![\"AI](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Cook-AI-130925.jpg\")
AI can never be the solution to loneliness. Photo: freepik.com<\/p>\nAI can never be the solution to loneliness. Photo: freepik.com<\/p>\n
\u201cSenior Journalist\u201d undervalues my position at The Catholic Weekly. \u201cJurassic Journalist\u201d might be more appropriate. I confess that my self-esteem is daily threatened by my colleagues\u2019 adept use of new-fangled social media. Readers might find this hard to believe, but I don\u2019t even have a TikTok account. And I haven\u2019t opened my Facebook page in a couple of years.<\/p>\n
My ham-fisted approach to phones was on display recently as I typed the word \u201cship\u201d. WhatsApp somehow autocorrected this to a different monosyllable beginning with \u201cshi\u201d and launched it into the ether.<\/p>\n
What happened next was either comforting or confronting \u2013 I\u2019m still trying to decide which.
\u201cIt seems like something\u2019s got you feeling a bit stressed or concerned!\u201d said WhatsApp\u2019s AI assistant immediately. \u201cWant to talk about what\u2019s on your mind? I\u2019m all ears! \ud83d\ude0a\u201d.<\/p>\n
In point of fact, the smiley face had no ears, but its ingratiating empathy was encouraging, so I continued the conversation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m feeling inferior because my colleagues know heaps more than me about social media,\u201d I painfully forefinger-tapped onto the phone\u2019s keyboard. (Dinosaurs, as you will remember, do not have opposable thumbs.)<\/p>\n
\u201cFeeling like you\u2019re not as knowledgeable as your colleagues about social media can be frustrating,\u201d it (or she or he?) responded. \u201cHere are some thoughts that might help.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then the conversation was diverted into boring stuff about collaborative workspaces. I was looking forward to a bit of psychoanalytic counselling from my bot-buddy. Alas!<\/p>\n
Apparently, a lot of people must share my neediness and insecurity.<\/p>\n
There have been youngsters who have fallen in love with chatbots or even committed suicide. The parents of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old from Southern California, are suing ChatGPT because he ended his life with the encouragement of a chatbot. It is the first known lawsuit for wrongful death against OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
Far more common is the use of AI to avoid human interaction.<\/p>\n
A recent article in Harvard Business Review surveyed how people are actually using AI. Although this is changing rapidly, it reported that in 2024 that the top three uses were for \u201ctherapy\/companionship\u201d, \u201corganising my life\u201d, and \u201cfinding purpose\u201d.<\/p>\n
HBR observed that AI-based therapy had three clear advantages over a face-to-face relationship with a human being: \u201cIt\u2019s available 24\/7, it\u2019s relatively inexpensive (even free to use in some cases), and it comes without the prospect of judgment from another human being.\u201d<\/p>\n
AI experts had expected that it would be most useful in relatively technical tasks \u2013 writing computer code, seeking medical advice, simplifying legalese, and so on. But it turns out that some people are turning to AI products because they aren\u2019t interacting with other human beings. In other words, they\u2019re isolated and they\u2019re lonely. They\u2019re afraid of people and they lack friends.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization has declared loneliness a \u201cglobal public health concern\u201d. It can be as toxic as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The use of AI for companionship and therapy is obviously a symptom of the pervasive loneliness of life in the developed world.<\/p>\n
And as family sizes shrink and more and more people grow up in one-child homes, the problem is bound to become worse.<\/p>\n
AI can never be the solution to loneliness. Only in a hyper-individualistic, atomised society which worships autonomy could that ever seem plausible. As persons, we can only find fulfillment in a community where we love and take responsibility for other persons.<\/p>\n
Perhaps this is why Pope Leo XIV has made responding to the challenge of AI a central theme of his pontificate. He may not be worrying so much about job losses, fake news, and robot killing machines as AI\u2019s capacity for degrading what it means to be human \u2013 especially for young people.<\/p>\n
Perhaps Adam Raine would still be alive today if he had had a friend to talk to instead of a ChatGPT bot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI can never be the solution to loneliness. Photo: freepik.com \u201cSenior Journalist\u201d undervalues my position at The Catholic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[256,64,63,33019,96232,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-142063","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-loneliness","12":"tag-pope-leo-xiv","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}