Loneliness has been one of the universal features of being human. In a survey by health insurer Cigna in 2019, about three out of five American stated they felt lonely (Alleyne 2020). Meaningful relationships, or even interactions, have become rare in many people’s lives, causing it to become a personal and a societal problem. The tech industry now seeks to fill that void through AI friends.
A legacy of interaction
Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum would create an early version of a chatbot in the mid-1960s, called ELIZA. He programmed this creation to respond to users in the manner of a nondirective Rogerian therapist, but despite the open-ended nature of the answers, people became attached to it. Weizenbaum noted (McBain 2021):
Extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.
So alarmed was he by the human participants’ emotional responses, he stopped the project, after which he became opposed to research into AI. Humans had easily…
