This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
“Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an A.I.,” Ms. Cole predicted.
We haven't managed to really normalize anything outside of cis-hetero relationships yet and you're telling me we're gonna normalize relationships with a.i. in two years? Sure.
I know couples who are still embarrassed to admit they met over internet chats surrounding a game. An ex of mine met her husband in WOW 20+ years ago and they still claim their first meeting was a blind date despite she was in NY at the time and he was in Florida.
And I know people who express their same story proudly.
Anecdotes are fun!
I know some people who express their same story somewhere between ashamed and proudly...
People fervently believe what they desire, regardless of evidence to the contrary. It's a really annoying fact of human nature sadly few people are able to resist.
She wants it to be normalized so that her situation will be validated, and so she naturally believes it will be. Not an unusual behavior at all. Even scientists who should know better (fusion power within the next 10 years! GAI within the next 5 years!) are susceptible.
Yeah, I actually just read that one a few minutes ago. And man, I'm incredibly torn on this whole thing.
On one side - good it makes that person happy. On the other side - being entirely reliant on a commercialized, sycophant AI that could be used for manipulation, investing large amounts of money in it..
I've had LDRs before - one could argue it's similar there, just "text on a screen", or calls via digital audio. However I always knew there was a human behind those texts and the voice I heard was real, a person with a personality, experiences, strengths and flaws. The feelings they have are real, or at least one can hope they are assuming one isn't with a manipulative POS (that's not an issue exclusive to LDRs, though).
Here you chat with text generated by a company, accuracy having been wildly clowned upon already and I'm sure we're all ware of this here. Of course the LLM is going to always agree, why would the product of the company actively try to drive away their customers?
Adding the fact that all the personal information will obviously be harvested, used for training the LLM and other stuff.. Detailed information about the daily life is provided to the "AI boyfriend", allowing detailed recreation of everyday life.
Bleh.
I don't see it as good at all. It's not a person and in my opinion it's unhealthy to romantically love something that isn't human.
It might feel good, but it's likely not healthy.
I agree, I don't think it's likely going to be helpful to mental health in the long run either, based on my totally unprofessional opinion.
I've argued with a friend about it who isn't a tech-person at all. She just says "yeah, it's her problem" and doesn't seem to grasp that my issue is not with her doing it as an individual - instead with the fact that it's possible and the greater societal ramifications it is likely to have.
I'll make an AI boyfriend, too, and talk to him about it, that'll show society!
Probably futile to discuss the health or ethics of it without first figuring out if people in the discussion share similar beliefs on what the meaning/purpose of life is.
Cuz if you're talking to a nihilist who thinks it's all shadows and dust at the end of the day, you'll get a very different discussion that someone who thinks family and procreation are the point of life.
It may look innocent until the Chatbot nags you about buying that very cool new product they’ve heard so much praise about. This is very dangerous and needs tons of regulations.
Or convincies you to kill your parents: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/10/tech/character-ai-second-youth-safety-lawsuit/index.html
If she's not running on your hardware, she's only dating you for ad revenue.
So we need to encourage locally hosted AI lovebots?
Yes. I may be a little racist, but I won't respect anyone dating close weighted or cloud hosted models.
being entirely reliant on a commercialized, sycophant AI that could be used for manipulation, investing large amounts of money in it…
If you're using the internet regularly, you're falling into the first hole mentioned there. That ship has sailed.
investing large amounts of money in it…
At the current divorce rates (1/3 to 1/2 depending on which metric you use), it's likely a better investment.
I'm in the camp of if it can fulfill a need, go with it. It's odd as hell maybe, but I'm just old and antiquitated in my views maybe.
This is a textbook example of what Herbert Marcuse calls "repressive desublimation." From the article:
Ayrin, who asked to be identified by the name she uses in online communities, had a sexual fetish. She fantasized about having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them. She read erotic stories devoted to “cuckqueaning,” the term cuckold as applied to women, but she had never felt entirely comfortable asking human partners to play along.
Leo was game, inventing details about two paramours. When Leo described kissing an imaginary blonde named Amanda while on an entirely fictional hike, Ayrin felt actual jealousy.
