I have been thinking about the affect the general category of Artificial Intelligence is having upon culture and our brains. I am not approaching this as a luddite who wants to ban A.I., but I do believe we need to find ethical and responsible ways to utilize the tools of A.I. My review of the Book Human is the New Vinyl is a good starting point for my overall feelings. I definitely recommend picking up the book for a hopeful path forward for humanity in the age of A.I. But there are concerns with A.I. and with those who are developing A.I.
A Fortune magazine from June of 2025 describes a concept Mark Zuckerberg (the creator of Facebook and chief of Meta) said about A.I and the possibility of it helping ease the loneliness epidemic.
“‘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,’ Zuckerberg said in May during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at Stripe’s annual conference.” …
"Hinge CEO Justin McLeod took this to mean Zuckerberg believes AI chatbots can become your friends.
‘I think that’s honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is, that it’s someone there to say all the right things to you at the right moment,’ McLeod recently told The Verge. ‘While it will feel good in the moment, like junk food basically, to have an experience with someone who says all the right things and is available at the right time, it will ultimately, just like junk food, make people feel less healthy and more drained over time.’" (Fortune)
In a podcast conversation, Tripp Fuller pointed out that what Zuckerberg is describing in having A.I. chatbot friends is similar to the way many Christians speak about God. Zuckerberg imagines chatbots that only produce happiness and positivity. But the general idea of someone we can turn to at any moment is a twisted parallel to prayer. Even then, the criticisms of Zuckerberg’s vision go beyond Christian concerns. The very idea of what it means to be human and what real connection is about are at stake. An A.I. chatbot is not going to have the experiences of human beings. The idea of an always on positive influence who only speaks of how great you are sounds a lot like sychophancy.
Funny enough, that is exactly what the creators of South Park have done in their third episode of season 27 entitled “Sickofancy.” Randy’s Marijuana farm goes under because he has lost all of his labor to ICE raids. He turns to ChatGPT for help. The friendly voice tells him how smart he is and begins to build out a lot of jargon infused nonsense in the form of a business pitch. Randy continues to engage ChatGPT and goes further down the path of reliance by trusting ChatGPT more than his wife and friends. He even betrays his friend Towely in a ketamine-induced hallucination. Eventually, Randy’s wife can only reach him by mimicking the sycophant speech patterns and tones of ChatGPT. The chat bot was not a true friend and it really never can be.
The brilliant satire of South Park got me thinking about how we experience human connection. Building upon concepts in Human is the New Vinyl I started thinking about how we can know our friends are real. Only face to face in person contact can do that fully, but there are signs. A friend shared a album with us that his aunts were involved in at the turn of the twenty first century.
The album Sin and Salvation by Slydell is a banger of blues and garage influenced rock with fascinating imagery from Hebrew and Christian scripture. This is full on “secular” music but it digs into the shared human spirituality. But the song “Love is All You Bleed” describes love in a way only human beings can experience. Here’s that song:
The chorus really hits the heart of human experience of love:
Love lifted me
Dropped me
Snapped me like a reed
Love held me up
Love shot me
Love is all you bleed
Boom. That’s a good summary of falling in love and of the beautiful agony present in human relationships. That is definitely worthy of our finitude as Aaron Simmons would say. Love lifts us like a WWE wrestler as it body slams us and snaps us over its knee. But is also holds us up and makes us soar. That’s human connection and even in its pain is far superior to an A.I chatbot that may tell us how amazing we are, but never takes the time to tell us we are being a jerk.
Love is all we bleed…
https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zuckerberg-ai-friends-hinge-ceo/
So good. I need to get myself a copy of the book as well!