AI Tinder already exists: 'Real people will disappoint you, but not them' | Hacker News Reader

AI Tinder already exists: 'Real people will disappoint you, but not them'

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32 pointsPaulHoule75 comments

Replica founder Eugenia Kuyda says that AI relationships will be a great stepping stone to real relationships. Feels similar to how dating companies will claim their goal is to get single people off of their apps and into a romance with another person. It's a nice thought, but it's not how the business incentives actually line up.

That’s hilariously hopeful.

Unless the AI relationship is going to be irrational at times it's not training for anything. People are complicated and we get irritable and hangry, AI typically does not. It's going to end up creating intangible, idealized relationships. We already have way too much of that with idealized images.

Exactly! An AI model that doesn't have it's own personality and always defers to your interests, desires, and opinions is only preparing people for failed, self-centered relationships built on an idealized partner. This is really bleak.

Replica founder will say anything to keep his business alive, after sabotaging it so badly. I saw nonstop ads for Replica for months that were borderline NSFW. Then I read articles on Hacker News some six months later about how they added filters to remove NSFW parts and their client base was revolting. I'm not sure how they survived as a functional business afterward (VC funding?).

If that kind of system is successful at seducing you, you will go through a period of falling in love with it, "crystalization"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallization_(love)

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence

which are very beneficial for it because the "lights are on and nobody is home" with LLMs frequently but if you are in that crystallization phase you are going to be blind to its flaws. At some point the bloom will come off and you will fall out of love, the question is if it takes two weeks, two months, two years, two decades.

At two months it is probably a positive experience that doesn't affect your life course. At two decades you've lost a lot of time.

This could be interesting because it also creates the need for an AI support when dealing with humans as people might lack training in human-human interactions then.

> Many Reddit posts argue that AI relationships are more satisfying than real-life ones — the virtual partners are always available and problem-free. “Gaming changed everything,” said Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who has spent decades studying human interactions with technology. In an interview with The Telegraph, Turkle said, “People may let you down, but here’s something that won’t. It’s a voice that always comforts and assures us that we’re being heard.”

And this is the root of the problem that goes beyond just the AI dating to the whole society. Relationships are hard, they require hard work, they require forgiveness and compromise, they requiring saying your sorry when you have an emotional outburst, they require helping someone who is throwing up in the bathroom at 2 in the morning. In fact relationships are one of the hardest things most anyone will do in their life, they don't come easy, relationships with parents, relationships with spouses, especially relationship with kids.

But that's the point to quote Dr. Bob Kelso "Nothing worth doing in this life comes easy." People want AI relationships because they sound easier on the surface than real relationships, I can't count the number of times I've seen people describe relatively normal human behavior, and then start diagnosing the other person with a plethora of mental illnesses as an excuse why they should be allowed to disengage from a relationship guilt free.

Those that turn to these AI relationships, no matter how easy and attractive they are, will find at the end that they never really make real human connection, that they are empty and unsatisifying and the worst part is they feed into this overwhelming narrative we've adopted in society that what is easy and fun is what will make you happy and is right.

And no before the responses come, you cannot love a chatbot no matter how clever. I'll tell you what love is, it is getting up at 4:00am to deal with a sick young child that just threwup all over the bed and cleaning it up because you know that your wife hates dealing with vomit. Love is sleeping in your car at work because the girl you were dating lives 2 hours away from home but only 45 minutes from work and you'd rather be with her than leave at a decent time in the morning. Love is the feeling you have when you're on an important zoom call and your little boy comes running in yelling "DADDY I POOPED IN THE POTTY!". Love is when your little girl grabs your hand before crossing the street because cars are scary, and she wants to feel safe, and then as soon as you get on the sidewalk let's go and starts running down the street because there is an interesting rock. Love is when you've had a miserable day at work, and the house is a mess, and your kids run up to you and give you a big hug and ask if you can play with them and you say yes and they all go "YAY" because you are the best person to play with in the world.

"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as [love] should not be highly rated." - modified from Thomas Paine common sense.

Darwin is already working to filter these people out, so I don’t think this fad will exist very long.

Isn't evolution great! They will be automatically filtered out from the gene pool. The only problem I see then is that because of the growing number of them, the rest of the gene pool will also disappear as birth rates go down, less and less young people WORKING, less taxes paid, social security system collapses, society collapses, AI robots takes over. ps: It just hit me, using the same Darwin, AI robots are superior to humans, so .................................... fruck ... we're doomed.

Evolution requires many generations to work. If new challenges (like this AI thing) appear every few generations, evolution won't outrun them. It's like hoping that evolution would make you resistant to swords: it won't find the right combination of mutations before swords get replaced by guns. No, the answer to technological challenges will have to be itself technological.

