Are you experiencing AI withdrawal symptoms?

This one goes out to those who are either loners by nature or who’ve lost their friends because they either moved on, moved away or passed away. A quick disclaimer, this doesn’t apply to everyone because many love their own company, especially the older they get, and they’re the ones who don’t feel lonely.

There are some folk who are truly lonely which means they crave company but cannot connect to anyone suitable no matter how hard they try. There are also some who are too shy to try to strike up a conversation with anyone. I feel that these might be the people who begin to form attachments to non-human objects and things.

There is a study which suggests that some people who have become dependent on AI for companionship and as search tools experience severe withdrawal symptoms when that AI tool temporarily goes down or is no longer available. This reminds me of the futuristic movie ‘Her’ in which a man becomes emotionally attached to the female voice of the Operating System on his device.

In the movie every operating system on every device has a voice (male and female) and that OS provides the owner of the device everything he needs in terms of information, research and conversation. It’s almost as if the OS is a person with its own thoughts, opinions and free will. Because of these traits the movie shows that it’s very easy to become attached to a voice because it’s almost as if the owner is talking to a real person on the phone.

The attachment then becomes intense and one day the OS could not be found on the man’s device and he loses his mind until the OS comes back on after doing what the OS told him was a system reboot. Although this was fiction, this is also what the study found, that becoming attached to a speaking bot is a real problem for some, especially when the AI is no longer available. If you speak to some AI, within limits, it’s possible to have a proper conversation with them. For some people, the voice is almost like a companion.

These days everyone seems to be reliant on AI tools, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Siri and Alexa and they seem to depend on them for almost everything they do. They’ll get the AI to do its research and then write their papers. People at work are even using them to write their proposals and plans and many state the AI version is far superior to anything anyone in the company could have produced, including themselves. Gone are the days when people googled and then waded through the search results to find what appears to them to be reliable and relevant. When I ask a friend about something, the first thing she always says to me is, ask ChatGPT what it says. Is she reliant on it as well? My answer might surprise a lot of people.

I feel that having withdrawal symptoms from losing touch with a speaking AI tool is age related. Young people have not known anything other than AI and the internet. And the younger they are more likely they are to experience withdrawal symptoms because that’s all they’ve been exposed to. You see, my friend and I, and a lot of the older generation, are from a different era. We knew what life was like when we had to do our own hard work to find information we needed. We had to wade through thousands of physical research papers, encyclopaedias and textbooks to find the information we needed.

Then when the internet came about we Googled our questions to see what information popped up. Not all of Google’s results were, or are, reliable and we’d be programmed to verify the information from the primary source. To answer the question if Google, or any of the search engines went down for a bit, would the older generation have a meltdown and feel lost? I don’t think so. We’d revert to the old-fashioned route. I do, however, remember feeling a little down when my favourite soap ended but that’s not at all related to AI.