No More AI Friends

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A couple of points before we jump in:

1) A few spots left for tonight’s NYC phone-free social experience. 630pm. East Village. Grab your tickets here.

2) A few days ago, I released my pod with BePresent co-founder Jack Winston. Received a lot of great feedback on this one, so dropping it again here if you missed it!

Onto this week’s essay…

Before we start, I’d highly advise you to watch this clip (1 min 53 seconds) as it will serve as the foundation for the rest of this piece.

If you can’t watch/listen, no stress. You’ll be able to understand everything I’m about to say.

Last week, Zuck Daddy went viral for explaining Meta’s plan to create personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones.

In the clip, he confidently cites pulls out of his ass a loose statistic around friendship and loneliness…

The average American has around 3 friends, but the capacity and demand for 15.

Unconvinced, I decided to dig into these numbers a bit further. I found that while he was somewhat accurate on the first part of the statistic (a 2023 Pew Research study showed that 53% of American adults report having one to four close friends, with 38% having five or more), there was no data to back up the ‘demand’ portion.

That said, his notion sticks true. People are lonelier than ever and this isolation has grave consequences.

According to the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes or drinking 6 alcoholic drinks per day.

Zuck is right that most Americans probably have less friendship and connection than they would prefer, but he’s dead wrong that providing them with personalized AI counterparts is the solution.

He argues that Meta’s AI companions won’t replace physical human friendship, but instead will fill the gaps where none exist.

But that framing misunderstands the problem and ignores how behavior change actually works.

And quite frankly, it’s the biggest sack of bullshit I’ve ever heard.

I've written before about how phones compress the period for discovery and obsession, whether it be of interests, self, or socially. The things that make someone interesting — the hobbies they’ve stuck with, the stories they can tell, the emotional intelligence they’ve developed through failure.

None of that forms by accident, but rather through boredom, trial and error, being alone with your thoughts, and making real contact with the world.

All of which have become increasingly rare.

If you’re a well-rounded person with curiosity, opinions, and some social fluency, it’s easier to make friends.

Not because you’re more deserving, but because you’re more discoverable.

You’ve naturally expanded your surface area of luck. There’s more of you to find.

But if you’ve spent every idle moment with your head buried in a screen, consuming instead of exploring, that surface area shrinks.

You end up with fewer stories, fewer questions, less depth, and people can feel that.

Especially in adulthood.

This is where the damage compounds. If you don’t develop the raw material for friendship early on, it gets harder to improvise later.

And if you’ve never built the habits or confidence to approach someone, listen to them, relate to them, then even the desire for friendship starts to feel like a liability.

So instead, people retreat to their AI-powered echo chambers.

When you introduce a frictionless, always-available alternative to something hard, messy, and unpredictable (like human relationships), you are rewiring expectations of human connection.

Human connection isn’t efficient. It’s frustrating, often boring, and sometimes painful. But it’s precisely those qualities that make it invaluable. Trust is built by showing up even when it’s inconvenient. You learn who you are by pushing against someone else’s reality.

We saw it with painfully sycophantic GPT-4o update. AI models are fickle and placing too much emotional stock into any virtual companion or LLM is a slippery slope.

No matter how ‘close’ you think you are with a virtual friend, it won’t pick you up at 2 a.m. after a flat tire, help you move apartments, or make you laugh until you cry.

The longer you talk to an entity that never interrupts you, never disappoints you, and never asks for anything back, the harder it becomes to tolerate real people.

The real risk is not that AI companions replace something people don’t have, but that they slowly weaken their ability and desire to build it in the first place.

Zuckerberg treats connection as a fixed commodity that AI can safely top up. In reality, connection is a learned behavior. Remove the incentive to practice, and you deepen loneliness.

The same logic applies to attention and content. Nobody intended for TikTok to become the default entertainment experience. It just happened to be the easiest, fastest, and most personalized. Now it’s hard to watch anything longer than 90 seconds without checking your phone.

The standard shifted. The inputs got flatter and more reactive, and now our brains expect everything else to adapt to that speed.

Why would friendship be any different?

My issue is not that people are finding solace in relationships with AI. It’s already happening for good and bad with Character.AI, Replika, and hundreds of NSFW bots accessible by a simple Reddit search.

I frequently use ChatGPT for business advice, as a therapist, and to help examine new angles of inner reflection that I may not have previously thought of. I know many of my friends do the same.

But Meta is a different beast. They have scale, distribution, regulatory pull, and more behavioral data than any company in the world. When they move into this space, it stops being niche and starts shaping norms.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: the most effective way to reduce compulsive tech use is to design a life that is so rich with meaning, challenge, and connection that checking your devices feels like a step down.

People are at the core of all of that. Collectively, they form the scaffolding around your identity. Who you spend time with quietly determines what you normalize, what you pursue, and who you become.

Every successful person in any domain will attribute their success to people.

The most important thing you can do today is invest in your relationships. Show up for your people. Be someone who listens, remembers the small things, and makes time for spontaneity.

Last year, I wrote about the advantage of being human and declared that it’s never been a better time to be a people person.

Every day, I believe that statement to be more true.

I’d like to leave you with a call to action: Pick up your phone and call a friend today. No agenda, just call. If you don’t have a friend that comes to mind, step out of your comfort zone and sign up for an in-person event in your city.

The best way to build friendship is to practice it.

My Businesses & Social Links

If you’re looking to improve your digital wellness, here are a few places to start:

Kanso Experiences - Unforgettable phone-free social experiences for ambitious people who are tired of the feed and hungry for real relationships.

Kanso Reset45 Cohorts - A cohort-based bootcamp to reprogram your tech habits in 45 days. If you’re interested in joining, reply to this email.

Kanso 1:1 Digital Wellness Accountability Coaching - For those who need high-touch, personalized support and daily ongoing accountability.

The Digital Reset Journal - The first journal designed to help you build a healthier relationship with tech

Digital Detox Tools - A free directory of 100+ digital wellness tools to integrate into all areas of your life.

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That’s all for this week. Now stop scrolling, and go do something great.

— Randy