I don't use Facebook or Instagram but I do use WhatsApp. Recently, Meta added "Meta AI" to WhatsApp and it added itself as a participant in private chat groups I have with friends etc. If I type the @ symbol in a group to mention a participant Meta AI is in the list.<p>I've moved every contact I can to Signal. I absolutely do not want Meta inserting some AI thing in private group chats. There's no option to disable this functionality. It's become standard for me to ask "Do you have a Signal account?" to anyone who contacts me via WhatsApp.<p>It's sad to have to turn away from a service that I used and loved so much. To be clear: I am not against the idea of AI chatbots, and I wouldn't mind one being available inside WhatsApp, but the roll out of this feature is horribly invasive: it's added to group chats, and there's a floating circle thing on the main WhatsApp page, and I can't disable it.<p>I did ask Meta AI in WhatsApp how to disable it and it told me that there's no official way to remove it and also suggested I might like to switch another messaging app like Signal.
The longer portion from the Dwarkesh interview isn't as flashy as the article makes out. Mark is essentially saying in that interview that people need more friends, have room for them in their lives, and they struggle to keep them. Using AI to help you get real people to be your friends is the goal there, not to replace people.<p>That said, if you listen to the whole interview, then it really does come across that Zuck really doesn't know what a friend is, and never really has. And at this point in his life, I don't think that going to change. Dude lives in a house with meter thick RPG-proof windows. His reality very much is too distorted by his wealth. He's, literally, too rich to function.
I think one major aspect of friendship is the random reward (similar to a casino). In any given social interaction the outcome could be extremely negative to extremely positive. While a good friend will heavily skew positive, there is still a range of outcomes.<p>Humans can have this range of social outcomes naturally because all parties are constantly in different moods. Sometimes humans careful choose their social behavior to manipulate others, and this is generally frowned upon. A machine cannot have a wide range of social rewards without being manipulative.
Someone having a lot of artificial "friends" algorithmically based on their behavior sounds more like a disorder than a desirable state. Something in-between schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder, but outside your brain. But all is fine, as long someone can make money out of it.
Why bother with all the stress and risk of a relationship with a real human when you can have a virtual relationship with someone who is always available and can be tweaked to meet your exact specifications?<p>I suspect history will see Meta the same way it sees Purdue Pharma - their greed allowed them to convince themselves they were providing something good for the world, while they were actually creating something enormously harmful.
I get the skepticism. But I already see several people chatting with chatgpt like they would with a friend.<p>A long memory window will increase stickiness and I don't think this is too far fetched.<p>I thought too much screentime was bad, but man...
Maybe this is how the people who thought TVs were bad felt when they saw people glued to phones.
I know it is a controversial topic, but do adults really need friends? I feel like "being friends" is something from middle school where our brains were different. Now, there are colleagues, there are neighbors, there is the partner that is supposedly our only and best friend, and optionally there are pets/kids. But proper friends? In my life and in the life of people that I observe regularly, there is no real need for friends.
> “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends,” he said in the interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.<p>Is this true? I don't believe this AT ALL. No way that the average American would say they only have 3 friends, that's beyond low.
> “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,”<p>My god, he thinks people like their feed algorithm.
"I want most of my friends to be AI, and I'm normal, so everyone else who's normal must want that, too"<p>I get the appeal, but there's something "you shouldn't have ice cream for every meal" about it.
zuckerberg's next big miss<p>in a future where AI is doing most of the mundane work, real / personal connections are infinitely more valuable as everything else becomes commoditized background noise
I think he's on to something big here.
People are getting more and more isolated, spending countless hours scrolling on stupid small screens.<p>What if you could have your perfect information bubble from all your friends, who always are there for you, always agree, or act in just the right way?<p>Never thought about this one.
Well, I guess that why he's a billionaire.<p>I'm happy I lived before this nightmare comes to life.
I know it's a bit stupid saying this about the owner of the world's biggest social network, but does he understand people at all?<p>I'm pretty sure you wouldn't need a very advanced AI to replace most friends' interactions on Facebook, but that's completely missing the point.
Keeping people in an even worse bubble of well-spoken yes-...agents will surely fix the division of society, right?!<p>That plan seems incredibly evil, but who gives a shit? Zuckerberg sure doesn't!
People having friends sucks because, while you can shove products in between them, you can only sell them at a price justified by the value they add to the friendship, not the value of the friendship instead.<p>People would be willing to pay so much more if what they were paying for was the friendship instead, but so far, any attempt at taking friendships hostage and having people pay have gone nowhere.<p>So the logical conclusion is to just sell the friendships immediately; that way you can put a price tag directly on the friendship itself and earn much more money from it.<p>This is a perfectly reasonable business strategy when you're a soulless psychopath with an insatiable hunger for endless wealth.
I really like friends who completely ignore the things that I like and insist that we do the things that they like instead, and talk only about things that interest them! /s