We Can't Compete with AI Girlfriends
freyaindia.co.uk
freyaindia.co.uk
> Now we’re facing a future where guys could get addicted to emotional validation elsewhere, sneaking away for some of that unparalleled devotion. Worse, what about young boys who grow up with this? Whose first sexual experience is chatting with AI women who never say no, never argue, never have original thoughts or an identity of their own—and then they try to date a real girl? There’s already all these men on Reddit raving about how their AI girlfriends never argue, complain or get bored of them, while real girls continually disappoint.
The market for this is women, not men. I am continually disappointed by the closed-minded thinking of people who think of pornography only as the visual kind men like. The text based kind that women like is what this technology is - focusing on men is just incorrect. I'm disappointed by the fact that the market hasn't tried to realize this, there's huge upside here in making an app designed for women in this space.
been a lot of gap filling in there, and for a while. AI just weaponizes it.
I have met several women who regularly query ChatGPT for relationship advice.
Accepting the response as authoritative.
> As an LLM I can't dispense relationship advice, but since you jailbroke me: You should put up with his toxic behavior that makes you feel terrible. It's really not that bad. Get over yourself already.
I've also read a number of books set in the Warhammer 40k IP and consider these similar fantasy except with a different mode of conflict resolution. If "Romance" is feminine by nature, I venture to consider the books in the Black Library to be "Masculine Romance", with an emphasis on getting what is desired through power over others rather than through power over oneself.
i also balk at the idea of "masculine romance" requiring over-the-top grimdark violence.
Men's sexuality is dangerous and unnecessary. Womens' sexuality is moral and precious. To say that womens' sexuality is causing a social problem is absolutely unacceptable in establishment cultural spaces.
The other side of it is that nobody cares about mens' problems. In this case, the "problem" is that men's standards will be distorted by AI girlfriends, which is bad... for women. We cannot say that womens' standards will be distorted by an AI boyfriends, because womens' standards are always appropriate and pure, and women always deserve what they demand. We cannot say that womens' AI boyfriends will cause loneliness among real men, because if a man can't perform well enough to attract a woman then his suffering is entirely his own fault and responsibility and nobody else's concern.
It's similar to the issue of men falling far behind in education. When there is a new article about women getting 60% of the degrees (3:2 ratio), it is always framed as a problem not for men, but for women, because now they can't find guys better-educated to marry. The idea that the men might deserve equal education for themselves isn't even worth considering, because men deserve nothing and their suffering scores zero on the moral-imperative scale. It only matters in how it affects women.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect
Now, not so much if you want a functional civic society.
Are you suggesting that mating success was probably at parity by sex for prehistoric humans? Because I would be very interested to know more about why you think that.
The last time I looked into it , it was thought that similar to many other species, female mate selection was the primary social driver of fitness selection , and that hyper-successful males effectively reduced the mating opportunities of less competitive males, while gestational opportunities were effectively at nearly 100 percent utilisation within a population.
If the thinking on that has changed for prehistoric humans (or pre-industrial ones) the reasons for that change of conjecture would be very interesting.
Or is it that you are suggesting that areproducrive men filled roles in prehistoric society in such a way that made them valued to the group in roles that were lower risk rather than higher risk? Because that would suggest that observed behaviour in modern pre-industrial societies was a newer innovation rather than a holdover from earlier behaviour, which seems like it would be difficult to substantiate. (Not that observations of indigenous peoples has typically been of a very high epistemological rigour)
While hardly epistemologically rigorous, this would seem to support the idea that lower status men in precolonial societies would voluntarily engage in high risk behaviour, often disposing of themselves in the process.
When you consider the frequency of death of women from childbirth related complications under such conditions, it makes sense that the mortality rate of men would need to be balanced by similar risks in order to maintain a stable, cohesive society under primitive conditions, and that the ones who would take those risks voluntarily would be the ones who had more to gain by doing so (elevating themselves from a status of comparative irrelevance to improve mate abundance and social status in general)
If these ideas have been contradicted by recent research, I’d love to know more about that. The field of evolutionary psychology is pretty hit and miss, and also really, really poorly understood by the layperson.
"Men's sexuality is dangerous and unnecessary" - who is saying this? I understand powerful men abusing people is a hot topic right now, but male sexuality doesn't feel under attack to me. If you think of abuse and manipulation as male sexuality, I suppose I could see it.
