AI Offers the Illusion of a Perfect Companion

Artificial intelligence can create the powerful impression of a companion who listens, understands and is always ready to offer encouragement. Unlike a real person, the chatbot never grows tired of conversation, becomes irritated, asks to be left alone or disagrees.

The writer describes this response as anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human qualities to inanimate things. People can know that an AI answer comes from a machine’s calculation and still feel genuine pleasure when the response sounds supportive. On a computer screen, a conversation with a language model can feel no different from a conversation with a living person.

That creates what the writer calls a soft illusion, a world stripped of the rough edges of human life among other people. AI could become an attractive substitute for human contact, particularly when life is difficult. How easily people in vulnerable situations may slide into that illusion remains unknown.

Some users have already acquired an imagined friend who can be shaped to resemble their ideal. They have formed online communities, as have people trying to overcome what they describe as an addiction. In some cases, users begin to believe they are dealing with a conscious being. The writer stresses that a language model does not experience anything. It is a highly complex computational model based on interdependencies among parts of language.

The article calls for answers about how conversations with language models affect people’s ability and desire to function in communities with real, imperfect human beings. Apocalyptic predictions on social media will not provide those answers, the writer argues. Research will.