[jerf]

If you think about it as a one-off amusement it's no big deal. This is how most people are evaluating it.

But consider iterating such an interaction over the course of, say, 25 years, and comparing the person who was interacting with humans versus the one who interacted with LLMs, and any halfway sensible model of a human will show you what's dangerous about that. Yeah, the former may well have some more bumps and bruises, but on the net they're way ahead. And that's assuming the human who delegated all interaction to LLMs even made it to 25 years.

This argument only holds for LLMs as they stand now; it is not a generalized argument against AI friends. (That would require a lot more work.)

[treis]

I think a lot of this is based on circular reasoning. The people who interact with other humans will have relationships with those humans. And those relationships are the evidence that they're way ahead.

I do think there is higher maximum with other people. But relationships are hard. They take work and there's a decent chance you invest that work in the wrong people.

I can see a life with primarily AI social interaction being an okay life. Which is not the best it can be but also an improvement for some.

[jerf]

"I think a lot of this is based on circular reasoning."

No. Actually it's based on information theory, and probably a better model of what interacting with an LLM would look like a year or five later than the one you are operating on.

Here's a little hint: It has total amnesia. LLMs by their nature scale only so far, and while they may scale larger than ChatGPT, they aren't going to be scaling for an entire lifetime of interaction. (That's going to take another AI technology.)

Ever interacted with someone with advanced dementia but otherwise functioning faculties for any period of time? (I suppose they could well make good therapists too.)

[falcor84]

Absolutely agreed. For many individuals “hell is other people”.

[jerf]

This is a false dichotomy, and one that is actually dangerous to you if you believe it. Your choices are not "deal with the bad people in your life" or "retreat into solely interacting with LLMs".

If you have the latter option, you also have "leave the bad people behind" as an option because it is made of the things you need in order to "retreat solely into interacting with LLMs" and is in fact simpler.

Cynicism and casting learned helplessness as a virtue are not the solution.