Raw LLM Responses

The explosion of LLMs is coinciding perfectly with the loneliness epidemic (or rather, it's the perfect storm). People are becoming less and less able and interested in engaging interpersonally, and social polarization means the relationships that do exist become more and more brittle. Rather than doing the work to maintain connections with people even despite the inevitable differences, conflicts, and disagreements, it seems people more and more readily just cut others out of their lives. Cue a machine that will convincingly indulge, inflate, and mirror your ideals, thoughts, beliefs and preferences, deferring to supporting you rather than challenging you regardless of the position you take. Fluent enough that it can seemingly scratch the itch for humanity, but machine enough to alleviate guilt for having total, slave-like control over it. In the same way that AI is offering to take the effort out of creative output, it's offering to take the work out of relationships. But what I suspect people will end up finding is that part of what makes human relationships so special is the bonding *despite* each party's independence and autonomy. A friend is special because they don't have to be your friend, they want to be, and they choose to be even despite the bumps in the road. The love and bond that makes family family is in part due to the years of living in each other's space, getting under each other's skin, and really seeing each other as close to who they truly are as possible, flaws and all, and still choosing to love, support, and stand by each other, day after day. Not in spite of it.