Commentary: AI will affect your social life, even if you’ve never used it

A LITTLE LESS UNFILTERED WITH ONE ANOTHER

AI has become a kind of social sealant, filling the gaps in young people’s relationships: coaching men to plan dates that outromance their rivals, supplying words of condolence our friends couldn’t quite find. 

Lately, it’s stopped being so invisible. “So my AI told me …” is now a casual part of my friends’ conversations. 

One friend texted me after he had come home from a good date, for once, elated and desperate to share it with someone. With his roommates asleep, he primed his chatbot: “Be my flatmate after I’ve just come home from this date.” I quickly texted back, so he spoke to me. But if I hadn’t, that conversation would have strengthened his connection to Claude instead, at our friendship’s expense.

New technology tends to distort our existing social equilibrium. Once smartphones entered the fray, being in a friend group meant being constantly contactable, a participant in group chats. AI hasn’t slowed our communication, but it may be changing what we communicate. 

Now that there’s a tool on hand to smooth and rationalise the bumpiness of our thoughts, we find ourselves being a little less unfiltered with one another, a little less vulnerable.

I don’t use Claude for my personal life. But like most Gen Z-ers, I’m more susceptible to its temptations than I think I am. 

My phone has always been a part of me. Like a cyborg, I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t attached to my person, an extension of myself, of my brain, tucked safely into my pocket. Young people are digital natives; of course the itchiness of our feelings has a fix in this little device of ours. Our friendships may suffer for it.

Alice Lassman writes about artificial intelligence and is the author of an upcoming book about the effect of technology on intimacy. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.