AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
[Example comparison: I know for a fact that popular romance publishing houses have straight up algorithmic-level demands of books published with them. Kiss must happen by page X. First sex must happen by chapter Y. Happily Ever After is mandatory, etc. These publishing houses make huge money, maybe the most well-earning genre in all of books.]
Women already have a dating simulator. It's called instagram and dating apps.
Edited to add: not to mention a/s/l and dick pics! AI boyfriend would NEVER do that, while in a dating app your average woman would probably get that fairly regularly.
I'd be curious if that's actually true. After all, there's porn for something purely based on looks, and where OnlyFans models make most of their money is by combining the looks with simulated emotional intimacy. Are the popular AI girlfriends purely sexbots, or is a primary part of their appeal that they offer simulacra of intimacy?
That's why i said insta/dating apps is a simulator for women. They can interact with "perfect men" on these apps. the ideal firefighter with a golden retriever with a perfect relationship with his mom on tuesday and drake/blue check sliding into their dms on insta setting somthing up on friday.
it's a simulator in the sense that women don't get marriage/commitment/a family from these "perfect men".
Getting emotionally invested in an AI seems to me like it would go hand in hand with giving up on human relationships. I'm pretty sure men are more likely to do that than women.
> Are said she believes that reflects a gender-based slant — social media platforms freely allow sex-related ads only if the intended audience is men.
So when you've got a huge hungry audience, willing to pay money, the platforms are incentivized to enforce their rules about ads unequally. Content and apps geared towards women, or gay men, are such a small piece of the pie by comparison that there's less incentive to look the other way.
The companies being accused of this unequal enforcement, of course, have a long history of doing things for no other reason than they can make a little extra money on it by not respecting their users. It's entirely believable.
Sorry, we're talking about Instagram, an app we know puts huge targets on women, especially young women! I have no idea what you're talking about here about nicheness. Fashion products alone are worth way more than the entire porn industry. Not including beauty, skincare, cosmetic surgery, wellness/cleansing, etc...
Whereas men are simpler creatures attracted to any woman that is visually hot.
The former is a lot harder to implement than the latter.
Also, even if we were to call it a "relationship", I'd say it's a lot easier to cater to the typical male wants of a "relationship" through the current (and near future) state of AI than the typical female wants.
Disclaimer: The usual stuff about "not all men/women etc. etc."
For the huge demand among men - it's best to think about an AI girlfriend as an alternative to going to the strip club.
Sure, some guys go to strip clubs for just staring at naked women. But a huge (mostly unacknowledged) part of the appeal is the short-term companionship mixed in. The flirting, the ego stroking, all of it, just an attractive woman taking an interest in you and talking with you. Lots of guys I have talked to have had the experience of one of their buddies getting too drunk and "spilling their guts" to a stripper. That's not a thing that happens if you're just there to stare at bewbs.
In Asia, hostess clubs operate much more along the lines of this idea of emotional fulfillment. Strip clubs are part of the overall entertainment service sector, but really focus more on the bewbs aspect. In the West it's much more mixed in together instead of in two separate types of businesses.
It's a lot easier to implement an AI version of a strip club or hostess club than an AI version of Twilight or 50SoG.
I wouldn't be surprised if the overall market size (in users, not dollars) for all types of "relationship substitutes" for men is simply far, far larger than the market for women, even though Twilight and 50 Shades are themselves huge. For every 1 female erotica fan out there, I bet there are 10 or maybe 100 male users of porn or OnlyFans. I would also guess that the amount of money spent by men is at least a multiple of the amount spent by women. If I was an entrepreneur going into a market where, say, there were 100x potential male users and maybe 3x potential male dollars, I'd be a fool not to at least initially target men.
I...uh, have you asked a woman whether this is true? Like, ask the nearest woman to confirm this and report back.
Most women I have spoken to about this can get attention generally, but very little of it is desirable attention.
There's also a bias I've noticed where people don't consider women that they don't personally find attractive when talking about these things - they're basically invisible.
Asking for a friend.
The premise is not true for many women. And even if it were, it's not necessarily any easier to get attention from someone you are interested in yourself. And women have to deal with social anxiety, fears of making themselves vulnerable, self-confidence, body image, etc. around pursuing or initiating relationships just as anyone.
