As someone who has written stories about the threat of AI, this piece by Visual Venture on YouTube goes over some of the concerns about AI friends and lovers. But I think they stop a little short of understanding the real horror. While it is absolutely a tragedy that “friend” chatbots have factually abetted people who have killed themselves and are being used by greedy corporations to make money (and will continue to do so in the future,) I think the greater problem is that AI friendbots will become better than humans at human relationships.
Most people think that an AI takeover will be something like Nineteen Eighty-Four or “The Terminator.” AIs will either create a tyranny where they control all aspects of human life but where humans will be miserable (popularly called “the torment nexus” as I write this) or, at some point, they’ll just kill us all. There’s a third way. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World is a dystopia that is created by love. Motivated by a genuine desire to help people, a society is created where people are engineered and chemically enhanced to fit roles in society with the total absence of pain, presence of pleasure, but also the perceived lack of real joy.
