AI that looks, gestures, smiles, and sounds like a real person.

By Pepper Parr

November 5th, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

Don’t say you didn’t know – admit that you have let it happen.

The following from the December issue of The Atlantic, an American magazine that began publishing in 1857.

The social-media era is over. What’s coming will be much worse.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook,  in this same spirit, has began to suggest the idea that AI chatbots could fill in some of the socialization that people are missing.

The social-media era is over. What’s coming will be much worse.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X, Reddit—all have aggressively put AI chatbots in front of users. On a podcast, Zuckerberg said that AI probably won’t “replace in-person connections or real-life connections”—at least not right away. Yet he also spoke of the potential for AI therapists and girlfriends to be embodied in virtual space; of Meta’s desire—he couldn’t seem to help himself from saying—to produce “always-on videochat” with an AI that looks, gestures, smiles, and sounds like a real person.

Meta is working to make that desire a reality. And it is hardly leading the charge: Many companies are doing the same, and many people already use AI for companionship, sexual gratification, mental-health care.

What Zuckerberg described—what is now unfolding—is the beginning of a new digital era, more actively anti-social than the last.

Generative AI will automate a large number of jobs, removing people from the workplace. But it will almost certainly sap humanity from the social sphere as well.

Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds and the glow of the smartphone screen. This seems likely to change our society at least as much as the social-media era has.

It gets through to you from a monitor or a cell phone screen – stop letting it in.