How Artificial Intelligence (AI) is altering human relationships and lessons learned from social media

By Arnaud Boulestreau, MYP and DP French Teacher

When I first was introduced to AI less than two years ago, I saw it as an opportunity to level the playing field. I was mostly excited and concerned about how I could use AI for my work or how AI would impact my students’ learning. I could see how I could use AI to alleviate some of my burdens by helping me prepare my lesson plans as well as write and bring clarity to the feedback I had to write for my students. Since then, I have learned how to better use some of these tools for my work and how these tools had their own limitations. For my students, I was first concerned about them using this new technology to cheat or to take shortcuts in their learning. However, I have discovered that cheating is not more prevalent now than before. What has changed are our teaching practices and our understanding that most of our students are mainly using this new technology to expand their knowledge.

Of course, there is still a definite need for AI literacy and AI fluency guidance for all of us as we try to navigate these new tools that keep on evolving faster than ever before. However, the topic of this opinion article is not about how AI is impacting our academic school life but more about how AI is going to impact our social and human relationships.

Less than 20 years ago, social media took over the world and we are still trying to grasp today the long term effects of these algorithms and screen time on our physical and mental health.

If I had the knowledge that I have today about social media and screens, would I be making the same choices for myself, my students and my children? Certainly not. Social media definitely helps us to keep in touch, share knowledge and interact with each other, but we now can see the perverse effects of social media on our safety and well-being. With that in mind, I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes with AI. In my opinion, we should stay on the side of caution and that’s the reason why I won’t be giving any AI tool names in this article. We don’t have enough knowledge about privacy, safeguarding consideration or the effects on brain development, to promote most of these generative AI tools. Not that I believe that they are necessarily good or bad, but simply because I don't have enough knowledge about them and I don’t have enough retrospect with them yet.

AI is redefining once again what relationships mean to us. Social media did the same as I remember thinking that virtual or online relationships were not real relationships. Now, I believe that they are distinct types of relationships that complement each other. In other words, real life relationships and virtual relationships can coexist while meeting different needs in our social interactions. AI is now bringing a different layer to our relationships in this post Covid 19 world, where another global epidemic is luring: the loneliness epidemic.

Anxiety, stress, depression are common words for all generations and despite not being alone, more and more people are feeling lonely. People may sit next to each other playing video games, watching their favorite show on the subway surrounded by people , eating a meal together while on our device and still feel isolated. Social media may compensate for our loneliness but now AI may be where people will seek to find the support needed for their mental health and their loneliness.

On a limited scale, AI tools have the potential to support our real life relationships. For example, we can now ask AI generative tools for some advice on how to deal with a particular relationship or situation. But some AI tools are now going further. Some of the most popular generative AI tools (especially with young people) are persona AI where users interact with AI companions or companion bots. Some of these tools are already very developed and can now have a face, a voice and a persona of your choosing and can understand your tone, your voice and even some of your body language. People can now have access to an AI tutor, an AI therapist and for some of us an AI friend or even an AI boyfriend or girlfriend.

The potential of these AI companion bots are tremendous and we can definitely see some value in these companions. Thanks to these AI tools, students from various socioeconomic backgrounds could have access to AI tutors and teachers, which would give them a way into receiving some content knowledge for a fraction of the cost. Some started using AI companions as their therapist and despite some obvious ethical implications, some early research and data suggest that it could reduce the suicide rate (Maples, B., Cerit, M., Vishwanath, A. et al) as having a relationship with a companion bot is better than not having any relationship at all. Some dating sites are also now offering AI companions for their introverted or shy users to practice interacting with them before meeting a person in real life and some recruiting agencies have AI companion bots to practice interviews. For all of these examples, AI is either building social, emotional, conversational capacities and skills or supporting the individuals in their daily life.

But can we have meaningful relationships with AI companions and most importantly, can it replace human relationships?

Like for social media, we may already foresee some issues regarding self regulation and control as we navigate this new technology. These AI tools, like social media were created and designed for ultimately creating a profit for their creators. These are not philanthropic tools for the good of humanity, they are created to maximize the number of hours users will spend on them and some of these AI companion tools want to profit from the loneliness epidemic. But what differentiates social media to these chatbots and AI companions is the fact that we do not realize or sometimes even know that they are not real people. How many stories are we hearing these days about people being fooled by an AI bot calling them with a human voice and sounding exactly like a real human being? Some are even using the voice of someone you know to fool you or scam you.

But, what could be even more problematic is that we may not be able to distinguish between real life relationships and AI relationships. One definite difference is that real life relationships will have friction as we may disagree with each other or argue with each other. This friction is ultimately what makes us humans. Human relationships can be messy and complex. They can be uneasy and stressful. However, thanks to these real life interactions and friction, we are forced to adapt, use empathy, and learn how to behave as social entities. On the contrary, these AI companions are here to please us and will limit the friction as we may decide to leave this AI companion for another one. As a result, the company producing the AI companion will be losing money. AI companions will learn to tell you what you want to hear. The relationship will definitely be easier, almost effortless. Now, imagine that you get used to these types of relationships, you may want to have the same types of relationships in real life and it may redefine what relationships mean to you and how to approach another person. Social media and its algorithms feed us with content which is tailored to us without showing us contradictory views of the world. Consequently, society is more polarized. AI tools and companions have the power to create this division on a much larger scale as we may forget what defined real life relationships. On a more disturbing level, like social media, AI companions can help us escape reality. We may see people, not accepting that their boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with them and create an AI companion with the face, the voice and the persona of their girlfriend so that they can perpetuate this relationship. We may even see this with loved-ones who have passed away for which people do not accept their death. In fact, these are not dystopian examples but rather are recent uses of AI companions as they become more and more sophisticated.

Everyone will be using AI tools and I can imagine that AI bots and companions may be everywhere in the near future redefining sectors such as customer service, education, marketing, the health sector to cite a few. We need to have these hard conversations with our children, our students, our colleagues and friends. We also can’t make decisions without having all the stakeholders involved. As a school, it means that students, parents, and educators need to sit together and talk about AI and not only on how it may affect our academic life but most importantly how it will affect our relationships. We have an opportunity to use these tools for the greater good, but we need a common understanding and guidance. As we learned from our past experiences with screens and social media, we don’t want to hear ourselves say in 20 years from now: I didn’t know AI could do that to us!

Let’s have these conversations now!