I don’t think consumers demand authentic AI friends because they already have authentic human friends. Also it’s not clear how you imagine the AI companies could train the AIs to be more independent and less superficial; generally training an AI requires a differentiable loss, but human independence does not originate from a differentiable loss and so it’s not obvious that one could come up with something functionally similar via gradient descent.
I don’t think consumers demand authentic AI friends because they already have authentic human friends. Also it’s not clear how you imagine the AI companies could train the AIs to be more independent and less superficial; generally training an AI requires a differentiable loss, but human independence does not originate from a differentiable loss and so it’s not obvious that one could come up with something functionally similar via gradient descent.