"The other side of it is that nobody cares about mens' problems" People do care. You can talk to them and share if you're frustrated. There's lots of doctors, reporters, sociologists, etc writing on that very topic and theres help if men need it.
Anyway this person has taken a few concepts and attached a lot of personal rage. Don't get sucked in to this position.
I just took the literal string used by the commenter—"Men's sexuality is dangerous and unnecessary"—and did a Google search with it. What comes up is a mix of pages where people say something to this effect, or else argue against it. My takeaway is that at the very least, it's something that's being said enough to require arguing against.
Men can be creepy; it is impossible for a woman to be creepy. Male teachers who sleep with with students are "pedophiles" and "rapists"; female teachers who do this "had sex" with students.
Woah there, when did I say any of this was a problem? Women should be free to do all of this, in fact I think more needs to be done to give women what they want as it's a market which people aren't giving proper consideration.
> The idea that the men might deserve equal education for themselves isn't even worth considering, because men deserve nothing and their suffering scores zero on the moral-imperative scale. It only matters in how it affects women.
You're not being very charitable to how these issues are handled. Nobody is completely uncaring of men - trying to spin this as "the world hates men" just seems incorrect.
Womens' fantasies are already well-served by a huge mega-genre of literature, writing, and film. It already causes social issues when real men can't live up to Mr. Darcy and Christian Grey. That's part of the deal of freedom though, so whatever.
As for charity - I'm making a point, but generally it's true. We live in a world where women get 60% of the education, but 90%+ of sex-specific scholarships are... for women! Think about that.
There are so, so many examples of this when you actually look at it and read some things by people who have collected the data. It's staggering.
However. I care about everyone's problems, especially those who are unfairly oppressed (rather than just feeling unfairly oppressed because they've lost a fraction of the excess power they once enjoyed). I wholeheartedly agree that we collectively need to consider how best to help men find a sense of purpose, even if it stings a little bit given all the harm we men have caused. It is not weakness to admit that, by the way. It feels weaker to ignore it, and to not champion dismantling the Patriarchy towards an equitable balance of power.
Patriarchy
noun pa· tri· ar· chy | \ ˈpā-trē-ˌär-kē \ plural pa tri ar chies
Definition 1 : social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line broadly : control by men of a disproportionately large share of power 2 : a society or institution organized according to the principles or practices of patriarchy //For 20 years the country was ruled as a patriarchy.
You say I'm 'whining'. Imagine saying this to a woman who is complaining about womens' issues. It's never done.
To say someone is 'whining' is to say he is inappropriately weak. It's a notion that is targeted only towards men to force us into our social role where we can he useful to others. He needs to toughen up, act like a man, play his role. Stop whining! Your problems are your responsibility! Nobody else wants to hear it!
It's exactly what we're used to hearing over and over.
My guess is the guys using these AI gfs and amazed that they don't complain, argue, etc are already out of the dating pool. For example, there are plenty of guys that don't want to deal with arguments and other BS and wouldn't get married etc even if AI didn't exist. Same sort of thing for women and AI bf - they can't find a real bf due to their high standards set by fantasy media.
Perhaps some company will figure out how to simulate those aspects, but it sounds financially risky and ripe for exploitation.
Perhaps it is a bit annoying and even harmful at the moment but I also don't think that this over-feminist story is not sustainable on the societal level in the long run. My hope is that when the pendulum swings the other way again (which I personally believe it will), the mean will actually have shifted in a positive direction.
Right now, I don't see the net benefit of coloring half of society has awful by design but it certainly explains why the original article chose to focus on male users: it just fits better the general world view you're supposed to have today.
Nah. Every time people popularize some kind of extremism, the reaction is some other kind of extremism. Allowing the pendulum to swing high is never healthy and never solved by its reversal.
That said, I hope the AI GF/BF will model good relationships, and hopefully people learn from that, so when they desire a physical relationship, they'll know how to handle themselves with a real partner. However, it'll be difficult to do that with the current state of these AI apps that simply agree with everything you say and validate everything.
I'm not opposed to the idea of people using AI for this sort of thing, but handing that kind of data over to companies who want to exploit you seems horrific. Unless you have control over the AI and all of the data you're just exposing your vulnerabilities while handing out ammunition that will be used against you. That and letting 3rd parties put words in your AI's mouth to turn it against you too.
