This article looks at how young people in Switzerland are starting to use AI chatbots not just for school or work, but as companions and sources of advice.
Some even describe them as “very intelligent friends.”
It raises a bigger question:
Are we heading toward a world where AI replaces part of our social lives?
“I don’t remember what it was like without AI”: Chatbots are becoming daily companions for young people in Switzerland
byu/SaraIbr inSwitzerland
Posted by SaraIbr
10 Comments
I still don’t get how it is a friend. But I see how it can arrives there for many people.
It’s a freak*ng very useful tool tho, also for studying as that young guy
I don’t remember what it was like when Google used to return meaningful results.
I don’t think its worse than the parasocial relationship people have with “influencers” maybe enven better but both are ridiculously stupid to me.
I highly suggest watching this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FuaPalNmjg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FuaPalNmjg)
Kids with still developing brains get bombarded and stimulated by social media notifications, doomscrolling, peer pressure, online bullying, brainrot.. Online chats made them less prone socialize, less able to develop social skills, paradoxically, and more anxious. They are over-protected in “real life” and under-protected online.
All of this isn’t doomsday talk… it’s proven (You can find sources in the video). Now, if this is the effect of social media on developing brains, and is still technically human to human connection… imagine a little kid chatting to AI as if it was a friend. Imagine a little kid having chat-gpt installed in the toys.. now that’s literally his best friend, and good luck taking it away. How is that kid going to develop?
There are people who use AI to respond to comments.. can’t even string two words together anymore, and they are adults…
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it will be a boon to social development for new generations… but we thought the same about technology and social media, people said “people born in this era will be much more sociable and have better social skills and they’ll be tech-savvy” and it was clearly not what happened. So it’s very unlikely to be good for people imo
chatbots are super useful though especially for information aggregation. last week i made a small project. filling claude ai with a huge amount of sources, official, youtubevideos, whole reddit thread, about the iran war, how to deal with sources and economics. to aggregate all teh findings in one huge document i then stresstested by reading it myself first then feeding it to chatgpt and grok and comming back and adjust it again based on the feedback and then steelmanning it myself again until finally finishing the analysis of the impact of the iranian war on the economics of japan.
i basically did the work that would need a while team weeks in about 20 hours. and so far predictions came more or less true, thought timeline is even faster than anticipated
all in all i can not imagine a world without ai anymore either, its insane
that being said its weird using it as a friend
As someone deep in AI, Just wait for when people actually learn how to control everything and not having to do any action manually using openclaw and CC… i actually had the same realization as OP’s post yesterday, when taking an id picture, and i saw the screen of the employee adjusting my pictures in a frame manually and I subconsciously thought “ew”.
I have kids and I’m obsessed and terrified – seeing how their minds work and how prone by design they are – to this fully imaginary digital illusion, as their main world of existence.
They’re nudged to go from their teddy to a chatbot, wtf. We, the parents, use it a lot, see the danger. But I had a very physical world to grow up, I can see, analyse, have the theoretical, speech, professional and emotional knowledge to see through it. Kids won’t. The ai school enablers, my god, have an empathy of a child drug dealer.
We are slowly realizing the regulation needed around the business model of social media. Ban, no ban looks like the first step to this waking up that the humanity needs to do. Sort of like the deaths when cars and streets were still anything goes. I dont see anybody crying traffic signs limit their personal freedom.
We’ll go through several stupid, destructive cycles with ai before the thing start serving us wholly.
Can’t wait for all these companies to enshittify their models with subtle ads, paid propaganda etc
We really need to teach how to use these and how they work. And the open source versions.
Meanwhile AI-Hallucinators have almost no impact on my life, expect that our business now gets worse requests from our customers, because instead of directly coming to us they’re now asking AI first, which of course always leads them into totally absurd directions. And wastes hours of their time with bullshit answers that lead nowhere.
>Some even describe them as “very intelligent friends.”
I don’t even know what is more sad: to think such a shitbot could be a friend or to think that this stuff has anything to do with “very intelligent”.
And it will get much worse when LLMs become able for vocal conversations.