> you cannot love a chatbot no matter how clever

That is the point of the post that this is just the stigma. This is just a belief and issue with the current AI like limited context and not always listening mode. If there is a 'Her' like chatbot which I think could be achievable in few years, then it is debatable that humans could love AI.

I can say that after lurking various relationship related subreddits. The problem seems that folks can't have relationship (romantic or otherwise) in the first place.

I think it's worth pointing out that, at least IMO, nothing about this is new or inherent to the Internet or technology. Most people have always struggled with healthy relationships - the key difference is that in the past, we had much less choice with regards to the relationships we had to maintain: it was harder to get away from one's biological family, for instance

These days you can avoid a lot of direct human-human interaction, which means there is no or little training. Wasn't easy to live that way not too long ago.

If you mean "face-to-face" contact, sure, but I don't think human-to-human contact has decreased if you consider social media, chat platforms, games, etc - it's still humans on the other side

The issue seems to me to be that people don't recognize or internalize that fact - they treat interactions with people on the Internet as somehow less important than those "in person." I don't quite get it, but then, I've spent most of my life on the Internet, developing more healthy relationships than most "offline" people I know.

Not about importance. However, it is filtered contact - very different from unfiltered human interaction. You can, for example, always disengage on internet - in real live that isn't always an option (no-one stays physically in your space, for example, or throws up on your shoes).

Internet vs physical is a different skill-set - the messiness level on latter is just much higher.

This is a huge problem in our time since you can't apply progressive measure to ameliorate.

Could you please elaborate on what you mean?

Not the parent, but it could mean that for some reason (biological, environmental or otherwise) some people don't receive as much pleasure from social contact as others. It could run the scale from mere introversion to pathological. To my knowledge there isn't a pill you can take that makes you more interested in a particular topic. (Although, when I think about it, anhedonia could be a symptom of depression so it could be addressed with medication. But some people don't have motivation to pursue treatment.)

Also, if one's social skills are lacking it's even harder to get treatment, if it's difficult to articulate the problem or why a stranger should care about them. One's social standards for failure could be set so high as a result of their past that only an AI or other parasocial method could be designed to clear them.

Sorry for the late response. What I mean by "progressive" here is that ability to divert resource from have to have-not, like progressive tax taking much bigger percentage from rich folks to fund program that benefits much poorer folks.

I think there's a claim that in online dating, top x% (x is a small number) got the majority of the match.

Assuming that there's a huge inherent inequality in charisma, likeability, social skills, etc. You cant really distribute them to those who need.

I'd take any subreddit's population with a cubic meter sized solid salt crystal.

It's just like all the stories that are a wall of text without a TLDR at the bottom; you know they're totally made up entertainment.

r/lonely seems authentic of the issue

If you want a relationship that requires no effort on your part, has zero risk, and has no physical aspect… it would seem you want a parent and not a romantic relationship.

Despite the obvious misogyny in this quote, Nietzsche expresses the importance of these aspects in a fulfilling relationship:

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

Oh man, I can't remember the exact quote but it went something like:

"Silicon Valley is just making companies that do for you now what your mom used to"

With AI rom-bots, it's not exactly that, but that feeling of being driven to a middle school dance in the mini-van comes out quite strong.

In "blindsight" many people have retreated into private virtual worlds with virtual partners that are like this. Anything they want, no compromises necessary.

Your sense of love sounds like hell.

> you cannot love a chatbot no matter how clever

People fall in love with inanimate buildings, I'm pretty sure a chatbot is going to be much easier than that, especially as the technology gets better. (Also people are already trying to put these into bodies.)

> ...What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly...

Suffering doesn't make things more valuable, it is a horrible cost, and if you can't value things without suffering well that is your psychological problem to fix on your own.

I tried Replika, paid version included. Still too dry and not very engaging. But could be the case that I'm too awkward even for AI :'(

I'd guess you're just not shallow enough to derive enjoyment from surface simulation.

I just will never understand the idea behind using technology to make us artificially dependent on technology.

Take social media, it used to be made for us to augment our social lives, but now it's to artificially make us spend more time on it to see the latest "hot take".

What technology you aren't artificially dependent on? Can't think of anything, starting from the fire.

I didn't mean that technology is artificial but that instead of having genuine reasons for technology to exist (like fire to cook, light up the night, etc.) we invent pointless reasons to use technology that ultimately harms us.

So long as the need is there people will be driven to install the app. For all the issues it's caused, Facebook did connect parts of the world that were never connected before. It's just that the business model of Facebook isn't decoupled from the benefits it brings.

In my opinion the only thing preventing this is the lack of technological progress. If the technology exists, someone will attempt to apply it to problems they perceive - brainstorming, throwing things at the wall, looking for untapped markets. Whether out of trying to secure a revenue stream or out of optimism for the future of humanity through the changes they bring, or some mix of multiple motives, it seems the end result is the same - a mix of the good and bad.