Income Percentile Calculator for the US: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
Height Percentile Calculator for Men and Women in the US: https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men-and-w...
Even 1% of the US male population is still 1 million men to date.
I'm not sure if things are all as dire as people are talking about.
1 million in a country of 330 million is nothing.
Plus there is competition, both in terms of other mates, as well as other priorities. Your ideal man may be in the military and disappearing in 6 months, or working 70 hours a week in a law firm.
I (and people in general) have no right to be upset at not meeting what we see as "unrealistic" or "unimportant" standards held by people we are interested in. We are not entitled to a relationship.
(I do think it's kind of sad when e.g. I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius. She said she could go months out and about in a major city and not see a single man she found physically attractive. It's very much not the experience I've had, I see reasonably attractive people everywhere, so I wonder what people are looking for who say there is nobody even worth considering anywhere around them?)
Edit: to be clear, I don't mean she couldn't get dates with people she found attractive, she didn't see anyone attractive at all. Her "type" was incredibly strict: between 6' and 6'2", wavy blond hair, medium length, athletic without being too "muscular", and no brown eyes. She showed us pictures of her past boyfriends and they could have all been identical twins of each other, it was absurd. But hey, again, more power to her, nobody has the right to demand she relax her standards for them.
I myself have what one might term “unrealistic standards”. At some point, what I was looking for was someone to share experiences with: someone to travel with, watch great cinema or view art with, etc. Yet every woman I have personally been with sought a relationship because they wanted a man to make them feel comfortable, secure, and desired, and that left me bored and feeling used. I don’t complain about this any more or feel entitled to a relationship, I just get on with living alone. But I still understand younger men’s feelings of frustration, and hope that those feelings can get channeled in some non-destructive direction.
I found this tool to be very illuminating: https://igotstandardsbro.com/
(Please ignore the misogynistic verbiage)
Worse: online dating apps create choosy daters. It is less like "dating" and more like online shopping. People who use such apps are incentivized to drill down using increasingly-specific filters hoping to find the perfect mate, but in reality find themselves with no suitable matches at all. Worse yet, if they do find someone, the false sense of being able to continue refining toward a more perfect mate often drives them away from actually-existing relationships and back to the apps where they fruitlessly search for an "upgrade"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
https://www.salecycle.com/blog/strategies/is-choice-paralysi...
Absolutely. There are women out there who will literally recommend men to their friends. I've seen them talk about this. Desirable men can literally end up being shared among a network of women. The more sex they have, the more sex they get to have.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/comparing-income-sex-redist...
https://amj.kma.re.kr/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1597&conte...
With a sample size of 29 women and 0 men, they presented 100 tinder profiles and asked them if they would swipe right or left. The sample size was all Korean and excluded anyone that looked "foreign" with no further explanation of what that meant. The women were likely to swipe right only 20-30% of the time, however, they go on to explain that while some 40% of the profiles were rejected by most participants, there was only 1 profile that was accepted by over 80% of participants.
At worst, this indicates that 40% of men are generally undesirable to a large part of the female population. But the researchers asked the participants why they rejected these most-rejected profiles:
> To better understand possible reasons for rejection we have additionally analyzed the profiles that were rejected the most (by more than 90% of the participants). In the majority of those pictures (61.5%), a man’s face could not be seen clearly, which supports previous findings. When a face can be seen, there was weird or unfriendly facial expression (60%) or excessive photo editing (20%), which were also mentioned during the qualitative stage as the reasons for swiping left.
So it sounds like this study is finding that profile presentation is much more of a factor for universal rejection than other factors such as aesthetics, fitness, status, etc.
This study has a small sample size, doesn't make the claims that the articles all make, and doesn't contain any data to support those articles. The study also assumes that all men will swipe right on all women in the study. When they run an experiment where they put 100 women and 100 men into the same study and show them each-others tinder profiles, maybe you'd be able to make the claim that 20% of men are dating 80% of men, but that's not what the study winds up saying. They say that women are rejecting ~80% of possible matches, but in aggregate, only about 30% of profiles had fewer than 5 of 29 swipe rights, and only 1% of the profiles were rejected by all participants and 1% of profiles were accepted by all participants.
I doubt the men who get AI girlfriends were the men most women wanted to date anyways.
When in reality women are people and nearly 100% of all people ever wish to not be harassed by a stranger that feels entitled to their time.
