Mark Zuckerberg destroyed friendship. Now he wants to replace it with AI.

Forget those 700 Facebook friends you've largely neglected since college. In Mark Zuckerberg's latest vision for the future, we'll be filling our empty hours chatting away with our generative AI buddies. In an era when people spend more time alone than ever before, Meta's CEO is preaching not just about the power of his company to connect us to one another — but also about luring our attention to new, fake friends.

In an interview last week with the tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Zuckerberg spoke about ways AI could make social media more interactive, including turning AI chatbots into friends for people who have few and want more. "Is this going to replace in-person connections or real-life connections? My default is that the answer to that is probably no," Zuckerberg says. "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 is far from the only one pushing a future with AI friends (and lovers, twins, coworkers, and parents), but this is his latest tone-deaf approach to the loneliness crisis that some say is inflamed by the very social media companies he owns.

On social media, his comments were met with widespread scorn. "This is what happens when you believe that humanity is reducible to binary data — you think of friendship through the lens of supply & demand," the writer Neil Turkewitz said on X. "An excellent example of the loneliness economy. Technology makes people lonely, then sells them a solution in the form of technology. Endless profit possibility," wrote Samantha Rose Hill, who's writing a book on loneliness.

Young people, forced onto Zoom during high school and college, want to meet and hang out IRL. In a 2023 survey of college and graduate students from Axios and Generation Lab, almost 80% of respondents said they used dating apps less than once a month, if at all. Nearly half of teens in a 2024 Pew Research Center survey said social media sites had a mostly negative effect on their age group, increasing from 32% in 2022. Meeting up in person helps young people: Those involved in extracurricular activities like clubs and sports have higher grades, higher aspirations, and a more positive attitude about school, research has found. People are ditching dating apps and pivoting toward book clubs, run clubs, or apps that host meetups to find their people. They're eager to hang out and be spontaneous.

The past two decades show us that Zuckerberg's ideas about friendship often leave something to be desired. Meta's own past internal research found that the company's social sites could exacerbate loneliness rather than alleviate it — but concluded Facebook was a "net positive" for loneliness. Social media has given us glimpses into thousands of people's lives at once, but the connections just skim the surface. Even if an AI pal is always at your fingertips, it's the kind of low-investment interaction that can only parrot connection, not substitute it.

That's because friendship, or at least a good one, isn't just about getting validation — it's a two-way street that's also about giving support. We feel good when we show up for friends and help them, says Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas who has studied friendship. Social media platforms and the push to bake gen AI into our apps and interactions miss the entire point of having a friend, he says: "Friendship is not efficient. It actually is at its best when it's inefficient." It comes in the form of standing beside you at a wedding, maintaining a comfortable silence beside you on a long flight, and complaining over extended happy hours about the person you both hate. "There isn't anything particularly efficient about a catching-up conversation," Hall adds. "It's done because of the joy and the value of caring about another person."

Several Big Tech companies are moving our online experiences further away from connecting to one another and closer to connecting with bots, who never need to log off to sleep or work or take their kid to the emergency room. An AI chatbot doesn't need you back — it's constantly present and quick to respond with questions and validation. If companies build a chatbot that begs for your attention, it could pull us further from human connection. "It makes us want to go back to our devices more often," Hall says.

The average person spends more of their time on screens than in person with friends. The tech that promised to connect the world drove some of us further into isolation. Facebook started as a place less about meeting like-minded people online and more about adding your classmates and watching their every move for decades to come. Instagram's rise threatened to upstage photo sharing on Facebook with its more simplistic, visual-first design. The once candid app gave way to a commodified, performative playground for influencers and brands, and the comparative nature and pressure of posting have been linked to mental health issues in teens. In 2021, Zuckerberg turned his eyes to the metaverse, launching a multiyear obsession with a future in which we put on obstructive goggles and walk (as soon as they could figure out how to code legs) around cartoon malls, office parks, and arenas to see avatars of our favorite performers. It has cost Meta tens of billions of dollars.

