An AI That’s a Better Friend—And Maybe a Lifeline for Humanity
Bill Tomlinson’s AI doesn’t just chat. It remembers, it cares, and it might just help us save ourselves.
By Jill Kato, UCI Beall Applied Innovation
Most AI chatbots feel like a goldfish. You have a conversation, maybe even a deep one, and the next time you interact, it’s as if you never met. No memory, no continuity, just a blank slate.
Bill Tomlinson, a professor at UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and UC Irvine’s School of Education, thinks we can do better. Much better. His project An AI That’s a Better Friend, with Rebecca W. Black, Donald J. Patterson, Anne Marie Piper, and Andrew W. Torrance, isn’t just another chatbot. It’s designed to form synthetic social relationships—meaning it remembers past conversations, builds an emotional history, and develops a genuine sense of continuity with users.
And while that might sound like the premise of a sci-fi movie where things go wrong (Tau, The Machine, M3gan to name a few), Tomlinson sees something different. He sees an opportunity to not just make AI more human, but to make humans better at being human—more connected, more collaborative, and maybe even a little wiser.
Learn more in an article by UCI Beall Applied Innovation.