All posts tagged: true friend

How to Know Your Frenemy

[ad_1] Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. There are many different kinds of friends. Aristotle distinguished among friendships based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Michel de Montaigne wrote about true friendship, which “grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by its practice.” In this column, I have written about the difference between real friends and deal friends. And then there is the frenemy. This portmanteau of friend and enemy first appeared as long ago as the late 19th century. It signifies a discordant relationship in which someone appears to be your friend or has a superficially friendly demeanor toward you but behaves in ways that real friends wouldn’t and shouldn’t. Perhaps the frenemy undermines you, manipulates your feelings, gaslights you, or says mean things about you behind your back. Identifying frenemies isn’t always easy, because the behavior can be designed to go undetected, or perhaps to be so …

You Can’t Truly Be Friends With an AI

[ad_1] Earlier this year, a man told me that a chatbot had saved his life. As I reported for Radio Atlantic, an Australian musician who had been battling depression for decades found companionship with an AI through an app called Replika, and everything changed. He started playing the guitar again, went clothes shopping for the first time in years, and spent hours conversing with his AI companion and laughing out loud. To me, it seemed as if he had gone to the app store and downloaded a future. But our conversations surfaced a slurry of contradictions. Though the musician felt less alone with his AI companion, his isolation from other people was unchanged. He was adamant that he had a real friendship, but understood clearly that no person was on the other side of his screen. The effect of this bond was extraordinary. But less dramatic AI relationships are surprisingly numerous. Replika claims to have millions of active users. And it’s not the only app for simulating conversation on the market—there’s Chai and Nomi and …