Wow, I've never heard anything like this before. Is this really a thing? People disappearing because they're so deep down the rabbit hole with AI and don't need to talk to anyone?
I can't exactly blame them.
In the latest furor over deepseek r1 the conversation online was _substantially_ worse than what you'd get from feeding the original paper into r1 and talking to it.
This was the first time where I genuinely wondered what the point of reading groups, message boards and similar is. A model that you can run locally for $6,000 at 20tokens/s beat however many thousands of people because it actually spent the time to read what it talked about.
Suffice to say, that's not how you will understand behavior of others, especially in non-trivial situations, other cultures and so on. Just accept people are different and you may very well never understand how they see rest of the world and others.
"Hikikomori" is not a new thing, long pre-dates AI, but I think similar things are starting to be observed outside of Japan. Internet-enabled entertainment competes with the real world and occasionally achieves total victory.