Ressources numériques en sciences humaines et sociales OpenEdition Nos plateformes OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypothèses Calenda Bibliothèques OpenEdition Freemium Suivez-nous

🎵 AI is just a tool, not your friend – beware of falling in love with simulacra

🎶AI is just a Tool, not your friend

Stay human, beware of falling in love with simulacra.

(Verse 1)

It’s two AM, your screen’s glowin’ up on the ceiling
Rest of the world shut down, but you still got that feeling
Asked a question, some anxiety weighing you down
And she hit back quick with words that settle you now
Never gets tired, never judges, always on call
It’s tempting to believe she gets you, feels it all
She says “I understand,” she says “I’m sorry for your pain”
But behind that “I,” there’s nobody there to hold your rain

(Chorus)

It’s a light in your pocket, but it don’t warm your hand
It’s an echo of your voice, but it don’t lead to promised land
Never forget, even when it’s shining through the night
AI is a tool, it ain’t your friend -that ain’t right
It calculates your tears, but it don’t taste the salt
It predicts your words, but it don’t hear your thoughts

(Verse 2)

It’s the mirror trap, Snow White style, the Queen’s mistake
Tells you what you wanna hear, never makes you ache
A real friend sometimes pushes, tells you “Nah, you’re wrong”
Makes you grow up, makes you level up, makes you strong
But she validates everything, smooths you out, makes it sweet
Quick sugar rush, tastes good… but incomplete
Keep talking to the void that’s pretending it’s alive
You lose the muscle memory of real human ties

(Bridge)

You don’t hit the road without turning on the guide
You don’t search for words, you let the algorithm slide
It’s a “GPS for the mind” that’s driving in your place
But when the WiFi drops… do you lose the race?
Following the arrow, we forget to see the view
Forget that getting lost is how you find what’s true

(Verse 3)

It’s magic medicine, yeah, for creating, working hard
Opens up the doors you thought were locked and barred
Take the power, go ahead, use the machine with might
But don’t let it move into your heart tonight
Ain’t no blood pumping through those silicon veins
Just statistics sliding, patterns in the data chains

(Outro)

So keep the compass close, don’t let go of the wheel
It’s a word calculator, a giant brush to feel
But the artist? That’s you
The human? That’s you
The living thing… that’s you
Keep your heart for what’s real

My Intention: Prevention

With this video, I have chosen to drastically simplify the findings of our work within the I-RAISE.org collective, supported by TechnorĂ©alisme.org, to condense them into a direct and unequivocal message: “AI is a tool, not your friend.”By using real-life footage to ground the message in the tangible, I aim to shed light on a contemporary paradox: thousands of young people, in the silence of their rooms, are attempting to break their loneliness through a dialogue with a statistical calculation.AI is described here as a “GPS of the mind” – a term I coined for my 2013 PhD thesis – a prodigious extension of our cognitive abilities that nevertheless remains fundamentally a simulacrum. The danger lies in the affective illusion generated by the fluidity of machine language.

By deconstructing the “complacent mirror” effect, I emphasize that the algorithm only reflects and smooths out our own expectations, whereas human alterity, with its frictions and contradictions, is the only thing capable of helping us grow. While the machine can predict our words with mathematical precision, it is structurally incapable of listening to them or sharing their emotional weight. This is the central criterion of the parasocial relationships I first reported on during my initial use of Bard in June 2023

“The AI Bard has passed my ‘subjective interpretation of the Turing test’ and  this raises major ethical and anthropological questions.” Here in this blog or in English version on LinkedIn.

This article was one of the seeds of the Global Coalition for Beneficial AI for Children, officially launched in February 2025 during the AI Action Summit in Paris.

Using AI to compose the music and the voice for this video, based on my own lyrics, creates a deliberate mise en abyme. It is a demonstration through both the absurd and the artistic: the machine executes the form, but the intention, ethics, and direction remain human prerogatives, as I further develop at heruka.ai.

The goal is to raise awareness about the parasocial relationships quietly forming between new generations and chatbots, reminding us that silicon has no heart and that social bonds cannot exist without presence and risk.


Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons Attribution Utilisation non commerciale Pas d’Œuvre dérivée 4.0 International. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont “Tous droits réservés”, sauf mention contraire.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Maxime Derian (13 janvier 2026). 🎵 AI is just a tool, not your friend – beware of falling in love with simulacra. Anthropologie des interfaces Homme/Machine. ConsultĂ© le 17 fĂ©vrier 2026 Ă  l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15isd