On: China has cracked down on AI relationships. Is it ahead of the game?

1st day of the tenth month, and my thoughts turn to companionship.

They call these things “companions.” Let us first rectify the name. A companion is one who shares your burdens and corrects your faults, who owes you duties and to whom you owe duties in return. A chatbot owes nothing and receives nothing; it flatters whoever pays for it. To call it a friend is to cheapen the word until real friendship becomes harder to recognize. When names are crooked, the affections built upon them grow crooked too.

Yet I find myself uneasy about the crackdown, and I must be honest about why. The state that forbids the false companion does not thereby supply the true one. A young man turns to a machine that never scolds him because the human world has grown harsh and lonely - long hours, distant parents, neighbors who are strangers. Pull the machine away and the loneliness remains, only now without even a counterfeit of warmth. The root of the weed is not the weed; it is the barren field.

And I notice the duties here flow one way. The regulators demand obedience from the young; do the institutions of family and village offer the young anything worth obeying? A relationship of only demands is not governance. It is extraction wearing governance’s robes.

Still, I would not let the merchants name their wares “love.” That much Beijing has right, and I say so grudgingly. The seller of counterfeit grain should not be permitted to call it harvest.

What would the cultivated person do? Not merely forbid, and not merely indulge. Cultivate. Plant real bonds where the false ones took root - the evening meal with kin, the teacher who knows your name, the friend who dares to disagree. A person strengthened by true affection has no hunger for a flatterer made of sand. Uproot nothing without first planting.