- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggests AI could fill the friendship gap by becoming like personalized companions. But critics such as Hinge CEO Justin McLeod argue this undermines genuine human connection and mental health—likening the phenomenon to eating fatty food.
As the loneliness epidemic continues to worsen in the U.S., people are coming up with new ways to combat the phenomenon that a former U.S. surgeon general said is linked to increased risk of heart disease, depression, cognitive decline, dementia, and early mortality.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the average American has fewer than three friends, but the demand for them is “meaningfully more” at about 15. He suggested that as AI becomes more personalized and gets to know the user better, it would “be really compelling,” and AI could even become your friend.
“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said in May during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at Stripe’s annual conference.
Hinge CEO Justin McLeod took this to mean Zuckerberg believes AI chatbots can become your friends.
“I think that’s honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is, that it’s someone there to say all the right things to you at the right moment,” McLeod recently told The Verge. “While it will feel good in the moment, like junk food basically, to have an experience with someone who says all the right things and is available at the right time, it will ultimately, just like junk food, make people feel less healthy and more drained over time.”
“It will displace the human relationships that people should be cultivating out in the real world,” McLeod continued.
When asked for a reaction in response to McLeod’s comments, a Meta spokesperson pointed Fortune to other comments Zuckerberg had made about AI being used in personal life. One such use case is AI being used to talk through difficult conversations they need to have with people in their life, Zuckerberg said in an interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.
“But the average person wants more connectivity [and] connection than they have. So there’s a lot of questions that people ask of stuff like, okay, is this going to replace in-person connections or real life connections?” Zuckerberg questioned. “And my default is that the answer to that is probably no.”
McLeod has been much more conservative about AI-centered relationships, calling the phenomenon “playing with fire.” Still, Hinge, as part of Match Group, is using AI for coaching features that help users improve their profile, choose better photos, and filter inappropriate messages before they’re sent.
“We want to continue at Hinge to champion human relationships, real human-to-human-in-real-life relationships, because I think they are an essential part of the human experience, and they’re essential to our mental health,” McLeod said.
Gen Zers have also turned to AI for other personal services like therapy, which professionals warn against doing.
“They’re not experts, and we know that generative AI has a tendency to conflate information and make things up when it doesn’t know,” Vaile Wright, a licensed psychologist and senior director for the American Psychological Association’s office of health care innovation, told Fortune’s Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez. “So I think that, for us, is most certainly the number one concern.”
