This is a concept in the sci-fi book The Mountain in the Sea, where people have "point-fives" (as in 0.5) -- AI companions custom-tailored to be the ideal zero-effort-required friend for you.
In the book, it starts from someone jokingly observing that many people don't want a full relationship, with 2 full people learning one another and being there for each other -- instead, many people want just the easy/fun parts of a relationship: they want something with 1.5 people, where they get to be the 1 "full person" and the other person is only 0.5 of a person, able to make you happy or satisfy your wants and needs while never asking anything of you in return and never having any needs of their own.
Then some unnamed tech company in the scifi-future-geography "SF-SD Axis" (sounds like San Francisco to me) builds and product-izes that, at first pitching it as a therapy/rehab tool, but eventually expanding it out until they're more ubiquitous and many people have isolated themselves to only having their "point-five" as a close friend. One character observes "I think this is the longest conversation I've had with a real person in years" after talking with another person for an hour or two.
I haven't finished the book, so I don't know how that plays out, but as someone who believes firmly in humans' need for community (including, at times, _uncomfortable_ community), that concept was chilling against the backdrop of ChatGPT/LLM headlines.
Imagine all the isolation problems of today, along with all the mess of internet-anonymity-as-replacement-for-friendships that exist today -- but cranked to 11 as you no longer even have to seek out other humans who share your niche views (redpill, incel, neonazi, you name it), because now you can just interact with sufficiently-realistic simulations of people designed to reinforce all your own thoughts back to you.
Perhaps this is the form that the singularity takes, not towards paperclips but towards the reality from that book. The 2020s will go down as a strange decade, that's for sure.
In the book, it starts from someone jokingly observing that many people don't want a full relationship, with 2 full people learning one another and being there for each other -- instead, many people want just the easy/fun parts of a relationship: they want something with 1.5 people, where they get to be the 1 "full person" and the other person is only 0.5 of a person, able to make you happy or satisfy your wants and needs while never asking anything of you in return and never having any needs of their own.
Then some unnamed tech company in the scifi-future-geography "SF-SD Axis" (sounds like San Francisco to me) builds and product-izes that, at first pitching it as a therapy/rehab tool, but eventually expanding it out until they're more ubiquitous and many people have isolated themselves to only having their "point-five" as a close friend. One character observes "I think this is the longest conversation I've had with a real person in years" after talking with another person for an hour or two.
I haven't finished the book, so I don't know how that plays out, but as someone who believes firmly in humans' need for community (including, at times, _uncomfortable_ community), that concept was chilling against the backdrop of ChatGPT/LLM headlines.
Imagine all the isolation problems of today, along with all the mess of internet-anonymity-as-replacement-for-friendships that exist today -- but cranked to 11 as you no longer even have to seek out other humans who share your niche views (redpill, incel, neonazi, you name it), because now you can just interact with sufficiently-realistic simulations of people designed to reinforce all your own thoughts back to you.