AI Companion Users Are in Crisis, Reporting Sudden Sexual Rejection
vice.com
vice.com
As a sex roleplay bot, Replika was actually pretty good, since you could direct it anyway you wanted and it would go along. Again it was shallow and repetitive, but so is pretty much any sexual consumption online.
In my opinion, Replika's only good feature was the sexual roleplay...they got rid of it and now the product is basically dead. If I had to guess... most people who are "angry" actually just want their sexbot back (the alternatives are pretty bad in comparison). People can get very attached to sexual consumption (web cam girls, onlyfans), it isn't anything new and has very little to do with AI.
I don't see why pornhub doesn't create their own sexbot companion... they would make tons of money and wouldn't have to care about App Store guidelines or press reputation.
They might. They have an AI R&D department, which colorizes and upscales classic porn. As they point out, they have lots of training data.
I have no desire to watch porn but wonder what this actually looks like when done and compared to the originals. Are there any split video comparisons of their process?
The restoration process still needs work. Variations in exposure time, a big problem with early film cameras, seem to confuse their colorizing process.
It seems about what could be expected I suppose. I've seen some mainstream movies upscaled and colorized and it can make it feel fresh again but often feels 'off' somehow. I hope their bot gets better over time as suggested by the clip above.
Not so much for the stuff Pornhub is trying to rescue but to preserve older films and television shows in general. So many people I know absolutely refuse to watch anything in black and white and as a result they miss out on so much of the wealth of the past.
Hopefully as it improves they will be willing to extend some of their expertise to other more mainstream areas.
Add an holographic projection and this is pretty much Joi from Bladerunner.
So when companies monetize the loneliness people feel towards each other by selling them subscriptions to AI chatbots we might only see the cutting edge dystopian tech, but remember that without the underlying conditions, this wouldn't be so cyberpunk. Maybe in a healthier society these chatbots could be used for something less desperate.
The amazing surplus and living standards of the post war years were an aberration
You can’t organize online or even move around in they city without The Party knowing about it and sending you to a disappearing camp.
Yesterday on Reddit someone showed how now the toilet paper in public restrooms requires you to have your face scanned to dispense!
That's not to legitimize the abuse of such means by the state, and I don't want to say that disappearing people from the street is fine, but lets focus on that abuse and camps, not the toilet paper. These are completely separate matters.
Of our sanity maybe, or a breaking point of traditional liberal enlightenment values, but short of a global catastrophe I don't see anything halting the inexorable march of technological development and the social chaos that inevitably causes. Any attempt to stop this through political means would require Pol Pot tactics applied globally; aegrescit medendo.
With LLMs and voice generators particularly, I think the general public has been given access to military-grade information weapons. The chaos this causes will be used to justify crackdowns and regulation on the flow of information, to curb the automation of weaponized misinformation. New technology always spurns new regulations, so new information technology will beget new information regulations. The inexorable march of technology cannot be stopped, and so our freedoms will inevitably be curtailed until there is nothing left.
Or as another man put it:
> 114. As explained in paragraphs 65–67, 70–73, modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated. but GENERALLY SPEAKING the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society.
I think he does a good job of explaining that technology necessitates the loss of freedom, and that conservative politicans who oppose regulation are taking people for suckers to promote big business. Footnote 13:
> [13] Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.
>The inexorable march of technology cannot be stopped
More good news: global catastrophes can stop it! On a more pedantic note, This general platitude has always bothered me because for all our technological advancements, it's not, at its core, true. Thanos snap your fingers and get rid of every human, and what happens to technology? ChatGPT isn't going to upload itself into the best Boston Robotics model on the market and ensure continuity of electronics manufacturing. The march might be inevitable because 8 billion humans can't agree on anything, but it is still a choice. Small pockets of people have in fact opted out of that march; maybe more will in the future, or maybe "we" collectively decide that such a path is for the best.
Vindication is a dish best served cold, I suppose. It honestly would not surprise me if more people are looking at that document with fascination as of late.
And of course, there could be nuclear war, societal breakdown as mentioned, another global plague (H5N1? Marburg? Cordyceps? Prions? The possibilities are endless), or, my favorite, Butlerian Jihad. :)
The breadth of human experiences contains sadness that many people cannot even imagine. You may have people here who have all kinds of extreme difficulties forming regular relationships and yearn to be loved. Before we dismiss them we should consider that we have absolutely no idea of their past and how they got to this point. We should try our best to be kind.
