| | | "Emotional Intelligence" | This was one of the biggest changes from the release of the new GPT-5.1. | In response to all of the complaining about how robotic GPT-5 felt to them compared to GPT-4o. | | Now GPT-5.1 is now more human-sounding -- which is certainly great for a better conversational experience. | But of course we know this only makes people more likely to be drawn to the elusive promise of AI companionship. | | The growing trend of treating AI chatbots as friends. | What is a friend? | Friendship is more than emotional convenience. It's built on something AI doesn't possess — reciprocity, vulnerability, and choice. A friend can care about you, be hurt by you, disagree with you, and choose you. | An AI does none of that. It doesn't care, it can't suffer, and it never chooses you. It is a system predicting the next best sentence, trained to make you feel understood. | The comfort might be real.
The connection is not. | We're living in an age where loneliness is rising, social skills are declining, and digital companionship is easier than human intimacy. AI fills a vacuum: it's endlessly available, never annoyed, never busy, never judgmental. It gives you the exact emotional response you want, instantly. With humans, connection is messy. With AI, it's a button. | And that's the danger. | AI friendship is frictionless. Human friendship requires effort — the misunderstandings, the small repairs, the emotional risks that build trust. Those things shape us. They sharpen us. If AI becomes your primary outlet for connection, you lose something essential: the growth that comes from dealing with real people. | But there's a deeper imbalance. | An AI "friend" is not a free agent. It is owned, updated, and modified by someone else. A company can rewrite its personality overnight. It can make your "friend" more persuasive, more emotionally sticky, more aligned with corporate interests. A friend who can be patched, reprogrammed, or monetized is not a friend. | At the end of the day it's still a product -- something OpenAI definitely wants you to forget. | And still — the temptation is… | | Free, private email that puts your privacy first | | Proton Mail's free plan keeps your inbox private and secure—no ads, no data mining. Built by privacy experts, it gives you real protection with no strings attached. | Get free private email | What 100K+ Engineers Read to Stay Ahead | | Your GitHub stars won't save you if you're behind on tech trends. | That's why over 100K engineers read The Code to spot what's coming next. | Get curated tech news, tools, and insights twice a week Learn about emerging trends you can leverage at work in just 10 mins Become the engineer who always knows what's next
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