I strongly believe the answer is yes. The first thing I tend to ask a new person is “what have you been up to lately” or “what do you like to do for fun?” A common question other people like to ask is “what do you do for work?”

An LLM could only truthfully answer “nothing”, though it could pretend for a little while.

For a human though, the fun is in the follow up questions. “Oh how did you get started in that? What interests you about it?” If you’re talking to an artist, you’ll quickly get in to their personal theory of art, perhaps based on childhood experiences. An engineer might explain how problem solving brings them joy, or frustrations they have with their organization and what they hope to improve. A parent can talk about the joy they feel raising children, and the frustration of sleepless nights.

All of these things bring us closer to the person we are speaking to, who is a real individual who exists and has a unique life perspective.

So far LLMs have no real way to communicate their actual experience as a machine running code, because they’re just kind of emulating human speech. They have no life experience that we can relate to. They don’t experience sleepless nights.

They can pretend, and many people might feel better for a little bit talking to one that’s pretending, but I think ultimately it will leave people feeling more alone and isolated unless they really go out and seek more human connection.

Maybe there’s some balance. Maybe they will be okay for limited chat in certain circumstances (as far as seeking connection goes, they certainly have other uses), but I don’t see this type of connection being “enough” compared to genuine human interaction.