[boringg]

Do the AI friend apps take people out of society or were the people who were using the friend apps not part of society to begin with?

I honestly can't imagine using an AI app to ever qualify as what I would determine to be what I deem a friend.

[reliabilityguy]

I guess the issue is that people who are struggling socially may further isolate themselves due to AI friends.

[ceejayoz]

The existence of drug users does not make it a responsible act to install all-you-can-eat cocaine buffets in their apartments.

[dfedbeef]

What if your internal life is different from other people though

[wccrawford]

They may not "take people out of society", but they relieve a stress that would otherwise cause them to continue trying to enter society.

Or, you know, go crazy and do something bad.

As a pretty severe introvert, it's not hard for me to imagine "friends apps" getting good enough to provide a lot of comfort when I was younger, and if you grow up with them being a thing, you don't question them as much.

In fact, if "friend apps" were good enough to play video games on a decent level, I'm absolutely sure I'd use them instead of trying to deal with random jerks when playing multiplayer games.

[mikrl]

>I honestly can't imagine using an AI app to ever qualify as what I would determine to be what I deem a friend

Agree, but AI has one massive benefit I’ve seen.

Conversations that I can’t have IRL because the response would be “huh? What are you talking about? I don’t know what that is.”

LLM apps are a fountain of knowledge and can reason well enough to bounce ideas and speculation off of. I can dump all my esoteric conversational topics into it and be engaged without needing to do 5 degrees and work in 3 industries at once, and the massive amount of socialization that would entail.

Maybe there will be a division in my social life, where my IRL human connections are more grounded and homely, and the LLM bears the brunt of my neurodivergent interests.

[boringg]

I can see this as I do use it in this fashion. That said I wouldn't ever qualify that kind of call and response as a friendship. It certainly would allow for me to explore topics in depth without trying to filter through networks of people to see who may or may not have an interest there. That said if anything it can scratch interests that I couldn't before.

I'd frame that as a people who want to deep dive can now do that without a huge overhead.