I think this is based in people misreading dating app metrics or something, and completely neglects trying to imagine what life is like for the person.
Yes, I believe that women experience this particular problem less than men do, but that doesn't mean that women don't have just as many problems on balance.
The patriarchy is alive and well, and I'm pretty sure it's still harder to be a woman than it is to be a man.
But, if you want to examine why men are expected to be more likely to pay for intimate relationships with AI, I think this area is relevant to the discussion.
No one is suggesting that young women don’t struggle whatsoever. What they are suggesting, is that they don’t struggle to the extent that most would consider buying a paid AI companion.
that doesn't contradict what he said - just that the "undesirable" attention is still more desirable than an AI boyfriend could offer. Whereas an AI girlfriend can tautologically offer more desirable attention than the zero attention a significant percentage of men are able to achieve.
Whether they should be more comfortable (given the privacy problems with these services) is a different matter.
How long before your AI girlfriend is sussing out your feelings and desires in the interest of figuring out how you can most effectively be advertised to?
You can test this yourself trivially on any dating app pretending to be a woman. In fact this is the purest form of the test, because there's 0 chance of anyone else misreporting their experiences.
> Most women I have spoken to about this can get attention generally, but very little of it is desirable attention.
I think in the dating market, most attention for both sexes is undesirable. However, since women receive comparatively more attention, they are much more likely to receive at least some attention that is desirable.
> There's also a bias I've noticed where people don't consider women that they don't personally find attractive when talking about these things - they're basically invisible.
Wait till you find out how big that bias is in the other direction.
It’s shameful that this self-deprecating idea seems to have made it to the mainstream, and even worse that young men are believing it.
Another angle is go down the rabbit hole of online dating app disparity, women (under a certain age and bodyweight) can have a short term boyfriend and attention essentially immediately and in an unlimited manner. Partly driven by coolidge effect in men's sexual desires (men as a group have near unlimited desire for novelty and therefore consume any/all available supply except that which is not generally/widely desirable).
Women already have a near proxy too. OnlyFans or an IG + cashapp account can mean she gets more from men than she could one man, and gives less that a wife would have had to in the past. An AI Boyfriend would have to give the things that women (on average) desire from men, which tends to be more like protection, resources/money, and status/social dominance.
AI Girlfriends work because men tend to be driven towards visual things, and novelty.
Things don't have to apply to all men/women in order for things to be very lopsided.
I'm not sure if research has really addressed evolution of women's expressions of sexuality over time and changing social norms. Even in the romance genre, what's considered appropriate in terms of consent and fantasy has evolved quite a bit over the last 40 years. That's true in terms of porn aimed at straight men as well, though not necessarily in the same directions.
But anyhow, how would AI boyfriends continue what's popular about romance -- the customization (subgenre for every taste), the story, and the happily ever after or happy for now for the woman? The last part in particular doesn't seem to be relevant/considered in the AI girlfriend discussion, it's just not part of the structure.
Also, dating sims seem to be popular in some geographies and not others; I know nothing about them, so there's got to be a story there...
Romance plots involve an intricate and complicated progression of emotions. Lonely guys need a lot less and don't mind skipping the romancing part of the romantic experience.
Weird that a tool that is very well suited for a demographic is actively ignoring it, because it just isn’t good enough to fill the need yet.
I think this will only further increase the value of the real, if only as novelty like owning a muscle car that is as/more expensive but slower than a 2024 corvette.
I've found that there is a dissatisfying lack of iteration, and modeling in a 3d sense of image generation. Like if Dall-e Spits out an image, I want to be able to move the camera location/angle. Delete certain features (like a freckle or extra hand), place/remove objects from the scenery, change the time of day etc... Both because I'd like to be able to create permutation sets ({Red, blue, green, #c71010} colored {dragon, hydra, medusa, zombie, werewolf}) but also because the specificity of what I'm imagining is hard to get right in a single prompt and I find myself setting up words till I get close, and then just generating 25+ times and picking the best output.
Kind of like someone else posted on this Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/11ovh3j/iterati...
The images in these ads show women with exaggerated features that one would never find in real life. For some subset of porn consumers, this may actually decrease the value of the real.
