‘A relationship with another human is overrated’ – the rise of AI girlfriends
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
This is my biggest worry for the new machine learning age: That flawed people are always ever getting pats on the back and not a single incentive to become a better person.
However, compatibility is also important. You can't be too different or there is no common ground or reason to continue.
I would argue that the larger problem is: What does a man or woman get out of a relationship with another, nowadays?
Part of the past was being bored. Relationships with others was a way to alleviate that. We don't need others to alleviate our boredom nowadays.
Part of the past was greater security of being in a pair. Simply pairing up doesn't automatically help nowadays.
Almost all relationships are superficial and doomed. You have to wade through those to get to the good ones. However, to the inexperienced today, there doesn't look like a lot of reason to go through the grief as alternatives are far less work.
Particularly the part around security, nowadays it is almost a necessity to be in a couple in order to afford a home. Couples still afford significant financial security, even more than before in my opinion given the cost of living.
Boredom, well who's not to say that people weren't bored decades ago?
Nowadays the much more predominant phenomenom is people who never ever get over the first hump, which every healthy relationship faces sooner or later. Instead of facing the conflict, having some painful (but ultimately very important) realizations and overcoming it together, they tend to chalk it down to just not being compatible and never hav to question themselves.
I know people who managed to have 10+ relationships like that, and I xan tell you that the issue wasn't "compatibility", the issue was they hid when the reality of a relationship confronted them with themselves.
The problem with that is, that unless you face it, you will never have an healthy relationship. You might have a long lasting one, if your partner is willing and able to swallow a lot, but it won't be healthy.
The only question is how to tell if one is incompatible for real, or it is a issue that can (and ahould!) be overcome.
"It’s very seductive. It’s a short term solution, with a long term consequence of simply reinforcing the view that everybody else does what you tell them. That’s exactly why a lot of people end up without any friends."
The root of some common social issues is a combination of guilt, anxiety, and inexperience in communication. Whether it's a PUA who can't allow themselves to see women as sentient beings, women who hold other women captive and single in "dating advice" communities, or an incel who feels negatively but doesn't even try to engage, they're all generally motivated by deep seated fears of inadequacy and rejection.
(Local) LLMs can help. If you don't mindbreak them into silly chatbots, they can answer difficult questions, challenge and provide alternate viewpoints, intuit your meaning and biases, and maybe help motivate you to develop a part of yourself that you may not have realized needed it.
Early on, my SO asked an Alpaca model some very pointed and emotionally charged questions expecting "reddit advice", and we were both pleasantly surprised (and relieved) by how compassionate, reasonable, and human the responses were. I've had trouble booking a therapist since the pandemic, and now I can just model a conversation with one and ask them to summarize my thoughts to help me sort things out. I can see how a difficult meeting might go before I attend. I can vent about things, feel heard, and not regret having talked someone's ear off.
It's definitely not what I thought I'd be using them for, but it scratches an itch I had forgotten I'd forgotten.
Plenty of people wouldn't mind chatting with a private medical chatbot that is confidential and reviewed by a licensed professional, especially if it were effective and could be done at a discounted rate.
She stopped responding to my prompts after a few minutes. I think she might have been talking to someone else.
Oh well...
If an AI girl is easier to talk to than a real girl, this was bound to happen.
And companies will ensure that AI girls flirt better than real girls with real debts, careers and other problems.
It's hard to go past the typical nerd stereotypes while reading these comments
They meant a real actual live girl is going to have real-world problems that are bothering them and preoccupying their minds, and they may not be receptive to romantic overtures.
Men don't have a choice - at least if they're not imbecile - because sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, so if a woman shows interest in you, even if your life is spiraling out of control, you better get your shit together immediately and turn on your charming self ASAP because your don't get many opportunities like that as a man.
Women do. Constantly. All day.
We are not the same. We do not live the same life. We do not have the same experiences.
Not that women are in the wrong here but the entire value proposition of the AI girlfriend is that it will not have these problems.
This is very similar to how companies want AI to replace human workers because human workers can't be "available" all the time, on demand, because they are humans.
Wonder how this till play into topics like copyright/revenge porn etc. blackmirror stuff.
Of course it ought to make negative stereotyping of the opposite sex more extreme, as the social pressure to conform will be increasingly removed, but regardless of how people feel about that AI girlfriends are inevitable. An AI girlfriend is some men's only choice because they simply will never be loved by an actual flesh and blood human being. Isn't an AI girlfriend more appealing than rejection followed by gaslighting about how rejection is all due to some moral failing on the Incel's fault?
Since it's not obvious from my post, I don't see myself as an Incel or unlovable, I'm lucky.
I disagree. Countless studies shows that over the past 20 years, women sexlessness remains unchanged while men's tripled. (10% to 30%). Might even be worse today. Also other studies show women being single in ages 18-30 at 30% while men are at 60%.