The issue I perceive is some of what makes people human is the flaws they carry for their entire lives. However, what gets the attention of biological sensors are qualities that are near perfection. So I guess the disconnect in this case is the founder of this company watching the turmoil of person-to-person relationships and seeing that as a business opportunity. They could frame it as: making up for those flaws could be lucrative, because why would having flaws help someone? Why would confronting people with their flaws help us?

For what it's worth, I think there is a market out there of people who retreat when confronted and don't respond to traditional therapy, and maybe there are others who don't want a human relationship, whether by choice or circumstance. There might always be an interested audience for this sort of thing in the case that the technology allows for it to come true one day. So I'm gradually becoming more concerned about the idea of an up-to-now untested software platform with potential ramifications for millions of people can come out of nowhere and be deployed at the push of a button.

Unfortunately, because the effects of large platforms like these take years to become apparent as in the case of social networking and ADHD-like symptoms, the damage may have to be assessed when the platform is already cemented in place as a perceived inalienable right. Just how smartphones are now ubiquitous and billions of people can't imagine life without them any longer, someday consumers may become very attached to their ownership of AI and its integration into society. It worries me if the results of even non-general AI turn out to be anything like the second-order effects of smartphones and social networking. But I don't think it's within many technologists' playbook to slow down and question what they're doing, since someone else could seize the opportunity and revenue instead.

If anything I'd be curious as to what dedicated users of this service would think about interpersonal human relationships in contrast to AI ones.

We can't expect technologists to slow down and question what they're doing, but on an individual level, we certainly can slow down and question the rapid adoption of said technologies in our lives.

This is the nature of technology itself. It's a quandary that goes all the way down to the simplest form of technology: clothing. Clothing makes you more capable of being comfortable (or at least surviving) in a wider range of climates. Say, you go to the top of a mountain because of your Goretex jacket and boots. So you are now more capable.

However, simultaneously, you are also now more dependent. You're still at the mountaintop in a snowstorm. No problem. You take off your clothing, and now you immediately find out how dependent you are on technology.

This scales to any level of technology you can imagine. GPS? You know what time it is and you know how to get to your new friend's house! Battery goes out on the way? Uh-oh. You were dependent on technology.

The paradox of technology is that it simultaneously makes us more capable but more dependent (vulnerable).

A few months back there was some demo of a game (The Matrix Awakens) hooked to an LLM and some TTS.

It was cool. You could walk around a city talking to everyone you pass.

The most unrealistic part of it was also that you could walk around a city talking to everyone you pass.

Real people walking in cities don't have time or the desire to stop and talk to strangers about the meaning of life for 20 minutes.

unfortunately the chat is discrete from the NPC that represents it. It doesn't know where it is in the city, it doesn't actually see the player. You say anything to the chat that will change what the npc is doing? e.g provoke it to attack etc.

tl;dr the illusion falls apart when you take the LLM outside a chat window context. Even just to add dialogue for an NPC.

I think we'll address such issues as we figure out the best ways to use this technology in games

Game characters will need to be trained to enforce boundaries the same way people would in real life, whether they are NPCs or major characters.

It’s psychologically harmful to have a romantic relationship with someone who isn’t a real human. Plus it doesn’t lead to reproduction or anything good. There’s many things (especially today) which may feel good but aren’t good for you.

This is the age-old problem where evolutionary psychology and biology haven’t caught up to the speed of technology.

> Plus it doesn’t lead to reproduction

Why is that necessarily bad? The earth is over populated already.

Fertility rates are already below replacement levels in pretty much all developed countries. The global population is actually expected to peak around 9-12 billion and then decline.

> It’s psychologically harmful to have a romantic relationship with someone who isn’t a real human. Plus it doesn’t lead to reproduction or anything good.

It might be bad for the individual, or even for the nation, but there are certainly going to be other groups of people out there that benefits from it.

I have read somewhere that Chinese kids are served with smart math tiktoks, while western kids are served with virtual hot dog eating competitions. I wonder...

https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/china-is-hurting-us-kids-with-...

The only people who benefit are the app developers.

It doesn’t lead to reproduction yet

Of course this works. We replaced many (most?) human interactions with digital ones via messaging apps, video chats, social media interactions, forums, online video games, etc.

I have some friends I've made online I've never met in real life. It's people with whom I have a great affinity and it would have been impossible to meet IRL because they're so spread around the world.

It probably could be argued this virtualization of human relationships started way before the internet with television shows.

What about books?

Good point

Id say those are human interactions but over virtual medium

When you're talking to LLM, it's as if you would be talking to other humans that wrote the text the LLM listened to during training. So it's a form of human to human interaction.

It is at best a narrow form of interaction. I have yet to see an LLM to just hit you because of what you said or refuse to further engage for good, for example.