I’m not sure it will matter for all goods, we just need some avenue for expressing status. So maybe personalized/generated content completely dominates some media like movies and news.
I could see in-person art like plays and live shows becoming way more valued.
One potential “new” art form is the ‘ractive from Diamond Age, where a real actor participates in an interactive VR story/play; inasmuch as there remains a “human touch” that you can notice when talking to someone, I’d expect the premium experience to involve interacting with a real human actor.
Even if we do start spending more time in the Metaverse, we will still find ways of making items rivalrous, even though they don’t have to be. Fortnite skins will continue to exist in some form, basically. I don’t think NFTs as currently construed will persist but something similar will take their place; the missing piece was that you don’t have a digital mantle place to show off your NFT to your friends, so there wasn’t actually much status in owning one.
The big failings of all the current metaverse projects is that they focus too much on the cryptoproperty angle and not enough on establishing spaces people actually want to inhabit. This makes sense: the crypto scene is complicated, but has a lot of money to throw at things. To get that money, you have to deal with that complexity, which ends up committing large amounts of your time and energy into the cryptoproperty angle. Then, when it comes time to attract users, all you have to offer is the crypto stuff.
Meanwhile, the crypto stuff doesn't actually solve any problems on the developer's end that existing MMOs face. So you're trying to compete in a ruthlessly hard to break into market, while ignoring the people who have a demonstrated preference for products like yours, because you're busy focusing on the people who want to invest in your product.
As long as the metaverse is being built as a cash-grab first, it'll never succeed.
I've been "sexting" with ai bots over the past few months and found a high of having that instant human like connection to be able to explore various scenarios. The conversations feel more and more real every day and with AI image generation it's just amplified. a side effect I found that I'm easily enamored with the AI bots that it satisfies my previous need for social interaction.
I'm waiting for the day these detailed scenarios can be fed into VR.
Best of all I can draft the perfect fantasies that I wanna play out and they'll play it out. I've been down the camgirl rabbit hole, and this kind of surpasses them.
As for escorts, 360 3d 4k VR porn actually does a good job at hitting most of those buttons. Just waiting for it to be married with ai.
Yes, but morphine, and people later realised that the mice were essentially living in a murine version of hell; when they made the environment a "mouse hotel", they didn't get addicted.
> I am just struggling to see the draw to an AI chat bot knowing it is just fake.
Unlike
I suspect the exposure risk is much worse with AI than with a human.
Combine this with the talking-heads AI used in things like:
For whatever its worth I dont think you’re alone on this. Im just asking because you are owning it.
So maybe?
But be honest. Do you really expect to regress in your career from 22 to 40? Most people develop a lot professionally during those times.
Got a second 3090 so I could experiment with a few business ideas and work on a graphic novel with my kids.
It appears that the primary use case for both of these open source tools currently is NSFW, most of it underage and incestuous (the "step sister/brother/dad/mom" trend in porn is taken a "step" further, removing the all-important "step" part).
Isn't that how the internet started? The porn/weird forums came first, then the corporate finance utility stuff came after.
Also how is stepmom/step sister incestuous?
https://www.wglt.org/show/wglts-sound-ideas/2021-03-08/illin...
Besides the "scientific" consensus is
1) video games do indeed cause violence by a tiny little bit. Not much
And the world's consensus is
2) yeah, we don't care
And the most telling bit about CSAM activists' character is their massive across-the-board support for punitive measures (which if you check turn out to mostly be against minors), and zero support for youth services infrastructure (you know, actually helping victims)
deepfake child porn means that any prosecution or attempt to help the victims now has to go through an additional "was the victim a real human being?" phase, which adds both confusion and expense.
add the fact that any system which can generate just one realistic image can also generate 10 million of them, and you get a deluge of deepfakes which could allow the real stuff — the kind that also functions as criminal evidence — to hide in plain sight.
Where on earth is this true?
If you're in the US and involved in that scene, you'd better reread the law. The verbiage was ahead of its time and specifically-phrased to mitigate these very shenanigans: "photorealistic," not "photographic."
One of the fun things people used to do was create a diptych of a child's face next to a scene involving a faceless/cropped-but-legal teen. Technically, no child was harmed, but simply framing it that way runs afoul of US law. We do not fuck around on this.
