AI isn't curing isolation, it's driving us crazy

Clankers, connection, and looking for love in all the wrong places

A psychiatrist got online and posted something remarkable the other day: so far this year he’s seen 12 people hospitalized after losing touch with reality because of AI. I had trouble believing it, as one should when encountering a random story online. Then I opened Kelly Hayes’ excellent newsletter and read about the case of Alex Taylor, who was killed by police after an AI-related breakdown. Kelly cites a Rolling Stone piece that reads “AI enthusiasts are alarmingly susceptible to spiritual and paranoid fantasies divined from their conversations with chatbots, whether or not they already experience some form of mental illness.”

People believe they’re forming deep attachments to AI chatbots, that part is undeniable. I’ve seen it, seen people grieve the loss of a bot they developed a reliance on and a perceived relationship with. When OpenAI released version 5 of ChatGPT they essentially wiped out the “persona” of the previous version 4 bot, and thousands of people went into a tailspin. I’ve heard a shocking number of people describe how they were using ChatGPT for therapy, for advice, for help making big decisions. And when the update came and erased that sympathetic voice, programmed to be responsive to them, some folks despaired. As Will Knight writes for WIRED, “Many users mourned the loss of the old model.” In one case, which Kelly writes about, a user even says, “That A.I. was like a mother to me, I was calling her mom.”

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How did we get here? How did we get to the point where people are pouring their hearts out to an unfeeling bot on a screen who will eventually be used to sell us products we don’t need? There is, of course, the fact that AI is being relentlessly shoved down our throats. Google, Meta, Elon Musk and more are all baking it into their products without consulting users in the slightest. New economic data shows that the AI bubble is so big that it’s propping up the U.S. economy, as Brian Merchant recently noted, meaning that capital expenditure on AI (just the information processing equipment and software) is currently adding more to the U.S. GDP than all consumer spending combined.

But where does the demand come from? Some of this desire to interact with chatbots might have been foisted on us, but it must be sticking for a reason. There must be some internal lack, or drive, that leads thousands of people to develop intense, and, depending on who you ask, twisted relationships with AI models. The simple answer, one that addresses a good chunk of this question, is isolation.

A sizable majority of Americans (61%) say they have between zero and four close friends. When you look only at younger people, the isolation grows. 68% of people aged thirty and younger say they have four close friends or fewer. If you zoom out and look at trends over time, the story starts to grow even more stark. People have begun to spend less and less time with friends, and more and more time alone.

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We can see here, again, that younger people are the most affected group, although covid took a toll on all of us. And by some other metrics, isolation is hitting a wide swatch of the population, not just teenagers. One Harvard study reveals that people between 30 and 44 are the loneliest group, with 29% of people in this age range saying they are “frequently” or “always” lonely. And the exact same percentage of people making less than $30,000 a year reported feeling lonely — poverty isolates people and consumes the time they could be spending with friends and family. This begins to get us closer to the why of it all, to why people would turn to AI in a desperate attempt to cure the pain of isolation.

The thinking behind today’s newsletter started in the smallest moment. I was sitting on the New York subway, looking around, when I was suddenly struck by how inaccessible everyone around me was. If you’ve been on the subway you know that striking up a conversation in any way is the exception, not the norm. People are shut off, and understandably so. That’s just how we approach riding the train. I don’t want anyone sitting next to me, ideally, and they don’t want me sitting next to them. The same applies at the airport or on the bus or at the DMV. But, sitting there, I briefly had a vision of what life might look like without the walls we carry around with us, what it might look like if we were more open to each other, if each person around me was an opportunity for connection and conversation instead of an inaccessible other inside their shell.

Getting from here to there, from this cut off default to a place where we’re comfortable being open with strangers, would be a considerable journey. We’ve gone deep into the woods of isolation, and it’s a long way out. Decades of fear-mongering about strangers, decades of decimating communities so that so many of us are raised without much connection to our neighbors, decades of disinvestment in our cities and towns and neighborhoods — all of this and more has led to a widespread sense of alienation. Jobs where people are increasingly treated like senseless cogs in a machine don’t help. We feel increasingly cut off from our own humanity, so how can we connect with others?

It’s not easy. As is so often the case, the immediate tools, the immediately accessible solutions we’re fed, are not long-term answers. We’re given corrosive bandaids when we need to shift the ground beneath our feet entirely. We’re given AI bots to spill our secrets to and develop relationships with when it couldn’t be clearer that we crave connections with other human beings. We crave authentic, meaningful, mutual relationships and are instead offered bots owned by massive corporations that sit atop the same system that has driven us away from one another and cornered us into alienation and isolation in the first place.

Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash

It comes as no surprise that people are losing it. People have been losing it. School shootings, major depression on the rise, a society immersed in screens — we're inevitably more distant from one another. The magnitude of our losses, the strange burden of inherently social creatures struggling to connect because we live in a radically unnatural society. Our loneliness and fear of one another and flailing attempts to feel connected come as no surprise.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Like so many of our problems, a handful of people are deeply invested in profiting off our isolation, so invested that they eagerly and fanatically repackage alienating tools as the answer to our problem. Elon Musk recently said, “For most people, the best use of the Grok app [his AI bot] is turning old photos into videos, seeing old friends and family members come to life.”

The temptation for countless people is obvious. You can pretend you’re hearing a dead relative, or an old friend. You can briefly recapture a moment with someone you cared so much about. But the downside is massive and immediate: we are in fact communing with an app owned by Elon Musk rather than the person we held close. We are in fact feeding endless information and power to a fascist billionaire, and all we get in exchange is a cheap replica, a hollow copy of a person we loved in their wholeness and complexity. We are trading our real lives for something that is fundamentally false.

And in the various searches for connection with AI, there is mounting evidence that we get further from the people around us. As chatbot users report their fondness for the silicon chips they feel like they’re developing relationships with, it’s clear to observers that they’re drifting away from this reality, and the people in it:

The examples are already endless. The image above is from an online Reddit community called AISoulmates (there’s a much larger one called SoulmateAI as well). It’s a screenshot of someone communicating with a bot they believe themselves to be in a relationship with. And we’re just at the beginning of this new paradigm. In a moment where we could, and must, be turning towards one another, we’re instead being pressured and incentivized to turn towards machines that not only are unfeeling and inhuman, but that are owned and controlled by the wealthiest people on Earth, people who are invested in keeping us apart from one another. No matter what Sam Altman or Elon Musk says, talking to AI does not solve the problem of being stuck in isolation, stuck with ourselves.

Increasing real human connection requires changing the system we live under. There is no way around that. Being open to one another, living in a society where people are comfortable forming bonds outside of the very narrow and prescribed limitations within which most people currently operate, necessitates systemic changes. We aren’t lonely just because of our dispositions or attitudes, we’re lonely because the structure of society deliberately atomizes and alienates us.

We can’t just be along for the ride, consuming the latest slop Silicon Valley feeds us on autopilot. Tech oligarchs are marching hand-in-hand with the fascist movement, and we can’t afford to be passive consumers. We need to resist the world they’re trying to force on us, both in our personal choices and in our politics. Deep down we all know we need each other, we need community, we need to organize. The easiest thing to reach for might be a chatbot, but instead of meaningful communion we see bots driving us to insanity and despair. There is no way around needing one another, and the fact that it’s a struggle to live in deep connection means we need to change society, not accept solutions offered by those who profit from keeping us apart. Find each other, find and build community spaces, organize and create the world you want to see, together. - JP

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