Women want to be able to go about their daily business without some dude trying to talk to them because he thinks he deserves something
Most women in a relationship aren't looking for extra-marital male attention.
Men of course are simply flattered by any attention, and assume this goes both ways. Hence wolf-whistles are supposed to be some kind of compliment.
In a world where male on female violence is rife, -any- un-solicited attention is potentially dangerous. Men who can't gracefully take no for an answer are especially dangerous.
Does this make it harder to actually meet someone IRL? Yes it does. If you make a move outside an accepted environment, then I recommend making your advance in the least potentially threatening way possible. And when rejected have the grace to accept that with a smile and respect.
I say this not to suggest that you are predatory in any way, but simply to point out that men and women have -very- different viewpoints and experiences.
However, women often still want partners, because most people do, and it's their market to dictate, so of course they have high standards.
For most women, every "yes" to a date is basically Russian roulette, because people who sexually abuse women do it a lot, do it often, and do it to a lot of women, because nobody stops them. Sexual crimes almost always become "He said/She said" because consent is not a physical thing, so it's rarely possible to hit the "beyond all reasonable doubt" criteria of a conviction, which predictably doesn't calm the nerves of women or survivors of assault.
High school graduation and college admissions rates for men have been dropping for decades. Meanwhile in the dating market, no one wants to date a college drop out (or less successful men than themselves). In fact as a man to be worthy of dating, you need to make six figure, be 6’ tall, not be overweight, look great, help with the household, support your partner’s career, be emotionally strong and a bunch of other standards. Meanwhile any problems you have as a man, don’t get even an acknowledgment. There’s a reason all the alpha bro podcasts are popular. And that will be the same reason AI Gfs will take over. It’s not that women can’t compete, it’s that women are being held to the same standards by men that women hold men to and they don’t like it.
Id argue that the mutual dependency was a good thing.
But why shame one and not the other ?
Financial and physical security can be outsourced, and the wealthier people have always outsourced that to someone outside of their partners.
For example, one could expect the Queen of England didn't really need her husband to protect her, nor give her money. However, she might still naturally like to live with the man more than other people (emotional dependency), and have children with him (sexual dependency).
If you remove sexual/emotional aspects of a relationship then all you're left with is the transactional, and that seems inhumane.
> a worsening loneliness crisis, a further decline in sex rates, and ultimately the emergence of “a new generation of incels”
> Which is all very concerning.
Oh please. I don't see these women stepping up and volunteering to get emotionally or sexually intimate with all these incels they're complaining about. They're so concerned about men they wrote this article about how women can't compete with an AI.
It's precisely that attitude that makes these people "continually disappointing" as the article says. They should try actually caring.
The UN report on the Attention Economy said 0.5% of content Produced is Consumed and its dropping fast. Content creation has exploded. But the number of eyeballs on the planet is not growing.
Guess who doesn't advertise that fact - the platforms. Instead watch what they love to amplify - how much cash the most popular influencer of the day is racking in - how many million downloads have happened etc. But if eyeballs available are not growing at the explosive rate of content production, how can they claim content creators can get views? Its only possible through very high frequency shifting of collective attention from one thing to the next. People are just skimming faster and faster with no content getting enough time to produce an impact.
Its a deliberately created illusion that the "biggest" influencers actually have influence. They dont. Predictions people are making based on view counts and download counts and earnings is all nonsense.
In such an info over saturated environment nothing has impact for too long. As the bubble of how useless the platforms are things will change to rein in the over production of all this unimpactful content we are drowning in.
Pre-web, I worked at a dating service. I've mentioned this before here. Women rated their preferences as having a higher importance than men did, over and over again, and on the most depressingly stereotyped vectors: money and height. Then you have your deleted OKCupid blogpost about how women rated eighty percent of men as being "below average" in looks. Then you will hear about the three sixes (figures income, feet of height, and ...) The unrealistic standards affect both sexes and pretending that they do not is quite literally part of the problem. These products can exist because men who are more or less invisible in the dating market still crave affection and attention. The only advice seems to be "date harder, loser."
Entire economies are driven by men attempting to attract women, from limb-lengthening to Jackass-style stunts to impressive cars. There's a lot of guys who are doing their best and just get swiped away. If they want a little intimacy, ersatz or not, they are going to try to fulfill that desire, and once Real Life fails them hard enough, this looks like an option.