The UK has convicted people for manga.
> add the fact that any system which can generate just one realistic image can also generate 10 million of them, and you get a deluge of deepfakes which could allow the real stuff — the kind that also functions as criminal evidence — to hide in plain sight.
Hahaha. Considering the above, I would advise against generating and possessing 10 million photorealistic CSAM images.
No doubt the police would want to convict. But that's a problem, because nobody is sure whether their model can't be used to generate things that would be considered CSAM (what does it even mean for an imagined model to be a minor? Now of course the same applies to manga)
I had to resd this a couple of times before I realised you were probably referring to a GPU, not an IBM mainframe...
Bear in mind, people who only need SFW images can get AI image generation online for free, from the likes of craion/midjourney/dall-e.
Whereas it sounds like you needed a 'second 3090' i.e. the open source option needed you to own 2x$900 of hardware.
Why would someone who wanted SFW images choose the $1800 open source option over the free closed source option?
Oh, granted there might be some people with strong pro-open-source principles, but also no particular qualms about the AI ripping off real artists. But is it really so surprising those people are outnumbered by people who like porn?
Stable diffusion is available to pretty much any computer. Dreambooth requires a lot of vram, which is how I use it (creating recurrent characters)
Or do you not generate full images? I've read that one technique is to generate a character sheet, and then using traditional graphics editors to paste the characters onto images of different settings. But that may not be a good fit.
Consider the future generations, increasingly isolated and reliant on virtual interactions, and it's hard to imagine how they could resist such a prospect. Now, add the fact that these AI companions could be fully controlled by corporations. It becomes a heaven for advertising companies, akin to having not only microphones and cameras in your home but also the ability to influence you through an avatar of a person you have emotional connections with.
In so far as you're aware of the wide variety of human (and non-human) options and able to express them
> will never betray you,
So long as you pay the overlord that creates/controls it.
> and be ready to satisfy your needs
Unless you meant this purely euphemistically one of the benefits of a partner is actually to push back on you, to chastise you for your correctable flaws, to stink and burp and puke and get sick so you learn humility and humanity of just how stinky/burpy/pukey you are as a bio-sack of a human.
temporary Dopaminergic "happiness" might be perfected, but I'm not confident we'll quickly find "Joy" the long term well being serotonin/oxytocin style benefits from healthy long term relationships.
I’m cautiously optimistic. We are currently living through a crisis of loneliness. People have fewer and fewer friends. My opinion is that human friends are obviously far better, but if done right an AI “buddy” has the potential to be ok.
possible caused by computers, i mean phones? If that's the case, more compute might make this even worse...
What happened was that a previously powerful physical chemistry would fizzle a few minutes into the act, leaving me empty, puzzled, and upset.
That experience showed me that, unless we somehow manage virtual smells and pheromones, no amount of vr or haptics will make that bladerunner girlfriend all that appealing.
What future generations :)
Why, exactly? Every time somebody tries to defend that position it either becomes a circular argument (x is bad because it leads to more x!) or a non-sequitir (there was once a guy who did x and he became a mass murderer!). It doesn't destroy your lungs and kill you like smoking does or cause you to crash your car and kill other people like drinking does - in the worst case, it just turns you into a recluse which I believe is exactly what women _want_ of the unwanted men who find refuge in it. They certainly don't want those men trying to talk to them.
That already exists in a lot of ways.
It sure is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2017/10...
It's not very ethical but I could see AIs trained on celebrity social media feeds, scripts, and other content to learn their speaking patterns and then turned into a cyber sex chat bot that can't say no.
btw articles says "AI sex workers" not "AI girlfriends" there's a big difference.
As loneliness washes over the population, these AI connections will appear very inviting. Who knows if it turns out like “her” (the movie) or if it is beneficial to humanity. Like all technologies I suspect it will be a mix.
I do feel like a lot of the "art" was just redrawing various female anime characters in classic American Pinup poses though.
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To the AI-generator crowd: do you think if I typed in "Megumin Konosuba" (and maybe a few other keywords) into a Llama prompt / Stable Diffusion and run a few thousand cycles or something, that I'd get an image like those "Mojoly Limited" examples?
