With friends like these: love and friendship with Ai Agents

An article published by William Hasselberger and Micah Lott (co-chairs of the SACRU Working Group “Artificial Intelligence, Agency and the Human Person”) in Quartile 1, Topoi.

This paper focuses on a central question for Human-AI interaction: Can you be friends with an AI agent? If not, why not?
Some have argued that friendship with AI agents is impossible because software artifacts do not, and cannot, care about you. Proponents of human–machine friendships have responded that such relationships may indeed be one-sided, but still count as relationships of genuine love and affection—perhaps constituting a whole new category of friendship.
Our paper takes a different path. We argue that you cannot be friends with an AI agent because you cannot sensibly be a friend to an AI agent. Being a friend to an AI would require caring about the good of the AI agent for its own sake, and it does not make sense to care about an AI agent in that way, since these agents lack a good of their own. After spelling out this argument, and responding to several objections, we highlight some initial implications of our argument, the most important of which is that the very idea of a tool – or, technological fix – to address social isolation and loneliness is misguided.

 

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