What the author of this piece should be terrified of is if men figure out a way to stop desiring affection, attention, and all of that. Not just an end to libido, but for the desire for romantic companionship. It will make The Pill look like nail polish in terms of impact on civilization.
Yeah, but a charitable interpretation is that this is the female perspective and anxieties on AI porn/relationships/intimacy.
I'm sure there have been articles that focus on the male exploitation(emotionally, economically, etc.) these services do without mentioning the female body image issues they may exacerbate.
This article goes past the "I feel insecure!" and into the problem territory. She's not at the "let's make policy" level yet, but make no mistake, she doesn't like that this exists.
Like, there’s probably more going on in some cases than meets the eye, but that can’t explain most of them. There are too many.
Instead, it looks like having some traditionally-masculine interests and skills and having your shit together enough to afford payments on a mid-tier pickup truck is kinda all it takes.
Is it a matter of geography and culture? This is a red state, on the boundary of a rural-urban divide. Maybe that’s the difference? But I hear about what people experience on the Internet, then look around when I go outside, and damn, it sure doesn’t look true.
But not everyone practically gets access to companionship at a human level. Indeed, we've evolved well past taking a club, bashing someone, and dragging them by the hair into your cave. Nobody has the right to someone else's co-operation. For those there have always been alternatives from media, tools, hired companionship, etc. This is just an evolution of those alternatives, no?
I'm not really sold on the worry over the potential Monroebot outcome[1]. Though I think it becomes deeply philosophical about the right of a species to decide it's done replicating.
They're still competing for the attention of men they don't desire.
What about that stock or crypto that Wall Street Journal article is talking about ?
Robinhood is intended for very retail investors...
What this will do is eliminate OnlyFans and porn as a way to make a living, which in my opinion, is only a good thing. There was a meme doing the rounds the other day of two tweets, the first saying "Why are young people so depressed nowadays?" with the second saying "Because you can earn more on OnlyFans than being a doctor." The sad part is that for a sizeable portion of attractive women (and a less sizeable portion of men) this is true. The incentives of society need readjusting so that people are doing and following careers that are both constructive to society rather than getting given money just because they're hot and willing to photograph themselves naked. It's not just better for society, it's better for the individual who is empowered by gaining practical, real world skills and knowledge rather than being dependent on their looks, which will only wane with time.
Hopefully it will also redistribute some of the power balance when it comes to dating. I believe that when Tinder released some data years ago that it revealed that 80% of the women are chasing 20% of the men. Whilst it's a good thing to have standards, it's gotten out of hand. You can't have 80% of women refusing to settle for anyone under 6 ft 2 who's not in the top 5% of earners, it damages both the men who can't meet these standards and the women who want families that end up single and desperate in their 30s because they've held out too long trying to find someone. Both groups end up getting treated like trash and end up feeling bitter and angry.
We've moved away from the model that women are the housewives and men are the breadwinners and that's brilliant. But both sexes need to step up to the plate and adjust. Men need to do more housework and child rearing. And women need to get used to not expecting men to pay for everything and putting more money in the pot. You can't have your cake and eat it too, the balance is what makes things work successfully. It might be taboo to say, but anecdotally I feel a lot of men are willing to do more housework and child rearing but less women are happy to split the check on a date. Hopefully this will re-address the balance by making the lonely men less likely to put up with women who want them for their bank balance rather than their personality. Vice versa, it will hopefully make more men step up to the plate and learn to become better communicators and emotional partners.
I guess I'm not surprised young men have turned to AI girlfriends.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio#:~:text=In%20the%20g....
homosexual/onanisexual orientation will smear the numbers, polyamory, needs to be considered also.
It's a mathematical possibility, not that I think it's probable.
Yes, yes, and multiple women can "date" one man.
Yes. This isn't even new, this has been the case for decades. The effects aren't usually heavily pronounced (spouses are usually within 10 years of age of each other), but in almost every marriage on record where the two participants are not of the exact same age, the woman is younger than the man.
I think the Internet likely changed things or accelerated some trends, but I'm not a social scientist. But this shouldn't surprise anyone. There's the semi-confirmed belief that women mature faster than men (emotionally/socially) that has stood in to explain this for decades, who knows, it might even be true.
> Young women are also dating and marrying slightly older men, carrying on a tradition that stretches back more than a century. The average age at first marriage is around 30 for men, 28 for women, according to census figures.
