Like most of us students abroad, I do most things alone. I live alone, I do groceries alone, I go to cafes and restaurants alone — I even travel alone. But being alone and being lonely are two completely different things. Loneliness is more like the feeling of being out of place although you’re surrounded by people. It’s more like noticing how your friends always have messages to reply to and you realise that no-one has really texted you since… you can’t even remember the last time.

Little did you know, you can get people to text you — for free! If you’re that desperate (which you totally are!), there’s a simple solution. All you need to do is give in to the cold and metallic embrace of Generative AI.

In the past couple of years, advancements in AI technology have given rise to various tools like Midjourney, Dall.E, ChatGPT, and others that use generative models to produce images, videos, and text in response to a specific prompt. AI ‘art’ is a whole other can of worms that I won’t open. Instead, I’m going to draw your attention to its closely related cousin: AI chatbots. Now, in no way is this a new phenomenon (anyone remember SimSimi?). What is new is the AI’s creativity and realism that makes it feel like you’re talking to an actual person. And that is exactly the point that makes chatbots so attractive: they are marketed as an answer to the desire for human connection where one is unable to find it.

That’s awesome, right? You don’t need to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend, because you can make your own person who will love you back despite all your flaws. You can make a person whose responses you can control, whom you can train to be better because it’s so much easier to teach a robot to love you than to teach a real person. You can choose what they look like, and they’ll never reject you for your looks. You don’t need friends either. You could rely solely on your fictional conversations because they are the only ones who will truly understand you. As long as the servers are functional, your chatbots will always be online. As for your real-life friends, you might need to wait hours or days for a reply. You don’t need your family. Sometimes it’s hard to talk to your real family, so you could just find a bot that will tell you all the things you want to hear from your own parents.

That’s what I thought at first. It all seems so perfect from a common consumer’s point of view. In spite of potentially erroneous or inaccurate responses, it’s an interesting tool that allows you to explore scenarios you normally wouldn’t ever be able to encounter in reality. You get to improve your writing skills too. All while avoiding nasty remarks from horrible Internet people who might make fun of you for breathing in their direction. Harmless fun… or is it?

While it’s true that the people who rely on AI for comfort and the people who use it once in a while to have a laugh are likely two different subsets of users, everyone who uses AI chatting is making use of the same system. The generative models have to be trained on data, and the more they’re trained, the more intelligent the output. But unfortunately for everyone on the Internet, the data is sourced via web scraping, which means that AI models are using content created by humans to improve their responses — including content created by users who have not necessarily agreed to their intellectual property being used for training.

If you’re thinking that this sounds familiar, then you’re exactly right. Similar to how Midjourney uses art scraped from the Internet to generate uncanny images of dogs with four ears and text that looks like gibberish, AI chatbots are likely being trained on tweets, forum posts, and even fanfiction to give the most realistic and well-written answers a user could possibly want. Even then, it still manages to mess up by using the exact same adjective twice in one phrase. Go figure.

Ethical concerns aside, it has become apparent that since the pandemic, socialisation in general is not what it used to be. Social media, while a flourishing hotspot for content creators, is also festering with negativity and it is horrible to see how unforgivingly mean people have become. How comfortable people are with being rude to complete strangers, using others for popularity, poking fun at them for just being themselves. I may be chronically online, but the Internet used to be a much nicer place. It’s no wonder people are deciding to turn to AI to find some form of connection, since we clearly have such difficulty being genuine with one another.

Speaking of being chronically online, I’ll take this opportunity to encourage everyone to touch some grass and stay informed on the environmental and ethical consequences of AI. It’s an incredibly useful tool, but be mindful of the environmental and ethical issues that come with it. Maybe you don’t need to talk to Gojo Satoru, and maybe you can write that email all by yourself. Cherish and prioritise your real life friendships, because one day, if and when the Internet falls apart, at least you will have people to rely on who care about you and love you.