{"id":209857,"date":"2024-02-20T07:01:51","date_gmt":"2024-02-20T12:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=209857"},"modified":"2024-02-16T15:47:42","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T20:47:42","slug":"ai-companions-promise-to-combat-loneliness-but-history-shows-the-danger-of-one-way-relationships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2024\/02\/ai-companions-promise-to-combat-loneliness-but-history-shows-the-danger-of-one-way-relationships\/","title":{"rendered":"AI ‘Companions’ Promise to Combat Loneliness, but History Shows the Danger of One-Way Relationships"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States is in the grips of a\u00a0loneliness epidemic<\/a>: Since 2018, about\u00a0half the population<\/a>\u00a0has reported that it has experienced loneliness. Loneliness can be as dangerous to your health\u00a0as smoking 15 cigarettes a day<\/a>, according to a 2023 surgeon general\u2019s report.<\/p>\n

It is not just individual lives that are at risk. Democracy\u00a0requires<\/a>\u00a0the capacity to feel\u00a0connected<\/a>\u00a0to other citizens in order to work toward collective solutions.<\/p>\n

In the face of this crisis, tech companies offer a technological cure: emotionally intelligent chatbots. These digital friends, they say, can help alleviate the loneliness that threatens individual and national health.<\/p>\n

But as the pandemic showed, technology alone is not sufficient to address the complexities of public health. Science can produce miraculous vaccines, but if people are enmeshed in cultural and historical narratives that prevent them from taking the life-saving medicine, the cure sits on shelves and lives are lost. The humanities, with their expertise in human culture, history and literature, can play a key role in preparing society for the ways that AI might help \u2013 or harm \u2013 the capacity for meaningful human connection.<\/p>\n

The power of stories to both predict and influence human behavior has long been validated by scientific research. Numerous studies demonstrate that the stories people embrace heavily influence the choices they make, ranging from the\u00a0vacations they plan<\/a>, to\u00a0how people approach climate change<\/a>\u00a0to the computer programming\u00a0choices security experts make<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Two Tales<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are two storylines that address people\u2019s likely behaviors in the face of the unknown territory of depending on AI for emotional sustenance: one that promises love and connection, and a second that warns of dehumanizing subjugation.<\/p>\n

The first story, typically told by software designers and AI companies, urges people to\u00a0say \u201cI do\u201d to AI<\/a>\u00a0and embrace bespoke friendship programmed on your behalf. AI company\u00a0Replika<\/a>, for instance, promises that it can provide everyone with a \u201ccompanion who cares. Always here to listen and talk. Always on your side.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a global appetite for such digital companionship. Microsoft\u2019s digital chatbot\u00a0Xiaoice<\/a>\u00a0has a global\u00a0fan base of over 660 million people<\/a>, many of whom consider the chatbot \u201ca dear friend,\u201d even a trusted confidante.<\/p>\n

In popular culture, films like \u201cHer<\/a>\u201d depict lonely people becoming deeply attached to their digital assistants. For many, having a \u201cdear friend\u201d programmed to avoid difficult questions and demands seems like a huge improvement over the messy, challenging, vulnerable work of engaging with a human partner, especially if you consider the misogynistic preference for\u00a0submissive, sycophantic companions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To be sure, imagining a chummy relationship with a chatbot offers a sunnier set of possibilities than the apocalyptic narratives of slavery and subjugation that have dominated storytelling about a possible future among social robots. Blockbuster films like \u201cThe Matrix<\/a>\u201d and the \u201cThe Terminator<\/a>\u201d have depicted hellscapes where humans are enslaved by sentient AI. Other narratives featured in films like \u201cThe Creator<\/a>\u201d and \u201cBlade Runner<\/a>\u201d imagine the roles reversed and invite viewers to sympathize with AI beings who are oppressed by humans.<\/p>\n

One Reality<\/strong><\/p>\n

You could be forgiven for thinking that these two stories, one of friendship, the other of slavery, simply represent two extremes in human nature. From this perspective it seems like a good thing that marketing messages about AI are guiding people toward the sunny side of the futuristic street. But if you consider the work of\u00a0scholars<\/a>\u00a0who have studied slavery in the U.S., it becomes frighteningly clear that these two stories \u2013 one of\u00a0purchased friendship<\/a>\u00a0and one of enslavement and exploitation \u2013 are not as far apart as you might imagine.<\/p>\n

Chattel slavery in the U.S. was a brutal system designed to extract labor through violent and dehumanizing means. To sustain the system, however, an intricate emotional landscape was designed to keep the enslavers self-satisfied. \u201cGone with the Wind\u201d is perhaps the most famous depiction of how enslavers saw themselves as benevolent patriarchs and forced enslaved people to reinforce this fiction through cheerful\u00a0professions of love<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his\u00a01845 autobiography<\/a>, Frederick Douglass described a tragic occasion when an enslaved man, asked about his situation, honestly replied that he was ill-treated. The plantation owner, confronted with testimony about the harm he was inflicting, sold the truth-teller down the river. Such cruelty, Douglass insisted, was the necessary penalty for someone who committed the sin \u201cof telling the simple truth\u201d to a man whose emotional calibration required constant reassurance.<\/p>\n

History Lesson<\/strong><\/p>\n

To be clear, I am not evoking the emotional coercion that enslavement required in order to conflate lonely seniors with evil plantation owners, or worse still, to equate computer code with enslaved human beings. There is little danger that AI companions will courageously tell us truths that we would rather not hear. That is precisely the problem. My concern is not that people will harm sentient robots. I fear how humans will be damaged by the moral vacuum created when their primary social contacts are designed solely to serve the emotional needs of the \u201cuser.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a time when humanities scholarship can help guide society in the emerging age of AI, it is being\u00a0suppressed<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0devalued<\/a>. Diminishing the humanities risks denying people access to their own history. That ignorance renders people ill-equipped to resist marketers\u2019 assurances that there is no harm in buying \u201cfriends.\u201d People are cut off from the wisdom that surfaces in stories that warn of the moral rot that accompanies unchecked power.<\/p>\n

If you rid yourself of the vulnerability born of reaching out to another human whose response you cannot control, you lose the capacity to fully care for another and to know yourself. As we navigate the uncharted waters of AI and its role in our lives, it\u2019s important not to forget the poetry,\u00a0philosophy<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0storytelling<\/a>\u00a0that remind us that human connection is supposed to require something of us, and that it is worth the effort.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Originally published in The Conversation.\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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As the pandemic showed, technology alone is not sufficient to address the complexities of public health<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":209858,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2460,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1902],"class_list":["post-209857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-faculty","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-10 08:22:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209857"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209859,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209857\/revisions\/209859"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/209858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209857"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=209857"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=209857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}