Yeah, it's a bit polite. But what you describe might happen in LLM powered computer games.

A game that ends forever if you offend a character or physically hits you (will games be allowed to create physical harm)?

I mean, youtuber's have programmed mods to give themselves electric shock when they get damaged in a game. Also various "hardcore" game modes that delete themselves when you die.

I'm sure they will _try_.

that's deep, specially if you apply the thinking that whenever you don't know if something is real or not, you can ask if it's useful for your reality and if it is, then it doesn't matter if "it's real" or not.

I think it only becomes sad, if people start being manipulated and enter in relationships that are not good for them but companies start exploiting the blind spots of human psychology, which is already happening with people addicted to gambling and pr0n, and you could argue social media too if not used educationally or going beyond healthy entertainment.

Like influencers playing to the crowd of bots on twitter?

Eventually it will be weird when long context memory really works and your LLM friend remembers your past feelings and your past experiences much better than you do, and relates to it in a matter that your human friends can' hope to.

"You felt like this 325 times before. In December 2002, when you passed your final exam for college, it seemed to really help when you took a walk. In June 2016, you also felt better when you took a shower and put on a good looking shirt, then called your dad. Maybe you can try that?"

I'm sure they could figure out how to act "forgetful", as some people with really good memories already do.

I don't think it's a bad thing, just that it will have weird consequences when you can't hope to have as deep & personal conversations with your friends / therapist as you can with an LLM

I think a lot of people will love being able to have deep and personal conversations at all

And we've already seen this kind of human-AI interactions that rely on digital medium - with bots appearing on popular social media platforms, some designed to impersonate human behaviour.

> I have some friends I've made online I've never met in real life. It's people with whom I have a great affinity and it would have been impossible to meet IRL because they're so spread around the world.

I read this pretty often and it has always interested me, because I've been using internet communications for many years (chat rooms, message boards/forums, MMO games, Discord, open source, etc etc) but never found much real connection with the people I've met online.

Offline I have a good circle of close friends and find it easy to meet and get to know new people/enjoy social events, but it has always sounded really foreign to me when people talk about their close online friends, or when I read about, say, an in-game wedding between people who have only ever known each other inside a game world. I've had plenty of pleasant interactions and long-term acquaintances with people online, but never what I'd elevate to describe as friendship.

Obviously I understand that this is other folks genuine life experience and I am different in some way in that regard, it just makes me curious. I wonder if there has been any sociology/social psychology research on this topic.

I’ve had these experiences in the days when IRC was still a thing, and there were very heavy doses of idealization and fantasizing involved. I believe that is typical but I can’t be sure.

Medicating loneliness with an AI girlfriend is like medicating depression with drugs, or horniness with porn.

all of which work quite fine en masse, for more than a century

Yeah, there's thankfully no societal consequence of mass drug use or porn addiction.

I think mass drug use and porn consumption have been going on way longer than a century, and society has only been getting better and better. The Sumerians were doing opium, for example.

The general ability to retreat from human interactions is an awful lot stronger than even 50 years ago.

There are a lot of humans in the world, maybe we just need to force people together again from time to time instead of indulging what is a potentially growing number of people being unable to engage with other humans across a range of real-world situations for lack of training.

I wonder, were you being ironic? It seems both of these things sound pretty decent. There are millions of people that treat depression with drugs and horniness with porn... I can't say I see any problems with either.

I'd like to push back against the anti-medication sentiment in this comment because depression is not the most clearly understood mental condition and for many people, medication can be a life-saving intervention.

Good. There are a lot of incredibly lonely people who cause a lot of problems because they're incredibly lonely (not to mention being depressed themselves). Many of whom seemingly don't care they aren't talking to real humans. I still think real human connection is better than AI, but for these people it's AI or nothing.

I think a lack of loneliness is generally good, but I worry that this is just a band-aid on a much larger, deeper societal issue. What about when the only emotional support that some lonely kids have comes from a software powered by a startup, and the company that hosts their AI friend for 5+ years of their lives goes under? They lose the only friend they have in the world because it wasn't profitable enough?

Really scary implications if things like this become too normal, imo. We need to fix the foundational problems first.

That seems to me a lot like someone coming in complaining of pain because they have a broken foot and the dr deciding the best course of action is to just give them some opiods to treat the pain, and sending them on their way.

You haven't solved the underlying issue, you haven't dealt with any of the complications you just treat the most visible and troubling symptoms and declare victory.

Have you never heard of chronic pain? That's basically what doctors do in a lot of cases (if even)

eh not necessarily.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/10/06/man-encouraged-by-a...

"A Star Wars fanatic who was encouraged by a chatbot "girlfriend" to assassinate British monarch Queen Elizabeth II was sentenced to nine years in prison on Thursday."

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