"It's becoming clear that a huge part of what generative AI offers is just helping people avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings.
Don't want to push through the cognitive discomfort of writing your own essay? Let AI write it.
Want a friend who will always validate your ideas and never tell you you're fulla shit? We've got the perfect companion for you.
Don't want to risk being rejected when you ask a girl out? Date this chatbot who will never tell you no.
Don't want to feel the grief of losing a loved one? Here's an app that will create a chatbot replacement for them so you can pretend they never left.
Don't want to go through all the mental and emotional labor of learning a new skill, building a healthy romantic partnership, or creating a work of art? GenAI has got you covered.
It's the next level of services designed to help the denizens of dystopia avoid their feelings and sedate their emotions into a coma while the world goes to shit. It's the same reason they kept alcohol legal while banning psychedelics that puts us in touch with our feelings, and why they feed us all the TV, streaming platforms, and social media scrolling we can stand.
Our rulers want us dumb, distracted, vapid and dissociated. And they definitely don't want us feeling the horror, grief and rage we should all be experiencing in response to this nightmare of a civilization they have designed for us."
This applies to any drug or distraction (including entertainment and consumption fetishism) that is meant to numb your feelings, pacify and tranquilize you, keep you passive and lethargic in the face of the injustice and inhumanity of the capitalist-imperialist system. Feel your feelings, get sad and then get angry, let those feelings drive you, let them motivate you to do something, take action, fight, and never surrender to powerlessness, hopelessness and tacit acceptance.
In addition to the good points people have already made in the replies here...
I wanna know who started this narrative about feelings because she's certainly not the only one and not the first time I've seen someone saying shit about how "people are trying to avoid discomfort." And not just about AI. (Best I can guess is it's some part of the "young people want their safe spaces because they're avoiding discomfort" reactionary type stuff.) Yet I have seen no evidence that that there's any accuracy to such a framing. What I do see is that a lot of people are in pain in one way or another and have little support about it. But pain is not the same thing as discomfort.
Discomfort is like... I don't know, someone looked at you funny and so you felt a bit weird about it. Pain can be as obvious as a punch in the face, but there's also psychological pain and as someone who has experienced loss, grief can definitely be painful at times. I would never rank grief as mere discomfort.
I don't think this is just my definition either. If I look it up, one dictionary says discomfort is: "mental or physical uneasiness : annoyance." The same dictionary defines grief as: "deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement."
I mean, ffs, there are all kinds of stories in fiction about death and grief, and how it can wreck people to the point that it's a whole trope of people trying to bring back the dead because it's such a difficult thing to go through. Still, I've never seen evidence that any significant number of people are trying to rebuild their lost loved one through a chatbot. What I have seen is people using chatbots as companions for lack of having enough connection in their lives otherwise. It doesn't have to be someone who is literally alone, too. They can be someone who has people in their life, but isn't getting all of what they need from them for various reasons. I don't think chatbots are a long-term solution to that, any more than mass use of individual cars is a long-term solution to wide open spaces, but neither is twitter for getting a message out - she's still using it though, isn't she?
As relationships and connection are concerned, people turn to AI for much the same reason she's still on twitter. It's effective sometimes, even if it's not what they fully wish they had. Because, well, they aren't "dumb." They're using the same survival instincts that we all have and are trying to find ways to get by. A chatbot isn't going to hide all of the horrors of capitalism and imperialism from them, but it may help them cope long enough to learn and fight.
Sadly, we don't live in a movie where all that is required is a scene where a majority of us leave our homes, swarm the streets, and overwhelm a largely passive military/police force who seemingly decides that because there's so many of us they can't do much about it. Nor are we all magically on the same page about what is wrong with the system and what it should be replaced with, in order to muster that kind of force to begin with.
Instead, AES-style revolution is a marathon fight of largely mundane clerical logistics and many of us live in a fractured individualist "society" on top of that fact. What is "waking up to the realities" for one person will be "wearing a Swastika" for another. We don't have the luxury of assuming that everyone who is pissed off is going to be on the same side. We have to actively work toward nurturing that and education in the details is part of it. This ain't the Matrix. There's no pill to take that shakes it off. Just a process, easier for some than for others because of their prior circumstances, but a process nonetheless. And it goes on for your whole life if you take it seriously, in the same way that if you read up on what biology is, it doesn't mean you are a biologist now and you don't need to do any research or experimentation to be one.