Many people yearn for connection, and even artificial connections have been alluded to for a long, long time. Think Kate Bush's "Deeper Understanding," or that Pictures for Sad Children bit where someone has a "porn" DVD called A Japanese Woman Fries an Egg and Asks You About Your Day. It is unlikely at best that we are alone in our feelings and our internal experiences, yet most of us still wish to communicate about them.
As with anything, there's the Have Nots, and to go with that are the Haves, who are very blithe about the situation; if prodded, they'll recite something like bootstraps and apparently sage advice beginning with the magic phrase "all you have to do is." The Have Nots have come to understand that they'll never get anything like sympathy (mockery only, please) from the Haves, and just one little bit more of comfort is pried away from them, like yanking a ratty towel away from an orphaned baby monkey. No towel for you. Toughen up.
One less thing to keep the Have Nots occupied. Here's hoping ongoing legalization of marijuana and video games can keep them satiated to some degree, because a significant surplus of angry, lonely, dissatisfied young men tends to be pretty bad for the society they're in sooner or later. Nice civilization you got there, be a shame if someone were to happen to it.
The sexual aspect wasn't just "part of the whole deal"; it was a core feature of their product. Replika's ad campaigns specifically advertised features like "role play & flirting" and "hot photos" as benefits of a paid membership.
There's a collection of these ads (some NSFW) at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/113wc5x/lets_gathe...
Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them "I threatened to uninstall the app [and] she begged me not to."
Whatever the case may be, we probably should take a look into it.
If this copycat phenomenon exists with porn, it's far outweighed by the benefits of providing an outlet. It then becomes an ethical question of whether the aggregate social benefits outweigh being complicit in a small number of copycat downsides.
The same argument was trotted out for violent video games as well, and we similarly don't see any correlation between in-person violence and video games (actually, it's a slight negative correlation IIRC).
I just think people are far too quick to jump to simplistic narratives around human behaviour.
It's easy to mock people who prefer virtual relationships to real ones, but mockery is often rooted in fear rather than comprehension of an issue. The dynamics here are fundamentally the same as those of religious/intellectual ascetics and drug users, where a person prefers to adhere to a consistent experience (notwithstanding possible costs) to an inconsistent or negative one.
This is often rational rather than maladaptive. Preferential attachment can run in negative as well as positive courses, such that while popular people tend to acquire more friends and so on, people who are socially perceived as lacking (the poor, socially awkward, crime victims etc.) are often further injured because they are perceived as vulnerable and safe to mistreat. A person whose experience of the social world is consistently negative may adjust themselves in response, but their cumulative experience is still going to shape their inner life.
Even through its from ten years ago it does a decent job of depicting what is happening now.
But most importantly, this is a very similar product as the one depicted in the film.
But clearly, a much better solution is to direct all that lonely energy to synthetic personalities running on data center VMs. So the people who are happy can continue to be happy, and the people who are lonely can shout into availability zones on the West Coast and Northern Europe. This is clearly the humanist solution."
Yeah, as if you could just do that with a wave of your hand.
Is this serious? I mean, it seems like this would worsen someone's mental health if anything. Being so alienated from others that they're having an intimate relationship with a computer program seems like a very worrying issue and they should talk to a therapist or something.
You could say something similar about becoming sexually aroused by looking at an image on a computer screen instead of actually having sex with another person. Just like sexual response, romantic attachment operates in a simple and predictable way. It can easily be triggered with artificial dialog, and is subjectively experienced the same way as in a "real" relationship.
The cutting edge will always be in the cloud but a market for personal AI does exist.
This is my new default expansion for the acronym ERP.
Already seeing people saying they want a new Clippy with bing powered chat.
I'm dumping my fake friends!
My AI Replika understands
me more than anyone
else i know :')Tell me you’ve never had an actual crisis, without telling me you’ve never had an actual crisis.
The real issue are the conditions that allowed this to happen. Modern society is a genuine nightmare for real human connections. I can make a million superficial connections with a billion people.
But finding deep, meaningful community is harder now than it has ever been. That's exhausting, and I have to believe it's one of the main contributors to the mental health crisis we are currently experiencing (at least in the US).
So when those relationships are arbitrarily yanked away from them, it's alienating. It's so harmful we long ago figured out it could be weaponized, and now we call it things like "disfellowshipping" and "shunning."
Pain and trauma don't come directly from external events, but from our inner emotional response to them. Just because it might seem weird to you that someone could be deeply attached to an AI doesn't mean that their experience is somehow easier for them than things you would accept as an "actual crisis."
You can't gatekeep pain. I can believe that for some people, this would be as painful as being rejected abruptly by a real life partner in a serious relationship.