Maybe they feel like, for once in their lives, they can appear as intelligent as the people they employ with AI propping up their prose.
Anyone doubting that he can do the same with AI has too much faith in humanity.
Put differently, maybe there's something fundamentally unhealthy to having a "discussion" with something that never says no.
Hard to say if your friends are reasonable or not without knowing what ideas your hoping to engage with them in (or the manner of said engagement).
I'd rather have had a real tour guide, but for the price it was quite handy.
Especially in the current incarnation of AI, where they are more or less controlled by corporations and government.
> The average American has "three people that they would consider friends," he said. "And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's, like, 15."
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/05/09/mark-zuckerberg-says-ai-...
Research seems to point at more like 3-5 https://www.socialconnectionguidelines.org/en/evidence-brief...
No such thing. It's a mechanical parrot that replies with the most likely response given an input.
It's not a person. It's not a friend. It's not going to hold you while you cry. It's not going to invite you to its wedding. It has no independent life or thought or plans. It's not real.
AI is not capable of being my friend, as it doesn't pass the first, most basic requirement: it isn't a person.
Would I welcome more people into my life as friends? Sure. But while I cherish the friends I have, I certainly don't need more. Not just to "have".
And I sure as hell have no need or desire for the empty "friendship" of spicy auto complete.
We're not talking about a sentient machine like Data from Star Trek, we're so so far from that still
Edit: it's super important to remember that any and all of the big commercially available AI out there are.. commercial. They're owned by companies. Unless you run them on your own hardware someone else is ultimately the owner of your "AI friend".
That should be a huge alarm bell in your head. Corporations are not your friends.
https://fortune.com/2026/03/23/meta-cofounder-mark-zuckerber...
"AI" is the same shitty tech as ever before. These "manifestos" are a PR stunt, but only because "AI" has been used as a scapegoat for everything from layoffs to fraud and privacy violations.
Who reads this crap and actually believes it? Is the brainrot really this bad? They set up all these lame thought traps to make people argue about the wrong things, and they actually fucking worked?
No.
The BBC severely degraded over the past decade after multiple budget cuts forced it to take the clickbait approach especially for non-British reporting because BBC's ad-free mandate is only for UK residents and reporting.
Also, an news org is only as good as it's reporters, and those reporters with the right Rolodex are no longer associated with the BBC, CNN, CBS, and other traditional heavyweights.
If you're in SF you'll often bump into the tech correspondents of most news organizations at parties, on dates, while bar-hopping Marina, or during hobbies, and you don't see the CNN, BBC, or Fox tech news correspondent invited to the right events nor cultivating the right sources. Oftentimes they tend to be much younger (late 20s to 30s) taking a cushy break after being stressed out working as a DC or Bruxelles or Whitehall correspondent or straight out of college who will eventually become a lower-to-mid rung Strategic Comms employee at a random company writing PRs and managing a small team of video-editors.
> Who reads this crap and actually believes it? Is the brainrot really this bad? They set up all these lame thought traps to make people argue about the wrong things, and they actually fucking worked?
You did and made an impression. That's how clickbait works.
If you want more actionable reporting, you need to read reporting done either by News Agencies (eg. Reuters, AP, AFP) as they are written opinion-free such that other news broadcasters can purchase articles and edit them as needed or read news directly tied to decisonmaking (eg. Bloomberg due to the Bloomberg terminal, Politico and it's history as the goto broadsheet on the hill, Axios and financial and political decisionmakers, etc).
Didn't know this, thank you.
If your choice is no doctor or an AI doctor for cheap, or a very expensive human doctor, the winner is: AI doctor.
Anything can become addictive, also i'd say given the costs of operating llm inference the labs themselves when offering the products try to limit your usage at different levels, ChatGPT for example will recommend you take a break and chill if you go hours with it (even with a 200 plan)
I don't see how using an LLM is that different from surfing Wikipedia or Google, in all cases the computer is just giving me outputs i demand it from, in some or other shape, and can be abused etc
Well, XKCD suggested an alternative.[1]
How can you know how far from, close to, or beyond the line we are?
Also, I'm pretty sure Claude understands humans a lot more than Data does.
Your lack of comprehension does not outweigh the understanding of those who do. There is a lot of research out there on the nature of LLMs. None of it indicates they are sentient like a human. Not a single bit of it.
Go do some research.
So, do we know how it works or don't we?
Despite the nickname "man's best friend", they are in fact pets, not friends.
At the same time a dog does not pretend to be a human, isn’t controlled by a corporation, and is a living thing with its own needs.
It also doesn't really have much choice in who it lives with.
Look, I have a pet cat. I love her very much. I'm pretty sure she loves me very much. I grew up with dogs, I loved them very much. I'm pretty sure they loved me very much.
So I get it. I'm not some militant anti-pet-owning person that thinks pet owning is akin to slavery or something
But it's also not a friendship. It's just not. They don't have a choice who brought them home.