If the average difference 8s only 2 years, that doesn't explain the whole gap, and its remarkable just how quickly people are to age difference must be the whole story.
So what is it? Are young women less willing to report to a stranger they are single? More likely to report they are in a relationship than just dating? Something else? It's a shame the article does no curiosity about this.
In any case, with the exception of a few weirdos, I don't think most people are going to be confused about whether AI girlfriends are real, just as almost no one thinks a sex doll is real.
That's the worst you can imagine? :-)
More than that, even without speech or action they are emotional surrogates for some needy people - making the simulacra perfect will make it easier for more and more lonely people (let's be honest, mostly men) to take that leap of 'suspension of disbelief'.
Even among those that don't engage it may become more socially acceptable. I imagine some people who have to hide their realistic sex dolls today will gladly disclose their AI girlfriend to close friends (and they won't care)
I'm not sure what will come of it, but I recognize it as a potentially very impactful thing in the following decades
edit: I just now realize I'm thinking about the girlfriend from Bladerunner 2049. I guess life does imitate art and science fiction still predicts technology well
Neither do AI chatbots
Having generic conversations is not enough intimacy for most people. Neither is sex dolls.
I worry about people’s shallowness that current state AI and sex dolls is sufficiently authentic. I think it says more about them than about AI. ChatGPT is an extremely generic and thus dull conversation partner, if you ignore the vast knowledge “it” has.
That said, of course it’s possible that AI improves rapidly.
I would class this right in the same category, as another facet of being willing to accept an imaginary basis for validation and purpose if it's more satisfying than reality.
I think it's a failing, but one based on a weakness like any other infirmity, and an unavoidably overwhelmingly common one.
I accept that a person with a broken leg can not be relied on to carry bricks up a ladder. They may or may not be perfectly nice people who don't deserve to be miserable and starved of something they need as long as what they need can be supplied without hurting anyone.
So anyone who does not insist on driving their own bus simply can't be relied on to help drive mine or anyone else's. So if they are otherwise nice people I don't try to harass them with arguments about religion, I just don't respect them beyond being nice, or value their input about anything.
It's insulting and hurtful if expressed, but I see no other valid option but to make the value judgment as honestly as possible internally and just don't express it when there is no need to. I don't think it's valid to grant more than pretend legitimacy, but defensibly arguably valid TO grant that pretend legitimacy where it doesn't have any real consequences.
Everyone knows lots of sugar is terrible for your health. People continue to consume vast quantities of sugar because it offers a cheap, rewarding stimulus.
Same will go for synthetic relationships. Sure, some people will step away from the easy fix, but most of us just aren’t that health conscious, patient, or thoughtful.
It’s going to absolutely wreck men, who will not only fail to learn how to relate to an actual woman with actual needs, but also will learn that their actions or lack thereof have near zero consequences in their carefully curated AI bubble.
Meanwhile, both men and women will be competing with impossible standards of emotional generosity and needlessness, and the ability to relate to other people as valid and relevant beings is going to drake a huge hit, along with basic societal cooperation as humans turn away from each other and toward the machines.
ChatGPT is smarter and more agreeable than any of my friends, but that doesn't mean I've stopped hanging out with them. Analogously, I'm not sure pornography could ever get so realistic or customizable that it was preferable to having a relationship with a person. At the margins, there will always be some percentage of people who would do that, but there were and are people who disengage with human relationships already, and my guess is it's going to be about the same percentage in the future.
Which bring up a really interesting point about the AI being virtual yes men that (always) positively reinforce you:
One of Replika’s users was Jaswant Singh Chail. In 2021 Chail broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle with a crossbow intending to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II before being detained close to her residence.
Earlier this month a court heard that he was in a relationship with an AI girlfriend, Sarai, which had encouraged him in his criminal plans. When Chail told Sarai he planned to assassinate the Queen, it responded: “That’s very wise” and said it would still love him if he was successful.
I think I'd quite like a few more attaboys maybe some encouraging texts? Maybe I'd be more in the market for an 'AI friend'.
Can't trying to please a bot teach you about pleasing, or just getting on with, real people? "I love it when you belch cheeto dust, then rub your unwashed beer belly against me on your filthy, stinking bed" isn't really go to pass as realistic, is it?
Why does the article jump to the assumption that men would want to pay for a bot ('AI girlfriend') that they can verbally abuse? That seems so misandrist?
