We live half our lives inside a glass rectangle.
The great bulk of our friendships - particularly those not tied to geography - happen entirely through chat windows. We check in on friends in group texts. We console each other with emojis, plan increasingly rare gatherings with shared calendars, and sustain connections with voice notes. It’s not hard to argue that for many people - most people - the “real” friendship is the ongoing digital conversation, while the occasional dinner or visit is the pleasant but unnecessary supplement. When you think of your closest friend, is the mental image of a face across a table, or is it the tiny glowing circle at the top of your messaging app?
Which makes the leap to treating an LLM as a friend far less dramatic than it might sound. Friendship has already been abstracted into text. We’ve already stripped away tone of voice, physical presence, even shared environment, and convinced ourselves (accurately enough) that the residue of words and symbols sustains the relationship.
Why should the next step - typing into a chat box and receiving words that are entirely artificial - be qualitatively different?
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