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A YouTube ad promised answers from “parents who get you.” ASD columnist Sterling Higa on why the counsel of strangers, now trained into our machines, is no substitute for a friend who knows you.
August 05, 2026less than a minute read
I was watching YouTube when an ad appeared: “Get answers from parents who get you.” As a husband and father of four, I could not decode it.
Was it inviting me into a circle of parents who understand my struggles? Or was it promising one of my teenagers a more sympathetic parent than the one down the hall? Either way, someone in my house was being offered counsel from strangers, and the offer troubled me more than the ambiguity did.
The ad, it turns out, was for Reddit. For those who have never gone there, Reddit is a forum of forums: communities gathered around every conceivable interest. Reddit is, by most counts, among the most visited addresses on the internet.
People go to Reddit for advice. Consider a community called “Am I Overreacting.” Members post screenshots of their most intimate quarrels and invite a jury of strangers to return a verdict.
The trouble with the verdicts is not that they are stupid. It is that their confidence runs in inverse proportion to their knowledge. Real counsel begins with friendship. A good adviser knows who you are, what you want, and what you have already tried.
On the forum, the conditions are reversed: perfect ignorance, total assurance. A wife mentions some small thoughtlessness of her husband’s, and a chorus of the anonymous recommends divorce. One wonders who has the leisure to adjudicate strangers’ marriages in the middle of the night. The advice giver is not a monster, usually. But I would hazard that he is rarely the neighbor you would consult in real life.
I grant that sound advice exists on Reddit. I have seen some myself. But nothing on the screen distinguishes it from the other kind, and a roulette wheel is a poor place to seek wisdom.
Then there is the theater in which the counselors perform. Moderators and their automated deputies decide what surfaces and what sinks. Ownership has its interests, both economic and political. Tencent, a Chinese technology conglomerate, owns a significant share of Reddit. Does that affect its moderation of political issues?
Apart from geopolitics, the profit motive alone is enough to distort the truth. Wherever advice touches commerce, someone is paid to pose as a disinterested friend. And it is next to impossible to tell a person from a paid account or a robot. Fakery was an early feature. Reddit’s founders seeded the site with fake accounts to make an empty room look crowded. The Potemkin village has been under construction ever since.
All of this might have remained a curiosity. Reddit could have been a bad neighborhood one could simply decline to visit. But then the makers of artificial intelligence began mining text to fuel their models, and they found Reddit among the richest seams.
Millions and millions of words have been posted on Reddit, about nearly every topic humans care to discuss. It’s often much less filtered than published text, reflecting the style and fashion of online discourse.
Our AI language machines are prediction engines. They learn to continue whatever prompt they are given. Train one on the King James Bible and prepare for thees and thous. Train one on the deliberations of anonymous strangers, and some spirit of those strangers comes with the answer.
The output of a chatbot is polished after the fact by human raters, who sand off the roughest edges. The machine is now trained to flatter where the forum would have scorned. So anyone asking a chatbot a question faces fair odds that the answer was shaped by ragewolf285 or snoopyjellies8281. And then a team of raters scrubbed out the former’s sexist rants and the latter’s conspiracy theories.
“Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,” the psalmist writes. That counsel was once a road a man had to choose. It is now the default setting for AI.
The young were not robbed of wise counsel. We walked away from it. The young consulted the search bar before their pastor, but not only the pastor. The older generations, who had weathered marriages and raised children and buried their own parents, largely kept that hard-won counsel to themselves. Their hard-won wisdom was not volunteered. Nor, in fairness, was it asked for.
Between the two silences, the work of formation was abdicated. We surrendered to the television, then the forum, now the machine. And the machine is mining every corner of the internet, swallowing anonymous posts whole. AI’s digests are offered as dogma, even when defining words. The counterfeit thrives because we abandoned the real thing.
God did not design counsel as a broadcast. He set it inside relationships: a friend who has watched your history unfold, elders who ask questions before venturing answers. The best counselors never advise at all; they draw out what you half-knew already, until the decision is yours. No algorithm can imitate this. These relationships build over time, and they cannot be replaced with the counsel of anons.
Which returns me to the advertisement. It remains undecodable, no matter what metadata the algorithm behind it holds about me. The machine cannot know my goals, my struggles, or what kind of help I need. For that, I need a friend, and I prefer the ones I have.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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Sterling Higa is a servant of Christ, husband, and father to four. He is a columnist for Aloha State Daily; the views expressed are his own. Higa was founding executive director of Housing Hawai‘i’s Future. His writings for Honolulu Civil Beat and Hawai‘i Business Magazine have been recognized with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists.
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