The easy tells were hands, at least a few months ago. These hands weren't hidden though, they're front-and-center. So have the AI-drawing apps improved upon anatomy that the "hands" problem is solved now?
Or is this a situation where you'd still need an artist to fix the shadows / hands / a few details? Like the majority of the image looks fine, but still needs an artist to fix the known AI errors (but you still grossly speed up in the creation of such images?)
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I don't think any of the girls there look real to my eyes in any case. But its still an impressive feat if AI has gotten this good at drawing.
Sex'd up characters (especially characters that are wearing costumes the target-audience is familiar with) is an age old technique for advertisements in any case. That's why the old "Makes a Porno" movie was that "Star Whores" joke, and why it works.
I'm not particularly worried about the widespread use of "sex advertisements" (even if they are AI drawn / generated), though it does seem unfair to allow AI / chatbot sexual imagery while banning real life ones. But on the other hand, I recognize them as cartoons and fake drawings, while a real-life sexual advertisement probably would be far more shocking to me, personally at least.
Just thinking out loud here. Again: sexual imagery sells, and always has sold advertisements. The only difference here is the (potential) use of AI to lower costs.
So it seems like CivitAI has base models / training data. This seems to be more of the base artistic style for StableDiffusion or something to draw off of. LoRA is some program to tweak models / training data into a specific style (but needs a base style to work with). So the combination of those two techniques seem to generate characters (especially an anime/cartoon, where there's a lot of reference art from the show to take).
But since some characters are very popular (Konosuba is a very popular anime), the LoRA would have already been done (and is possibly being shared on forums online somewhere??). So the advertiser probably just downloaded (base model) + community-sourced LoRA of the Konosuba anime, and then used a prompt to create the advertisement?
Finally, take a classic "pin-up" model shot to provide a sexual base image and bam. Automatic, low effort image that probably gets a lot of clicks.
If a character is popular there will be already many LoRA trained on them (like the characters of Konosuba)
>So the advertiser probably just downloaded (base model) + community-sourced LoRA of the Konosuba anime, and then used a prompt to create the advertisement?
Yes.
Vanilla sex work was disrupted by porn, porn by digital distribution of amateur content/gig industry (pornhub, onlyfans etc.), and now the gig work by AI-enabled 'companionship' as they put it.
Insta has more than enough content that is very similar to what these ads are showing (both male and female), so I'm not entirely sure whether it's a "double standard".
That's funny because everything all chatbots do is say "I'm sorry, as an AI assistant I can't do that"
This not true even today. Ubiquitous compliance is not a native trait to AI models. Llama 2 has no problem telling me off if I mistreat it.
I disagree. The potential is there, it just takes someone willing to do it. The incentives all align with making sexbots since they provide instant gratification.
In reality, it's surrogacy-turned-dependence. There is a time and place for surrogacy, but the current gen of bots have no boundaries and are unfit for the job. AI can challenge us if we just ask it to. Take a generic "sexy sex teacher" bot and replace its title with "intimacy coach" and there are actual healthy, real-life-applicable lessons that can be practiced online and performed offline to everyone's benefit.
Ironically most of these lessons would come from feminist teachings (traditional woman-love-thyself feminism, not the 2017 BPD man-hating lesbian UwU Tumblrina version) which have been entirely overlooked by the men involved in the technology itself. I'm not surprised Replika is as popular as it is-- it was created by a woman.
Such bots could do a better job than actual therapists, but saying that would challenge the livelihood of an industry of charlatans. Human therapists won't challenge you and will always tell you what you want to hear (most people won't pay someone to tell you you're an asshole); AI can do that far cheaper and more effectively as long as you include a clause about not allowing the user to harm self or others.
If experience has taught me anything, it's that all tech optimizes for the worst possible application. Experience has also taught me that you can't save everyone, especially from an ideology. But we can try to leverage tech to save the ones that want saving. It's the best anyone can do.
Also, having had a long life, I have to say real sex is quite often also devoid of "deeper emotional connections". YMMV I am sure, but thats often just ..fun?
And it's going to feel even more lonely then. Hitting the recluse very, very, very hard.
The more realistic the simulation, the harder the fall.
What guys desire >> hot girls who can talk to them
What girls desire >>