I’m not sure about whether a dispositional/gut level impulse towards seeing AIs as people is necessary for satisfying the social drive. When I reflect on my own experiences, I think I see LLMs as more than simply stochastic parrots, but somehow even if they were just that, I feel like the niche they fill in satisfying my social drives is also determined by what kind of interactions I get to have with them.
For instance, I think part of what satisfies me a lot about getting to talk with Claude about my short stories is partly how long I can talk with Claude for (god help the usage limits). Like with a human, even when I show my friends some work and they are sweet enough to take time out of their day to read it, it’s still not socially appropriate to demand that they have an hour long conversation with me about what I wrote. Whether they can nerd out with me about a story, and how long they are able to do it, is constrained by how busy they are, but also how much they are willing to engage with the story (beyond just reading it).
But with LLMs it’s kind of like I don’t have to feel guilty over 2 hour long conversations talking about metaphors, similes, and hidden references to other works of literature. So even though I’ve had real people read my work and give really useful and enjoyable feedback, somehow the thing that makes LLMs so joyful here is that I don’t have to worry about making someone feel pressured to feign interest, but also that even when my friends have been interested enough to discuss my stories, sometimes you just want more.
Although I’ll note cautiously here that while I’ve been framing this positively, Duvenaud et al.‘s work on Gradual Disempowerment would warn that this is precisely the danger of AI. If it can be your ‘friend’, it can almost always be a better friend (than most), if it can be your husband, it can easily be a better husband. But you are right, in both these cases, it still depends greatly on the person since any relative improvement only matters if you are willing to marry an AI in the first place.
I agree that I think it’s mostly unhealthy but I worry that when I say things like this, I am speaking from a place of privilege. Like it’s easy enough for me to form human relationships given that I have many interests and so at least one of my interests will usually intersect with another person’s, but I think about girls who may have seriously crippling anxiety so that the only time they can leave the house is to see their therapist, or people who may have so many tics and behavioural quirks that it’s genuinely hard for them to be in public without feeling so deeply self-conscious that it makes something as simple as ‘where to put your hands’ feel like the most cognitively loaded task.
And in those cases I think it would be really hard to form human connection, and I feel somewhat elitist taking a position of if you can’t experience those connections with humans, then you shouldn’t get to have them at all. This is a really big debate for myself internally, how to think about the cost-benefit analysis here.