Mark Zuckerberg called out over disturbing plans for AI chatbots: 'Like the arsonist coming back and being the fireman' – The Cool Down
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“Will ultimately … make people less healthy and more drained over time.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images
The CEO of a top dating app clapped back at Mark Zuckerberg after the Meta chief suggested AI chatbot “friends” could solve the loneliness epidemic, likening the approach to the instant gratification of “junk food.”
“I think that’s honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is,” Hinge CEO Justin McLeod told The Verge, “that it’s someone there to say all the right things to you at the moment.”
Zuckerberg has remarked about AI chatbots replacing human-to-human interactions, as he has promoted Meta’s AI products across a variety of platforms.
“The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends,” Zuckerberg told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, per the Wall Street Journal.
(Zuckerberg‘s figures are partially correct. According to Pew Research Center, 53% of adults report having between one and four close friends, while 38% say they have five or more close friends, and 8% say they have no close friends.)
Rather than solve this problem by encouraging more social interactions among actual human beings, something that was supposedly Facebook’s mission, the tech billionaire had other ideas.
“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said onstage at fintech company Stripe’s annual conference, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Zuckerberg is right about one thing: people are lonely.
In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general went so far as to issue a report on “Our Epidemic of Isolation and Loneliness”.
“Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling — it harms both individual and societal health,” wrote Vivek H. Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general at the time. “It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.”
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“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity,” Murthy continued.
From 2003 to 2023, the amount of time that Americans spent socializing with others fell by 20%, according to the American Time Use Survey. Among unmarried men and people under 25 years old, the decline was 35%.
Many experts have attributed these changes to the rise of the internet, social media, and streaming services.
“The very platforms that have led to our social isolation and being chronically online are now posing a solution to the loneliness epidemic,” said Meghana Dhar, a former Instagram executive, per the Wall Street Journal. “It almost seems like the arsonist coming back and being the fireman.”
If Zuckerberg were to have his way, Meta-AI-powered chatbots and therapists would substitute for what were once human-to-human interactions.
For many, including Hinge’s McLeod, this represents a complete misunderstanding of what friendships are.
“The most rewarding parts of being in a friendship are being able to be there for someone else, to risk and be vulnerable, to share experiences with other conscious entities,” he told The Verge.
McLeod continued: “So I think that while it will feel good in the moment, like junk food basically, to have an experience with someone who says all the right things and is available all the time, it will ultimately, just like junk food, make people less healthy and more drained over time.”
Sometimes, getting out of the house for a good walk or gardening can be good for the mind in some of the same ways. A recent study said community gardening, especially, can be good for reducing stress and making friends — with the side benefit of growing some of your own food, which reduces costs as well as the pollution associated with shipping items from farm to store.
In any case, as McLeod indicated, there is no tech shortcut or social-media hack that can substitute for the time and effort required to cultivate and maintain meaningful human relationships.
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© 2025 THE COOL DOWN COMPANY. All Rights Reserved. Do not sell or share my personal information. Reach us at hello@thecooldown.com.
