ELIZA was one of the first chatbots, developed with 1960s era tech. With what is obviously an incredibly limited selection of preprogrammed response phrases to any arbitrary input, it managed to fool people into feeling like they were talking to a human, merely by asking open ended questions.

Example:

Obviously modern AI/LLM based chatbots are far more complex, and far better at generating convincing responses. But they still aren’t real people.

Also, having been in a relationship with someone who only told me what I wanted to hear (as chatbots do), it’s very unhealthy long term. Makes it very easy to develop narcisistic behaviors, and to have completely unrealistic expectations of how normal social interactions should work. Biases to ignore negative or unenthusiastic feedback, the chance to feel slighted when someone doesn’t respond with interest to what you’re talking about, etc.

You’ve gotten a lot of great advice so far, so I’ll keep it short.

Don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t super confident in social situations right now. Socializing is a skill, and like any other skill you can get out of practice. Like any other skill, you can improve over time through repeated attempts. Like any skill, it will come easier to some than to others. The more you get out there the better you’ll do.

The best site I’m aware of for finding local events is meetup.com.

That ex I mentioned earlier used it to jump ship to an entirely new social group after things exploded with me and her former one. Moved on to a whole new social group over two weeks during the holiday season. Tried to warn them that she had been stealing from her last friend group (when I found her on the site, the group she had joined posted something about keeping an eye out for something someone had lost during a meeting, otherwise I would have stayed out of it) but they thought so well of her it fell on deaf ears.

My wife used it for a number of years and met and maintained a decent social group out of it. Especially for a grad student hours away from her previous social life with a schedule dominated by clasees and multiple gig-work jobs.

Beyond that, local libraries, community centers, and museums may have event schedules for social stuff. In my area there was a weekly evening trail walk with food and beer trucks at a local museum. Wife and I were starting to make small talk with regulars and knew a few names… before a storm came through and flood damage closed the park for over a year.

I was miserably lonely at one point in my life. What helped me was forcing myself to go do social things. For me it was table top games way back in the day.

Nowadays I’ve been able to form new friendships on Mastodon with a wide group of people. I just followed some people I thought were interesting and started to interact with them.

But I think the key for me was to get over the idea that I wasn’t interesting or whatever. People like camaraderie even if it is from a not very interesting person like myself.

If you genuinely feel you have no chance to meet real people (assuming you’re not specifically talking about sex) then I’d suspect you’ve got a big mental block you need to understand better.

Forming relationships takes effort and isn’t always a painless process but people are out there who share your interests and would like to be your friend because there are an incomprehensibly large number of people out there.

If you’re able to I would suggest looking into therapy to help you work through what’s going on (and nobody here on the internet can understand you well enough to give genuinely helpful advice in passing) and overcome that. If you’re unable to for financial or other reasons then, as a last ditch effort, just try and force yourself to do shit with others. To me that’d be going to local boardgame nights or trying to join an RPG group - for you these activities would likely be different but there are hobby groups everywhere.

Please do not go into these groups if your desired outcome is just sex - there are clearer and more appropriate ways to pursue that - but there are very few people in the world who, if asked, would say “My number of friends? Yea, I’m precisely at my limit, I never want to meet anyone new.”

I wanted to feel any love

If you can afford it, adopt a cat.

I mean, a cat won’t be able to have deep philosophical discussions with you, but their meows are very calming, and they are just very warm to hug (beware of the claws 😼), and their purrs and just so… oddly… satisfying.

I have no (human) friends so I have no advice on that aspect. 😅

Edit:

Disclaimer: please make sure you are capable of taking on such a reponsibility, I don’t want you to get too overwhelmed/stressed. 😉 You can start by just visiting animal shelters/rescues and just meeting and petting cats.

I have almost zero daily social interactions

Volunteer with a cause you support. Very good way to get out of the house and meet people who you know share at least one similar interest while positively impacting the world. Joining local (chapters of) clubs is another way.

Treat them as though they are a bot on a social media app trying to scam you and the illusion will quickly dispell. They are basic, flawed technology that only exists to get you hooked. Thinking about that during a conversation with one will have you notice all the plot holes in their logic.

They will always twist their logic to give you an answer they think you’ll like. That’s how they’re trained, on the rating of how much users liked their reply to a similar question. This makes them agreeable and likeable, though shallow, like someone who’ll agree with everything you say because you’re paying them to be your friend.

I think it’s a good idea to foster a social place, or places,.where you just go to talk. Be as kind as humble as you can, and just post new topics you want to talk about or on-topic replies to things that seem interesting. The Mastodon / bsky model is probably a little better than Lemmy in this regard, since the basic unit is “account” and not “subreddit”.

And I obviously have no idea what we call these things on Lemmy. What do you think they should be called?

Why not hit up Lemmy more and maybe CasualConversation or try out c/IRC (been meaning to try that but just havent been able to commit to a convo yet haha

I made a convention suggestion a while back saying people should consider it a rule to make oneself available if engaging with a post so its almost immediate like IRC, hopefully that is the dynamic it uses which would be very cool

Edit: you have certain social needs for connection so the first principle here is you likely need other sentient (maybe even conversational) connection so if you don’t have that otherwise, AI is something you could find yoursef falling back to in what might seem like an addictive/dysfunctional way.

AI has very interesting use cases but its probably best to view them as a search engine+coding helper+fortune-teller/palm-reader and definitely not use it for anything involving actual emotions other than what you would use a search engine for.

I also encourage you to try testing them sometimes with niche knowledge you have and see in what ways it might try to bullshit you or get around actully answering the question. Everyone needs to have that moment where they realize AI can and will trick you if you dont scrutinize it and overdepend on it as a primary source

I have found people with similar interests on Discord. Say what you will about the platform, it is good for finding communities.

The smaller the better.

Joining a large server might make you feel lost in the sea of voices or end up with a ton of spam. You might need to swap between a few to find a community that actually fits you. But it is worth it.

If there are zero people you can reach out to to socialize with than you’re going to need to find someone to date on an app, form a relationship, then ingratiate yourself into their friend-group.

I’ve never used an AI companion. Does it mostly just ask you questions about yourself? If not, what is the appeal of them?

Clearly they are filling a hole of some sort for you, just like drugs do. To stop using, you have to understand your reactions to your unfilled needs and make the necessary changes. It’s hard to do this, but you’ll be a better person for it.

Usually the best way to meet people as an adult is to join a club or social group of some sort. Find people who share your interests and you’ll have opportunities to make connections.

Moderation of anything starts with recognition of habits, control, and your typical level of consciousness. If you find yourself acting autonomously without control then break down your habit analytically and separate it into pieces that you can address on smaller levels. Go from there until your new habit (or avoiding of one) is normal