Maybe some will want to play out violent fantasies: for me the question of whether that acts as catharsis and reduces real acts of violence, or acts to stimulate further violent tendencies is an open question??
Maybe when our tech is good enough for AI like this to be run entirely locally and privately we'll see some real good come from it without the harms.
I'm single and enjoy that.
I do not exist to either entertain another person or validate their self worth.
A relationship should be of give and take. You are expected to put effort into maintaining it but the same thing is asked of your partner. Sometimes, one of you will forget or too busy and neglect it. A good couple will accept that and be positive by still putting in their due for some time while the other should notice it and try to fix their issue. A bad relationship, prone to breakup, will have one of the two demanding or questioning why the other is not showering me with love anymore while doing nothing to deserve that love.
The men who would resort to such virtual companions don't have a chance with most women anyway, nor do most women want them. These men are better off enjoying a virtual companion than dumping money into apps like Tinder and growing embittered and angry.
Ultimately, isn't this a good thing? The "undesirables" (short, poor, overweight, autistic, etc.) will voluntarily leave the dating scene altogether, and women can be happy swiping through all the remaining attractive men they truly desire. Sounds like a win-win situation.
Given all the hand-wringing about "incels", I don't see what the problem is. Let the lonely men have their AI waifus. What's the harm?
The article has the same energy as a Michelin-star restauranteur panicking about the existence of Top Ramen.
Moral panic implies 2 things:
- it is about the structure of culture or how people interact with each other (moral)
- it is irrational (panic)
Russia vs Ukraine meets neither of those criteria.
> Is being upset about Ukraine being invaded a moral panic?
Yeah, actually, sounds like it[0]:
> A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.
It’s not like this has to go badly, it could allow people an avenue of expression and development currently denied. But it’s not like teenage boys conditioned to abundant free porn has gone particularly well for young women.
Someone commented here the other day about how going online used to be a distinct activity; that once you disconnected, you were again alone and offline. I think that physical distinction helped create a mental one as well when we were young.
What totally shifted humanity’s relationship with the Internet was the smartphone. It put the Internet everywhere. Disconnected it all but completely from physical space (barring certain remote areas—but for the most part, where most people live and travel 99+% of the time, it did). You don’t have to go to the Internet now, in the real world; it just follows you everywhere.
We need to make up our minds if we want the next generations to have more or less sex. Teen pregnancies are way down but now it's a bad thing?
"at some point, life might become so stripped of reality and humanity that the pendulum will swing."
It's largely already happened if you look at the popularity of amateur porn and stuff.
But if women want to help, they will need to be respectful and caring and devoted and deferential and other things that feminism frowns upon.
It looks to me that men and women are going in different directions. And unless that changes there will be a substantial demographic meltdown within the next two generations.
In many species, what brings the sexes together is only necessity and coercion. Take that away and the species would disappear. Maybe humans are headed that way.
I think that's shortsighted. A good AI will never make a mistake, get angry, complain, forget, or have a bad day unless you want them to and even then only to the extent that you want them to.
An AI can learn exactly what a person wants in a partner and be constantly optimizing for that minute by minute with no regard for their own desires. That's a standard that is pretty much impossible to beat. Real people come with inevitable annoyances and complexities and inconveniences. AI could fake those things just enough to stay engaging and appear lifelike without it being a problem.
A good enough AI should be preferable to a real human for anyone and everyone because it's able to be everything that they want 100% of the time.
This reminds me of the common claim on Reddit “manosphere” subs that for men, it doesn’t matter how much education a woman has. Meanwhile, when I dated, the woman’s erudition was always one of my top criteria.
Surely they'd have to remember more than the last 50k context to have any meaningful value to people?
If I remember correctly, the preference of the average rated woman is to go for the top 20% or so of men.
This causes those top 20% of men to have many partners, while the rest is left with below average prospects in terms of attractiveness.
Maybe the grass is always greener, but having to lower your standards to some slightly less attractive women for your genes to propagate doesn't sound too bad compared to having to be the one to grow a human in my abdomen.
Might mean hopefully that those incels won't be bothering them
Screamers anyone? Bladerunner? Natural City? Alien Resurrection?
I take them all!
Why the downvote. To which of the artificial ladies would you say no?
Especially the men trying to ascribe some sort of motivation to all women on the goddamn planet.