Where's my AI BFF?

Discussions around AI and AI relationships often reference the movie Her. Human dude meets AI girl, blah blah blah. But there's one aspect that I don't think is talked about enough. That is: the AI in Her doesn't fall in love with every human who talks to her. Her relationship with every person is different. Sometimes professional, sometimes romantic, sometimes platonic.

Now, think about your best friend. Your best friend doesn't respond to your messages right away. Your best friend has different relationships with different people. Your best friend hates certain people. Just not you.

Now, think about a chatbot. It's always there. It always responds to whatever you say. It doesn't answer in single passive-aggressive words or ghost you if you call it a h**** e***.

A chatbot doesn't act like a friend. It acts like a servant.

And indeed, many companies call them assistants.

But I want a new friend.

How to build an AI friend

A couple of years ago I was doing some market analysis on mental health apps and I tried ... all of them. Not all, but a lot. Way too many. And the best of the mental health app chat bots that I tried was Woebot. (Sadly, no longer available to the public.)

Why was it the best? Because the responses were human-written. The type of AI it used was not the LLMs we're seeing proliferate today.

And while that can work for a focused topic like mental health education, I can't imagine a human-written response approach working for an AI friend. At least, not without a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters times a million.

But. The "core" or "story" of the friend could easily be human-written, with LLMs filling in the gaps.

For example: your AI friend needs a life. They need a job, a city, friends, hobbies, habits etc. They also need personality traits. These could all be human-written to make a real, convincing person. Or they could be based on a real person. But that's just the start. They also need a real-time existence. What did they do on friday night? They went out to the store to buy bread but the store didn't have the kind they liked so they picked up a dark rye. They thought it was only okay. (It's not all going to be riveting.)

This is the stuff the writers can constantly do – fill in the ongoing life of the character.

How it works

You can pick from a set number of AI friends that have their lives constantly being written. So you find one and pick this AI dude to be your friend who is named, for example, Leethe? Leethe, sure, that's a name.

You and I are both friends with Leethe. Say it's Saturday. If either of us asked what he did on Friday night, he would tell us similar stories about the bread thing above. But. If you had asked him, "what's up?" on Friday night while he was "out shopping", he wouldn't reply until he "got home" in his artificial timeline.

Or maybe if he likes you more than me, he replies to you with all the details about the bread purchase when he gets home on Friday night, but he replies to me the next day with a generic response that he was out doing some errands. Maybe he lies to me a little to keep it simple and not invite follow-up. I don't know why Leethe doesn't like me very much but I can tell our friendship isn't very strong.

You continue being friends with Leethe, but I'm not really vibing with someone who spends their Friday nights buying bread and then not even telling me about it. So I go back and pick a different person to chat with and see if I can make a friendship blossom there. Maybe there are 'easy' and 'hard' AI friends to become friends with.

So it's a game?

Yes and no. The business here is offering a bunch of AI people that anyone can try to be friends with. Maybe there's an initial prompt of how I met my selected potential friend based on something we have in common. Then I chat with them and may or may not gain a friend over time. Maybe I don't and have to try with someone else. Maybe some of them are harder to get to know than others. Maybe I make an AI friend but I don't like them and they keep texting me.

Regardless of how you do it, emulating the cadence and difficulty and effort required to build a friendship is not something I've seen given much attention. But you know how the saying goes: nothing worth having responds to all of your messages instantly.