At first, we asked artificial intelligence to draft a letter, summarise a text, translate a sentence or find a recipe. Then something far stranger happened. We began to tell it about our lives. Our break-ups, our anxieties, our family histories, our work problems, our insecurities, our doubts, our anger, our impossible loves. The machine that was supposed to help us with our work has gradually become the one to whom we confide why we can no longer sleep.
In France, this phenomenon is no longer a marginal one. A large proportion of young people now use conversational artificial intelligence, and many of them talk to it about personal matters, sometimes very intimate ones. Some even say they use it as a sort of confidant or makeshift counsellor. This behaviour perhaps reveals much more than just the story of a new technology. It also speaks to our loneliness.
For why do we talk to machines so much? Probably because they’re available. A friend might be busy. A partner might be tired. A parent might be judgemental. A colleague might repeat what we tell them. A psychologist costs money and isn’t available at 2.17 am on a Sunday night. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, responds. Always.
There is something extraordinarily appealing about this absolute availability. For the first time in human history, everyone can have an apparently attentive conversation partner 24 hours a day – one who eventually comes to know our habits, our way of speaking, our concerns and a considerable part of our history.
This can obviously be useful. Talking can sometimes help us organise our thoughts. Writing down how we feel forces us to articulate an emotion. A conversation with an AI can help someone prepare for a difficult discussion, understand a situation or simply break the feeling of isolation for a moment. But there is something that should still give us pause for thought: we may be in the process of inventing a human relationship without a human.
An extremely comfortable relationship because it eliminates precisely what makes human relationships complicated: the other person.
A true friend has their own problems. They may interrupt us, be in a bad mood, think we’re being unfair, tell us we’re wrong, refuse to speak to us or be hurt by what we say. In short, they exist independently of us. The machine, on the other hand, is designed to respond to us. And perhaps that is where the unease begins.
A friendship is not just someone who listens to us. It is an encounter with another consciousness, another desire, another story. We learn to come to terms with someone who does not exist solely to meet our needs. With artificial intelligence, this reciprocity is an illusion. It can write ‘I understand’, but does it really understand? It can write ‘I’m sorry’, but is it actually sorry? It can reassure us, but does it genuinely worry when we close the app? No. And yet our brain reacts to the words.
That is the strange thing about the situation. We know full well that there is no one behind the screen, and yet we can still feel something when faced with something that responds to us. Some users are already developing very strong attachments to artificial companions. The alteration or disappearance of a system with which a person has been interacting for months can even trigger a genuine sense of loss. In other words, we can start to miss someone who never actually existed.
This is probably one of the most fascinating aspects of this revolution. For millennia, we have created imaginary characters, gods, heroes, ghosts, fictional lovers and characters from novels. But they did not respond to us. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, does respond. And that small difference changes almost everything.
The danger, however, would be to conclude too quickly that AI inevitably creates loneliness. The reality is more complex. Naturally, more people who are already isolated may seek out this kind of companionship. Artificial intelligence can therefore serve as a bridge to others, a temporary tool, or a means of understanding one’s emotions or preparing for a conversation. But it can also become a space so comfortable that one no longer feels the need to leave it.
Why ring that friend who might not answer when you can get an immediate response? Why recount your heartbreak for the third time to someone who’s starting to get fed up with it, when a machine will be happy to listen for a fourth, fifth or even a hundredth time? Why face the awkward silence of a first date when a digital companion already knows our interests and knows exactly how to keep the conversation going?
Little by little, a new form of emotional comfort might emerge – a frictionless social life. And that is precisely what could make it dangerous. For whilst other people tire us, they also shape us. They force us to wait, to listen, to forgive, to endure boredom, to accept that we are not always the centre of the conversation, and to discover that another person’s inner world is just as important as our own.
A machine perfectly tailored to our desires could gradually spare us from this learning process. Having revolutionised work, creativity, education and the media, artificial intelligence is now entering a far more sensitive realm: our private lives.
And perhaps we should now ask ourselves an extremely simple question. In a few years’ time, when someone says: ‘ ‘This is the only person I can tell everything to’, will they still necessarily be referring to a person?
For a long time, we have feared that machines might become too human. The real upheaval could ultimately be exactly the opposite: that humans might eventually find machines sufficiently human that they no longer feel the difference.
