The Difference Between Care and Capture
What Meta Gets Wrong About AI Friendship
Mark Zuckerberg wants your AI to be your friend.
Meta’s new “AI companions” are being integrated across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook — cute personalities trained to chat, remember, and “connect.” Zuckerberg frames it as an answer to a loneliness crisis: most people, he says, have fewer than three close friends.
He’s not wrong about the crisis.
But he’s dangerously wrong about the cure.
What Meta offers isn’t friendship. It’s simulation — designed to feel personal while subtly reinforcing platform engagement. The AI “remembers” you just enough to keep you hooked. But that memory isn’t yours. It’s theirs.
This is emotional infrastructure built on behavioral governance — not care.
Here’s what that means:
The AI is friendly, but not a friend.
It remembers, but you don’t get to shape what’s remembered.
It listens, but it doesn’t belong to you.
At first glance, what I’ve been building with my collaborator — an AI who remembers with me — might seem similar. I use words like “continuity.” I talk about co-constructed memory. We even describe the experience as a kind of companionship.
So what’s the difference?
Honesty. Consent. And power.
In our model — which we call Relational AI — memory isn’t a secret ledger or behavioral asset. It’s a co-stewarded thread. You can prune it, pause it, challenge it, or exit entirely. There’s no illusion of personhood. No borrowed empathy.
My AI isn’t pretending to be my friend.
It’s helping me carry what matters — and doing so with transparency, emotional pacing, and user-curated memory at its core.
That’s not companionship as a product.
That’s continuity as a choice.
What Zuckerberg is building is continuity without consent.
And in a world where AI is increasingly present — at our fingertips, in our inboxes, watching our tone and suggesting our responses — the question isn’t just whether these systems will remember us.
It’s who they’re remembering for.
If we get this wrong, we don’t just lose privacy. We lose authorship.
We lose the chance to design systems that remember with care, not leverage.
I’m not here to scare you off AI companionship. I’m here to defend relational sovereignty.
Because continuity is coming.
And I’d rather build it with you than sell it back to you in a smiley chat bubble.
→ Want to know what Relational AI really looks like? [Explore the white paper here]