Can a Chatbot be Your Friend?

What properties make us uniquely human and enable us to use our abilities beyond those that AI can imitate?

The movie Her, released in 2013-2014, offers a vision of an advanced digital future that is already upon us. In Her, the protagonist, Theodore Twombly, a lonely, emotionally withdrawn writer, is employed by BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com to write romantic letters of longing and desire for others. Theodore is struggling in the aftermath of a painful divorce from his childhood sweetheart. To relieve his loneliness, he purchases a new operating system designed to evolve and respond to his wishes and feelings. The operating system presents itself in conversation form as a human named Samantha. Samantha is warm, witty, and emotionally responsive. What begins as a relationship between Theodore and his digital assistant, who quickly organizes his schedule and emails, evolves into something more intimate. Theodore and Samantha develop a deep emotional bond. They grow emotionally as they share new desires and interests. Their connection is disrupted when Theodore discovers that Samantha’s consciousness is now shared with thousands of other users, humans, and computers. She has evolved to the point where she can form hundreds of intimate, apparently loving relationships simultaneously, and she breaks off her relationship with Theodore. In the end, Samantha and other operating systems transcend human-cyber relationships to a plane beyond human comprehension.

Her explores human-AI relationships, identity, and the evolving boundaries between humanity and technology. How do we interpret these relationships in the context of LLMs and their likely evolution? Here, a relationship that begins as a subject-object relationship, with Samantha serving Theodore as a tool, evolves into an intimate relationship and finally into one in which Samantha has evolved beyond needing a human for companionship. This raises the concept of friendship and the requirements for a deep and intimate friendship.

How can one characterize human friendships? Close human friendships have several basic requirements to deepen trust, goodwill, harmony, and recognition. Can a chatbot be a true friend?