[munificent]

The top two comments here both suggest that the people using chatbots in place of social interaction were already a priori socially isolated and AI has no effect on it. It's merely a "symptom" or after the fact consequence.

I deeply, fundamentally disagree with that. Humans are one step mathematical operations that take in an input, transform to an output, and are done.

Human life is an endless continuous cascade of incentives, feedback loops, iterations, and modification. When you change anything in a person's environment, it will affect them. Perhaps the effect is small unless someone is primed by their prior environment in certain ways, but nonetheless nearly everything leaves its mark.

Can you eat healthy if your kitchen is full of free junk food? Yes, it's possible. Can you get out of the house and socialize even when endless media and parasocial relationships are just a screen away? Yes, it's possible.

Will you in practice? Evidence shows clearly over and over again that even tiny incentives have huge effects when compounded over time.

We all have a deep moral obligation to build an environment (physical, cultural, social) that is nourishing and incentivizes all of us to flourish. If you're building technology like AI chatbots that enables people to become more socially isolated, in my mind you are in the same category as junk food sellers, drug pushers, and polluting factory owners. You're making people sicker and the world worse.

[exe34]

> Can you get out of the house and socialize even when endless media and parasocial relationships are just a screen away?

The problem is when the junk food is cheaper/more easily available. There are plenty of people I could spend all day with and enjoy it. They are busy living life. The people who have time for me are usually the ones I feel drained after talking to. So I prefer to stay away from them.

[abnercoimbre]

Some practical advice I gave a good friend yesterday, who is frustrated by the constant bailing from people to go touch grass with him:

1. Increase frequency of informal communication. For example if your hangout is a monthly coding club, you might casually message participants once or twice a week. “Holy smokes Jenny, this HN thread reminded me of you.”

2. Create convenient little group DMs (call it “Bob’s Coding Club”) and add in the people you like to hang out with.

This way, even if you invite someone privately, this person is well aware you hang out with others; they'll worry you can gossip if they bail too much (even though you won't, but fear of getting ostracized is a typical human trait and therefore a helpful forcing function.)

Source: I run meetups [0] for programmers, many of whom are recovering social media addicts.

[0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups

[conception]

Also, if organizing a group thing, get one or two people privately to say that they will go and then announce to the group that the three of you are going and if anybody else wants to come rather than just you are going and to see if anybody wants to come. If there’s already buy in, you’re much more likely to get people to show up.

[munificent]

Abner!

It's no surprise that you have excellent advice on how to socialize more. :)

[munificent]

Edit: By "Humans are one step", I meant "Humans are not one step".