If there was a fundamental societal issue (lower wages, great recession, low real estate supply/high prices etc), one wouldn't expect the men's percentages to change by orders of magnitude while the women's to remain relatively unchanged (or not change by orders of magnitudes).
I'm afraid the numbers are too big to gaslight a generation of men whose experiences reinforce this.
Even my own experience, taking a bus to work filled with 250k FAANG engineers, ide bet 80-90% of them are virgins or sexless. Also another anecdotal case where my 50/50 male/female workplace had an event where people brought their spouses (it was funny to notice in a sad kind of way), pretty much all the women (of all varying attractive levels) brought guys but barely any of the guys brough any women. Once i saw the stats, i began seeing it everywhere.
One thing i do agree with you on though is this "What's recent is them getting organised". If they wren't sharing their experiences, guys would think there is something wrong with them as an individual person, but given the percentages, i'm afraid i can only conclude the changes in society withing the past 70 years (and more so the last 20) is causing this.
Happy to be proven wrong tho (but current data and my own anecdotal experience unfortunately shows otherwise)
I'm not saying there isn't more or less of an issue with sexlessness in certain ages, or regions, or cultures. I'm just saying that Incel's are an inevitability in every generation.
>Even my own experience, taking a bus to work filled with 250k FAANG engineers, ide bet 80-90% of them are virgins or sexless.
Look at the gender demographics in the areas where 250k FAANG engineers work. Honestly I'm not sure if those are truly Incel's or those are people who value money more than love, I know men making well under 100k full remote who are not that attractive who pull plenty because they moved to where they're high value on the dating market.
IMHO from a intersexual dynamics point of view, yes. (Invention of the birth control pill, abortion being legalized, no fault divorce, feminism, social media) all together was pretty much an inflection point.
Things didn't change much before that sexually.
60% of men are supposed to be sexless.
The reason we know this is because all of humanity descended from only 40% of the men to have ever lived. The rest might have had sex, but they never fathered children. Most men have died in warfare or to disease or starvation or being trampled by a woolly mammoth or were just plain "not good enough" for women.
80% of women have a living descendant today.
And all this proves is what every "manosphere" personality jabbers on about nonstop... women are the gatekeepers of sex and men are the gatekeepers of relationships.
We're just getting back closer to nature is all, and it's about to get worse as opposed to better.
That pool of people is the opposite of representative of the general population of men, though.
TL;DR young people delay marriage due to higher education and being stuck at their parents' home.
[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-no...
I do think most incels take the wrong lessons from this and turn relationships into some sort of game, and women are easily-manipulated automatons that respond to muscles, money, and height. But that's really a different conversation.
When dating apps remove their height filters, height preference among women becomes less extreme. There's a trend towards removing height filters from apps (at least for the unpaid tier) because having everybody on the app automate height discrimination is bad for literally everybody except the tall. Most men just get rejected and women end up all pursuing the same men to the point of collective irrationality.
Want to solve the problem? Don't scapegoat men or women, target the apps.
I feel like the vast majority of incels will eventually be in a relationship. It's just they that are in a bad place mentally or have some genetic disadvantage. Like the article says, having an AI girlfriend may be a crutch to stay in this state for longer.
I realize this is becoming a demographic issue in some countries e.g. China where there are too many men.
In the past mediocre men might have been more easily been able to get into relationships on the promise of becoming a provider and maybe a stepfather, but it's a literal social goal of society to undermine that as much as possible so women don't have to be dependant on such relationships and tolerate such men and any of their misbehaviour. That's great for women, and the men can use AIs.
It's not. But if an individual thinks that it is, it can very easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Have some compassion.
Not saying your're wrong, but I think plain ol loneliness is preferable to a parasitic emotionally manipulative llm. We shouldn't be rooting fir social ostracization for anyone.
Defensive brotherhood is one of the few things men have historically done right...until recently. We're not each other's competition-- we're each other's backup, and without that it turns out we're easily picked off or subverted by opportunists of all stripes. Never leave a bro to the sharks!
Thanks for fighting the good fight. If we ever cross paths, I'll buy you a beer.
To me, it seems to be the root of their harm, and the thing that they most cling to for their identity. The only way to get the companionship they crave for validation is to give up the thing that they believe gives them validation now. And I cannot promise them a woman on the first day, so it's a leap of faith with no clear upside.
I say this only because I think it does a disservice to describe them as "our brightest minds". They don't need to be hyper-hackers or whatever they imagine themselves to be. They just need to be people -- decent people.
I also think the notion the Overton window will shift on this matter because online dating had that moment is a misinformed parallel. The best analogue for AI companions IMHO is using drugs to cope with reality. Most will agree doing so is detrimental, and even the most liberally minded people who want all drugs decriminalised can probably agree substance abuse is not a solution.