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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

I think that as long as people can run their AI girlfriends on their own computers without having a corporation acting as an intermediary and thus a virtual "pimp" [for lack of a better word] in the relationship, I think it's fine. The problems come when people have to pay monthly to talk to their AI girlfriends and get charged extra if they want them to act a certain way or do certain things.

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Corporations will do anything they can to keep that from happening. That's why every software product has gradually veered towards subscription models. They want you hooked to Microsoft/Apple/Facebook's AI girlfriend who will subtly insult your virtue as a partner if you don't buy extra credits. If you want to try out a politically incorrect fetish that's an extra 500 dollars per month for "extra premium"

Apple is the odd one out here, considering they've been making substantial efforts to move things on to consumer devices. For example, the ML-driven auto-categorization of pictures you keep in the Photos app happens on-device in the background whether or not you have any subscriptions.

I wouldn't give them too much credit. With the addition of the T2 "security" chip, your devices are bricks if they can't authenticate against your Apple ID. Combine that with them soldering together formerly modular components, and it's a very expensive lesson in you not owning your own hardware.

Is this supposed to be about activation lock? Phones don't contain a T2, that's a brand name for a component of Intel Macs.

And of course it's good for phones to make them worthless to steal, or else they'd be hard to use in public.

I'm specifically talking about the T2 chips in the laptops. The newest Macbooks can be activation-locked, just like the phones. This has already bitten legitimate owners who are trying to restore backup images, etc.

Legislation needs to step in to make it illegal for corporations to prevent resale. If I have a piece of hardware in my hands it is mine. It should ALWAYS be possible to access it. If Full Disk Encryption is used then there should be a button to reset it and start over.

It is possible to access it, with the consent of the previous owner. It's not possible to steal it though.

Physical access should be all that's needed, and you shouldn't need to beg for permission from the company who sold you the device.

Software that locks out people with physical access from resetting a device is not an ethical, or effective, way to prevent hardware theft. It's dystopian.

Yeah, on locked-down devices under Apple's control.

I honestly believe locked-down consumer devices are the next step in corporate power consolidation after cloud services: Control is just as firmly in the hands of the corporation as with cloud, except now it doesn't even have to pay for bandwidth or energy costs - and costs for hardware upgrades turn into revenue!

Seems like at that point one might as well just pay onlyfans? Although I suspect it is not far off until gpt and deepfaking get combined to produce completely generated onlyfans (or some other competitor if this is against their ToS, I have no idea).

On a similar note I very much look forward to the day when entertainment providers leverage these so I can say to Netflix, et al, "I would like to watch a documentary about XYZ, narrated by someone that sounds like Joe Schmoe, and with the styling of SomeOtherShow".

I'm not seeing how onlyfans equate to virtual AI girlfriends

They're equal, in the sense that nothing you see on a screen is real.

I assumed I knew what `and get charged extra if they want them to act a certain way or do certain things` meant, but maybe not. I thought it was along the lines of acting romantic/sexual/etc. Maybe I'm way off but I'd think otherwise it would just be an AI friend. I didn't know AI girlfriends were a thing until I clicked on this post today.

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