How much will you trust an AI chatbot powered by Meta to be your friend? Answers to this may vary. Even if you won’t, other people are already making close connections with “AI companions” or “falling in love” with ChatGPT. The rise of “cognitive offloading”—of people asking AI to do their critical thinking for them—is already well underway, with many high school and college students admitting to a deep reliance on the technology.
Beyond the obvious concern that AI “friends” are hallucinating, unthinking, obsequious algorithms that will never challenge you in the way a real friend might, it’s also worth remembering who AI actually works for. Recently Elon Musk’s own AI chatbot, Grok, was given new edicts that caused it to cast doubt on the Holocaust and talk about “white genocide” in response to unrelated prompts—a reminder, if we needed it, that these systems are never neutral, never apolitical, and always at the command of those with their hands on the code.
I’m fairly lucky. I live with my partner and have a decent community of friends. But I work from home and can spend the majority of the day not talking to anyone. I’m not immune to feeling isolated, anxious, and powerless as I stare unblinking at my news feed. I think we all feel it. We are all Angela Bennett. Weaponizing that alienation, as the antagonists of The Net do, can of course be used for identity theft. But it can also have much more deleterious applications: Our loneliness can be manipulated to make us consume more, work longer, turn against ourselves and each other. AI “friendships,” if engaged with uncritically, are only going to supercharge this disaffection and the ways in which it can be abused.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can withhold our attention, practice healthier screen routines, limit our exposure to doomscrolling, refuse to engage with energy-guzzling AI, delete our accounts. But, crucially, we can also organize collectively IRL: join a union or a local club, ask our friends if they need to talk. Hopelessness is what those in power want us to feel, so resist it.
The Net appeared at a time when the internet was only faintly understood as the new Wild West. Before the dot-com boom and bust, before Web 2.0, before the walled gardens and the theory of a “dead internet.” In that sense, it remains a fascinating time capsule of a moment when the possibilities to come felt endless, the outlook cautiously optimistic.