Mark Zuckerberg says don’t worry about loneliness epidemic because he can just recreate all your friends in AI

Mark Zuckerberg thinks artificial intelligence personas could step in to fight the loneliness epidemic.

In an interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel this week, around the time Meta released a new programming interface for its AI models, Zuckerberg suggested his company’s increasingly integrated AI assistants and chatbots could help Americans make up for the friends they wish they had in their lives.

“The average American has fewer than three friends,” he said. “The average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends or something.”

“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?’” he continued. “My default is that the answer to that is probably no. I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections, when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don’t have the connections and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”

Zuckerberg conceded that while the field of AI companions is “very earlier,” largely consisting of disembodied chatbots, such relationships will grow more sophisticated over time as “the personalization loop kicks in.”

The world will adjust to the demand for AI friends, he said, and we will “find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable and why the people who are doing these things, why they are rational for doing it and how it is adding value for their lives.”

Early forays into AI companions have raised some ethics concerns, including that digital friends might expose underaged people to sexually explicit themes or offer unsound mental health advice.

User-made AI bots have been found making up fake credentials about being licensed therapists, according to 404 Media, while a man who said he planned to kill the queen of England in 2021 had received encouraging messages when he told a chatbot he was an “assassin.”

Regardless of if AI is the cure, millions of Americans are searching for some way out of daily loneliness, a condition that afflicts 20 percent of U.S. adults, according to an October poll from Gallup.

A 2024 poll from the American Psychiatric Association found that 30 of adults say they have experienced feelings of loneliness at least once a week over the past year, though two-thirds said technology “helps me form new relationships.”