The unrealized hype of the metaverse was quickly overtaken by the gen AI boom. It seems deeply unnatural to some that AI could become the newest way for us to seek connection without ever actually connecting to people. Pushing ahead, Meta launched an AI app last week based on the idea that AI-generated content should move from the private confines of chatbots to a more social feed. Facebook's original mission "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" made it sound like we had the power, but Meta's mission now is to "build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible."

The chatbots Meta has built are already riddled with problems: Journalists found they could lie on Instagram about being licensed therapists and could have sexual conversations with users under 18. A Meta spokesperson told me the AI are "clearly labeled and there is a disclaimer that indicates the responses are generated by AI." They added that the sexual conversations are "hypothetical," and show a manipulation of the tool. "We've now taken additional measures," the spokesperson noted, to make it "even more difficult" to manipulate.

In the podcast interview, Zuckerberg claims that the average American has three friends or fewer but the capacity and drive for about 15. It's not clear where he pulls this stat from, but he's right that loneliness is an urgent problem. In a Pew survey from 2023, 38% of American adults said they had five or more friends, but 8% said they had none. The older someone was, the more likely they were to say they had five or more close friends, with half of people 60 and older falling into the category. Just 32% of people younger than 30 said the same. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, then the US surgeon general, called loneliness an epidemic. In a 2024 poll conducted by Morning Consult for the American Psychiatric Association, 30% of adults said they felt lonely once a week, and 10% said they felt lonely daily.

Facebook did not create the loneliness crisis, but it often gave us quantity over quality in our interactions as people spent more time alone. "Likes" and "pokes" and reminders to post "happy birthday" on someone's wall could substitute a phone call. There were some meaningful connections on Facebook for me: I joined a group dedicated to my incoming college freshman class and looked for roommates or other people in my major before arriving on campus. It became an easy way to find events in a new city or send out party invites.

But largely, Facebook did little to grow or maintain deep connections on its platform — it was more a personalized newspaper for sharing college and job updates with the masses, a way to keep tabs on estranged friends and exes, and, ultimately, a gossip mill that let you know who's had a baby, who's gotten engaged, or who's dropping hints they're headed for a breakup. Facebook and Instagram have long been large and tied to our real names. In trying to take on everyone you knew as a friend or follower, a pressure grew to post in ways that looked cool to your peers but acceptable to your great-aunt. Context collapsed and curated images were everything.

None of this is to say that online connections can't be just as real as offline ones. I forged a best friendship as a teen on AIM with a girl who went to another school in the town, connecting over chat and eventually meeting up at the mall every weekend. Tumblr has fostered online friendships that span decades between people who run in the same fandom circles. Fan fiction sites offer communities, often with strict parameters and their own social norms. And AI chatbots have their benefits, too. Autistic people say they can help them practice navigating difficult social situations. Some say they act as an on-call therapist when they're working through a problem or help them prepare for job interviews.

Gen AI is still new, but we can already see that it's less like a true friend and more like an imaginary friend. "AI personas are just like fictional characters," says Hannah Kim, a professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. "If the question is, will an AI friendship be helpful, or will an AI relationship be fulfilling, the corollary question is: Will an interactive fictional character that I engage with be as fulfilling as a friendship or relationship?" Fictional characters can help us work out ideas about society and entertain us, but they can't have real, dimensional relationships with us. A chatbot might always be available and always have its full attention on us, but relying too heavily on them could further warp people's expectations of their real-life friends. "If we expect that from humans, it's going to be pretty disastrous," Kim says.

Earlier this year, Meta took down AI-generated Instagram profiles that users hated. But Zuckerberg thinks they can get better and become our friends. For Meta, it doesn't actually matter if Facebook, Instagram, the metaverse, or AI chatbots make people less lonely. It matters that we keep clicking on them.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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