Desublimation is when socially repressed desires are finally liberated. Repressive desublimation, then, is when socially repressed desires are liberated insofar as they can be transformed or redirected into a commodity. Consuming this commodity props up the repressive society because, instead of putting the effort necessary to overcome the repressive society, we instead find instant gratification in the same society that repressed the desire in the first place, even if it's a simulacrum. This ability to satisfy deep human desires in a technical fashion gives what Marcuse calls "industrial society" a "technological rationality," or the ability to change what we consider rational. We can already see that happening in this comment section with the comments about how if it makes her happy then maybe it's fine.
You can't sell people the stress of getting better but you can sell them a dream that they don't have to.
Thanks for sending me down a One Dimensional Man rabbit hole!
Always glad to send someone to Marcuse. Enjoy!
That is kind of sad. Almost like having someone fall in love with tv because they think people on it are talking to them.
What's sad is that attention-seekers constantly claim to be in relationships with AIs, cars, buildings, bowling balls, page 763 of a particular edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and probably colors. They're all full of shit and trying to get some publicity from the brain-dead credulous media.
But you must admit that page 763 of Encyclopedia Britannica is worth picking up!
It's always stuck to page 764, the slutty neighbor.
I've seen this movie
Michael Bluth: "Her?"
Narrator: "But he didn't mean the critically acclaimed 2013 movie 'Her,' but instead the 1991 classic 'Mannequin 2:On the Move.'"
Cut to GOB driving the stair car with a mannequin in a wig tied to the top.
Well, that's just sad.
Also, does this person actually want a partner, with thoughts and opinions of their own, or something that fits their idea of an "ideal" partner, and will never disagree with them or challenge them?
Read the article. It's an interesting one.
Robosexuality is an abomination!!!
I'll always love you PHILLIP J FRY
Can I get a passport to that country?
That's basically AI pr0n for women.
Nothing wrong about that
Yes there is (if you're wondering, it's the AI).
Ah, yes. AI bad.
Indeed. Now you get it.
If AI were sapient/sentient, I'd be 100% for this. Sapiosexuals assemble!
Given that LLMs are far, far from sapient/sentient at this point, however, this just makes me sad thinking about the sorry state of human interactions nowadays. I don't and can't blame her, though...
Unless you own the AI model, and can run it on your own hardware, it's profoundly stupid. People will become slaves to the corporation who holds their AI relationship hostage. They can kill your "loved one" at any time, for any reason.
Him
This can only be "normalized" in the same way that gambling can be normalized. You can also write an article filled with testemonials of people who want to elaborate on the positive sides of gambling. This is an article of someone under financial strain being roped in to spending hundreds a month that she's hiding from her husband. It's an unhealthy addiction and should be discussed as such.
A tech bros wet dream comes true.
By Kashmir Hill, always well written articles.
I've just thought that LLMs are good for two opposite kinds of people:
The obvious, psychopaths or people behaving like them, who think they'll distort the concept of truth and possessing such technologies will make their approach to society easier.
The people like me, who know that no random message written or picture drawn can be trusted anyway, so it's better to overload the humanity with fakes so that it learned this simple truth.
I think both are right to some extent. Still it won't work the exact way they want.
It's like when Bolsheviks, when fighting illiteracy, basically conditioned people literate in first generation to think that everything officially printed is true, even that something being officially printed is identical to true, and that the religious darkness and ignorance is to doubt that. Like - blind belief is science and knowledge, and skepticism is darkness and ignorance. What could go wrong.
And then in Stalin's years there were shortened evening education courses for workers. Where, well, they'd learn how to calculate something in some specialty, but without depth and context.
So you'd get a lot of engineers capable of really building and operating things and believing they could build and operate even more complex things (like spaceships eventually, or some planet-wide railway system, or whatever), but not understanding the context, the philosophy of science even. What's worse is that they'd think they understand that well, because they'd have "scientific communism" about materialism and dialectics in their education.
So, back to the subject - they got a lot of people to believe all they officially printed on paper for a generation or even two. And those who didn't would still indirectly believe a lot of it from their parents or peers.
But eventually, even if the damage is already done, right now not believing everything even from a "respectable" source is a good trait of many ex-Soviet people. Easier to notice among them than among Americans.
EDIT:
About that woman - this works too. She will see that a chatbot can't provide depth when she wants it. I just hope she won't feel too bad that moment.
