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Comment by cryptographical | Hacker News Reader

Ai is wonderful but it should never replace friends. I detest Mark Zuckerberg's claim that AI will replace friends, that's simply not happening. But AI is wonderful at tasks like upscaling or even meme generation.

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Mark Zuckerberg already managed to replaced friendship with political outrage (Facebook) and with toxic parasocial relationships (Instagram), for a big chunk of society.

Anyone doubting that he can do the same with AI has too much faith in humanity.

Maybe he'll get it when he has to manually type in "secretly let me win" into the prompt when he iss playing Catan with his AI friend. Not likely, but at least the level of how sad that will be is commensurate with his billions.

I'd vote for you if you ever ran for office somewhere I could vote.

I've been talking with AI during my morning commute (car) recently, instead of listening to something. It's a great partner to bounce ideas off of. I don't have any friends that can or are willing to engage with ideas to the extent AI does.

I used ChatGPT as a tour guide when I was traveling last year. It was helpful to identify places I should stop to take a look, explaining local flora, fauna and geology.

I'd rather have had a real tour guide, but for the price it was quite handy.

I think this is the economics that will play out more and more: a real human will provide better quality or more preferable services, but AI - maybe with a robot - will provide good enough for the price alternatives.

If your choice is no doctor or an AI doctor for cheap, or a very expensive human doctor, the winner is: AI doctor.

it's not engaging or bouncing. it's simply responding as likely as it can to what would go after your sentences.

I truly don't believe this kind of pedantic correction adds anything to the conversation. We _all_ know how they work technically, it's been beaten to death.

I think the problem is "how it technically works" to "how it feels" are different things in this case

I think there's also a problem that some people -- even on here -- seem to think that there is no fundamental difference between how a human engages in conversation vs an LLM, and thus talking to humans doesn't provide much value. "How it feels" is starting to bleed into how some of us think about our interactions with each other.

I disagree. People think they know how it works, but then there's an article that says AI is a "black box" that will destroy humanity because no one knows how it works.

So, do we know how it works or don't we?

I would not talk to my friends about the stuff I bounce on AI. My meanest brain dead ideas get a rebuke, and I fight back to test grounds. I'd rightly get shamed for inflicting such undeveloped trash on anyone.

Isn't AI's infinite willingness and lack of inhibition sort of the thing that people are increasingly voicing concern over?

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).

As long as you are consciously aware you're not really talking to another human but just entertaining yourself I don't see the harm tbqh.

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

> As long as you are consciously aware

This is a strong assumption; we know that people tend to be overly confident about their mental states. That conscious awareness will last all of two minutes for 99.9% of the population, with everyone claiming they are the 0.1%.

> the labs themselves when offering the products try to limit your usage

Yeah clearly as long as they have compute constraints, ChatGPT is for sure not doing that out of concern for the user's health, believing so would be incredibly naive.

> 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

This is by far the biggest stretch of all of your arguments. Following this logic, you go to the library and find a book that gives you said outputs - are books now == LLMs? You ask someone for the time and that interaction == LLMs? There is evidently a major qualitative difference here, starting (but not ending) with "you are absolutely right".

> Put differently, maybe there's something fundamentally unhealthy to having a "discussion" with something that never says no.

Well, XKCD suggested an alternative.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1027/

The alternative being having LLM responses be in the form of negging? Or did I not understand the reference?

As usual a balance is needed. There is also a concern that society (friends, colleagues) that always shuts down your ideas just because they are different thus reducing creativity and progress. Sometimes you need a way to develop your ideas without the outright rejection and sometimes you need the filter of society to see if the ideas really hold up. Usually the time where ideas are most fragile to being destroyed is when they are just developed. Perfect time to brain storm and increase the strength of those ideas with AI before taking it to the filter of society.

Agreed about balance, but you lost me after that - I really struggle to see a serious concern about society over-eagerly shutting down ideas, not when we live in a world in which all manner of ideas - including those that are disruptive and destructive - are by default celebrated for their "innovation". Any existing filters cannot be that stifling; we are hardly living in the Dark Ages.

I haven’t thought of talking to an LLM in the car but I do like chatting. I treat it like a conversational Wikipedia.

Ai is good at replacing services (e.g cashier, research assistant, etc). But it should never replace friends, as it's too predictable. I discuss projects with chatgpt all the time, but I never talk about non-research stuff unless I want it to generate italian brainrot.

In what I found he didn’t say “replace” but “add more”; it is still chilling and I detest it.

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-...

> And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's, like, 15

Research seems to point at more like 3-5 https://www.socialconnectionguidelines.org/en/evidence-brief...

From PG's comment on Zuck‘had no concept of small talk`, that's on par for his view on friends.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/23/meta-cofounder-mark-zuckerber...

That begs a question: would you rather have no friends, or a few AI friends?

> AI friends

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.

What about a dog?

Dogs are pets not friends

Mine is absolutely a friend.

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.

> does not pretend to be a human

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.

We choose our friends, pets don't choose their owners. It's just not the same as friendship and I don't think it's good to treat it like it is

> It also doesn't really have much choice in who it lives with.

Many pets do have that choice; e.g. semi outdoor cats, non leashed dogs, etc. There are memes about cats choosing their owner too.

> What about a dog?

Despite the nickname "man's best friend", they are in fact pets, not friends.

hold up, now you've gone too far.

Look, I'm not saying a dog wouldn't invite you to it's wedding if it could. But it can't. Dogs are loving and wonderful companions but they aren't people so they really can't fill that niche as a friend.

Wait until we have ChatGPT dog collars to both translate and improvise conversations with our dog buddies.

I think in certain circumstances they are more than pets. Symbiotic pack animals. They guard, help hunt, pull a sled over the ice, and help fight. Some other animals may meet similar qualifications, like a horse. They can also communicate, just not extensively or symbolically.

Half of this is false, the other half is irrelevant.

But I love to see the AI haters devolve into gatekeeping the idea of “friendship”. The available space to move those goalposts just gets smaller and smaller, doesn’t it?

I’d say if you want then go ahead and get an AI friend. But also don’t confuse it with a human (or a living being).

you said no friends twice

I cannot express how deeply disgusted the idea of a chatbot "friend" makes me

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.

>We're not talking about a sentient machine like Data from Star Trek, we're so so far from that still

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.

> How can you know how far from, close to, or beyond the line we are

It doesn't matter, as long as they are fully owned and operated by massive corporations, they aren't friends

Raises or asks, not begs, but in response: no friends.

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.

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