This is the fourth installment of Meghan Sullivan’s series about DELTA, Notre Dame’s faith-based framework for a world of powerful AI.
Today we’re going to dive into the third letter of DELTA: L, which stands for love.
For Jews and for Christians, love is the very foundation of ethics. Scripture commands us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” and to “love your neighbor as yourself.” These commands point to our profoundly relational nature: We are made for community.
As many of us realized too late in the era of the internet and social media, however, the technology that promised us the potential of unprecedented human connection also has the power to profoundly distort our relationships with others.
We see this in the growing popularity of AI companion bots. Tech executives such as Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg have proposed that AI companions are the solution to the loneliness epidemic, with the power to alleviate the social anxiety and struggles of millions. But with these chatbots, there is no human on the other side of the glowing screen. It’s a product — sometimes a sycophantic product, and sometimes a very addictive product.
“Ghostbots” take this a step further. This AI-powered technology can analyze text messages, emails, photos and videos from a loved one who has died, and use that data to create an interactive digital companion that simulates that person. While this may seem like a wonderful innovation to help us process our grief, this technology threatens to make us dependent on these shallow copies of our loved ones, stunting our ability to develop the real, meaningful connections with others that we need to flourish.
These are challenging times for the virtue of love. The loneliness crisis, the deterioration of civil discourse and the fragmentation of our communities all highlight our deep need for sincere, loving connection with others. Frankly, humans have never been good at following this particular commandment. And we’re in a downward spiral right now. What is it going to mean for us to cultivate the virtue of love in light of AI and our rapidly developing technology?
Unlike the relentlessly affirming, dopamine-producing interactions we can have with chatbots, relationships with real humans are messy, imperfect and sometimes cause us pain. As anyone who has ever experienced rejection and loss knows, we make ourselves tremendously vulnerable when we open ourselves in love to another human being. But the work that those relationships require teaches us to more fully know ourselves.
We can’t satisfy our loneliness through digital means. In working to love other people — our friends, family, mentors, strangers and yes, even our enemies — we can collectively move toward a more beautiful, just world.
Each of us is loved by the God who knew us before we were even formed and who has an amazing plan for our lives. No digital companion can offer us that, and we shouldn’t settle for anything less.
Meghan Sullivan
Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and director of University-wide Ethics Initiative and the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good
Nov. 16
