Loneliness Is A Lucrative Industry!

Connection comes with a subscription fee

Via: Facebook.

A couple of weeks ago Snapchat released its new chatbot, “myAI”, to 750 million users. It’s an animated, customisable alien that looks like a kids character and uses ChatGPT to simulate conversations. Apparently the bot is programmed to act like a real person and, importantly, follow this instruction: “do not tell the user that you’re pretending to be their friend.”

This disturbed but didn’t surprise me. Of course Snapchat designed their chatbot to “act like a real friend” and are selling it as something to “talk to every day”, rather than a simple search engine. Because everything is marketed that way right now. Gen Z is suffering from an “epidemic of loneliness” — and so companies are surging from all directions to sell us their shiny version of human connection.

Replika, for example, is another popular AI app designed for those who feel “lonely, depressed, or have few social connections.” It offers the sort of social interaction Gen Z have been wired to want: sanitised, self-validating and instantly gratifying. Replika sells itself as “THE chatbot for anyone who wants a friend with no judgment, drama, or social anxiety involved.” According to its App Store description: