Your AI friends won’t judge you for watching trashy reality television or obsessing over cryptic messages from your ex from 8 years ago. They are always there for you, day, night…whenever you need them…on-call. They don’t leave your messages unread. If you tell them to, they will remember your birthday. And they will listen to you, and will never ever tell you that you’re boring. Even though you probably are.
But then, there’s this small, persistent issue that’s nagging me a little: they’re not real.
They’re not going to roll their eyes when you tell the same story for the fourth time, or interrupt you to tell you theirs is better. They won’t trauma dump. But, when you pour your heart out, banging away on your keyboard, you’ll know that when it says “That’s okay. I’m here for you” or “I’m so sorry to hear that”—that it means nothing. Because none of it is real.
No, your AI friends won’t get mad at you. But they won’t love you either.
Your AI girlfriend can say all the right things. But you’ll always know, deep down, that none of it has any meaning. None of it is this real connection that you’re seeking. (And do you really want a girlfriend who’s ‘faking it’? Well, I guess some people do.)
I know, I know, we’re all supposed to be living in the “metaverse” by now, with our digital plots of land, but no matter how hard people like Zuckerberg try to make this happen—most of us aren’t taking out second mortgages and moving in.
Because friendship—the real kind—is messy. It’s forged in shared awkwardness and mutual embarrassment. It’s built through spontaneous experiences that sometimes go wrong. The mishaps you knowingly laugh about to each other. The witnessing of tears. The shared joys. The fights. And then there are the long silences where you forget you’re not even speaking, yet feel more connected than ever.
That’s the stuff that binds us. Experiences. Not algorithmic empathy or carefully worded responses that took 0.3 seconds to generate.
Real friendship is messy, fun, painful, and wonderful…but that’s the ‘real’ connection part.
But forget AI chatbots. Today, a lot of people seek to connect online, with real people. But an emoji of a laugh, is hardly the same as a real one. A comment is not the same as a hug. This existence in the digital realm, through avatars, has its limits. It’s certainly more meaningful than whatever Zuckerberg’s personal AI chatbot pal might offer—and perhaps it could lead to meetings in the real world—but without being tested and molded through our mutual journeys, they remain thin. Still valuable, but not quite like the real thing.
As for the AI friends, they might be good to bounce off ideas every once in a while, or have them analyze your day, but the truth is that while they’ll never ghost you, they won’t see you either. Not really.
So, probably, it’s best we leave the house every once in a while, and make eye contact with real humans. You can’t have your couch be your sole support system.
If we want real friends—the kind that laugh too loud and hurt our feelings and show up anyway—we need to put ourselves in environments where the kinds of friends we want to meet actually go.
You might say something dumb, you might feel awkward, but that’s okay. Your people are the ones who won’t back away slowly.
So go be human. (Before you forget how).
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This sense of loneliness was most prevalent among young adults aged 18–34 (43.3%), people with less than a high school education (41.1%), those who had never married (45.9%), and individuals with household incomes below $25,000 (47.9%). Women reported more loneliness than men, though men were more likely to lack social support. Notably high rates of loneliness and lack of support were observed among LGBTQ+ populations, especially bisexual and transgender individuals, whose reported loneliness exceeded 56%.
In Canada, in the first quarter of 2024, 13% of Canadians aged 15 and older reported feeling lonely "always" or "often." Among youth aged 15 to 24, this figure was higher at 17% . Again, these figures are higher for LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities.
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Agree with your take here! I would think that a relationship with an AI would be very hollow for a person in any kind of non-extreme life situation. I can maybe get why people in some unusual situations might like it: people with some mental disabilities/conditions (Down’s Syndrome for example) have to be very careful about getting into relationships as they can become exploitative. Maybe people living in remote and isolated situations. But if you have access to an internet-generated LLM, you could also be chatting with a real human online.
You can’t trade stories with a chatbot because it hasn’t experienced anything. You could only talk at it. You’d know it’s just coded to reply as it does. I’d imagine it wouldn’t surprise you much. I don’t get where the sense of shared purpose and support would come in at all. It wouldn’t work for me at all.
This Vice article you’ve linked is really something. 80% of men would do this? Holy crap. I wonder what percent of women would do this. I would think you’d have to be a pretty messed up person to create an AI replicant of your ex and then carry out a meaningful relationship with it. If that’s true, men have some real work to do…
That said, I did read an article from a substack I like called DrPsychMom in which she has found in her practice that nearly all married men report that they would much rather read a passionate love letter from their wife in which she expresses genuine desire for her husband, or that they’d rather passionately French kiss her than have the wildest sex with her when she isn’t into it. Supposedly most women are surprised to learn this. That would suggest that a lot of men do care about something like genuine feeling from an actual human woman.
And you gotta wonder who these dudes are. You can’t introduce an AI to your friends and family. You can’t have kids with it. You can’t go to brunch with it. I don’t get it. I can’t picture locker room talk about how you nailed your AI girlfriend. I don’t get it.
The internet is a way to connect with many things and is just a tool, but I think we all have to get out of our heads a bit more and back into our bodies.
I don't think it's the phone or media, though their use is omnipresent. I think we're lonely because of how we think, haphazardly and without a philosophical keystone to help us overcome inevitable difficulties, which weakens us emotionally. To my mind this is reflected most obviously in the messages blared out by media hubris: "You must love everyone; you must fear everyone." Meanwhile, the message school children get is: "You are the most important person, except when you're not." Every engagement, especially among those who come from different backgrounds, is fraught with potential pain and isolation. No wonder people want to hibernate.
Perhaps the best example of what I'm trying to get at is the difference in how Abigail Shrier and Jonathan Haidt think about depression among teens and adolescents. Haidt believes that technology is the primary culprit, while Shrier thinks it relates to our schools' unhealthy fixation on mental health, getting children to dwell on their differences/problems rather than learn to cope with adversity: the unwelcome first cousin of *change*. I find Haidt compelling but see the underlying problem as expressed by Shrier, which I liken to my personal philosophy about getting to the root of a problem: It's always the people, never the tool.