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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

I've worked in emotional communication and conflict resolution for over 10 years and I'm honestly just feeling a huge swirl of uncertainty on how this—LLMs in general, but especially the genAI voices, videos, and even robots—will impact how we communicate with each other and how we bond with each other. Does bonding with an AI help us bond more with other humans? Will it help us introspect more and dig deeper into our common humanity? Will we learn how to resolve conflict better? Will we learn more passive aggression? Become more or less suicidal? More or less loving?

I just, yeah, feel a lot of fear of even thinking about it.

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I think there are a few categories of people:

1) People with rich and deep social networks. People in this category probably have pretty narrow use cases for AI companions -- maybe for things like therapy where the dispassionate attention of a third party is the goal.

2) People whose social networks are not as good, but who have a good shot at forming social connections if they put in the effort. I think this is the group to worry most about. For example, a teenager who withdraws from their peers and spends that time with AI companions may form some warped expectations of how social interaction works.

3) People whose social networks are not as good, and who don't have a good shot at forming social connections. There are, for example, a lot of old people languishing in care homes and hardly talking to anybody. An infinitely patient and available conversation partner seems like it could drastically improve the quality of those lives.

I appreciate how you laid this out. I would most likely fall into category one and I don't see a huge need for the chatbots for myself, although I can imagine I might like an Alan-Watts-level companion more than many human friends.

I think I also worry the most about two, almost asking their human friends, "Why can't you be more like Her (or Alan Watts)?" And then retreating into the "you never tell me I'm wrong" chatbot, preferring the "peace" of the chatbot over the "drama" of interacting with humans. I see a huge "I just want peace" movement that seems to run away from the messiness of human interactions and seek solace in things that seem less messy, like drugs, video games, and other attachments/bonds, and chatbots could probably perform that replacement role quite well, and yet deepen loneliness.

As for three, I agree it may help as a short-term solution, and wonder what the long-term effects might be. I had a great aunt in a home for dementia, and wonder what effect it would have if someone with dementia speaks to a chatbot that hallucinates and makes up emotions.

I read a comic with a good prediction of what will happen:

1. Humans get used to robots nice communication, so now humans use robots to communicate with each other and translate their speech.

2. Humans stop talking without using robots, so now its just robots talking to robots and humans standing around listening.

3. Humans stop knowing how to talk, no longer understands the robots, the robots starts to just talk to each other and just keep the human around as pets they are programmed to walk around with.

Do you remember where you read that comic? Sounds like a fun read

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3576 Maybe this one?

Created my first HN account just to reply to this. I've had these same (very strong) concerns since ChatGPT launched, but haven't seen much discussion about it. Do you know of any articles/talks/etc. that get into this at all?

You might like Gary's blog on potential AI harms: https://garymarcus.substack.com/

Gary is an anti-ML crank with no more factual grounding than people who think AI is going to conquer the world and enslave you.

> AI is going to conquer the world and enslave you

That is actually a plausible outcome, if humans willingly submit to AI.

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