Dan's the man: Why Chinese women are looking to ChatGPT for love
bbc.com
bbc.com
AI companions have been around for a couple years now, so we’re past it being pure novelty (though clearly that’s a driver of growth). “AI girlfriends” were a great early use case for social interaction when AI companies were first targeted to (mainly) cis men. From what we’ve seen in research, a guy’s cognitive function measurably degrades when sex is on the menu. A crappy AI could get the job done.
With female brains the research generally shows that they require a socially sophisticated interaction (“responsive emotional support”) so this level of adoption is significant evidence of progress in LLMs and fine tuning.
anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain. It’s quite the cultural statement that an LLM outperforms most men on how to be present for a conversation with their date.
Important to note that regular consumers of AI companions actually rely on them mostly as a synthetic partner/friend.
There’s two things striking about this trend:
1. AI companions for women is more socially acceptable.
2. The mother of the women (who served as the focus of this story) said “if she’s happy, I’m happy.” That’s powerful. That’s a core value for many parents.
It’s fair to attack the hype, just thought it might be useful for others to see there is underlying technical progress & social adoption reflected here.
Can you not symmetrically say that it's quite the cultural statement that porn outperforms most women on how to be attractive to men?
Women want deep emotional connection, which an LLM provides upfront at no cost (like sex or even risk of rape).
Men want sexual stimulation, which porn provides upfront at no cost (like dates and courting with tedious emotional support and social connection).
It's just short-circuiting to the reward function at no cost.
The difference is that people who don't have sex without emotional connection aren't forgoing it because they don't know how; they're just choosing not to. No one goes on dates intending to be a draining person to interact with, so there's something lacking there in terms of their ability to provide what others are looking for.
To be clear, none of this is inherently tied to gender; it even applies just as well to non-heterosexual dating. That being said, I don't think it's particularly uncommon for most people's experience to be that they encounter far more heterosexual men than women who cite their central problem in dating to be not finding anyone who will have sex with them. Assuming that trend is accurate, there's not really any explanation more plausible than men generally just being less capable of providing women are looking for in a man than vice-versa.
That’s like saying porn provides sex.
Total non-sequitor.
The thing about dating in "mid-career" (for both genders) - which I consider to be mid-30's to mid-40's in most cases, is that those people are still dating for a reason. The good prospects already settled down, and they are now scraping the bottom of the barrel (and to be honest, they are bottom of the barrel material as well).
What I've heard from women talking about men they've tried feeling out is a lot of them from the descriptions are trying to play outdated gender roles and doing a bad job of it. That'll just annoy a woman looking for a companionship based relationship. That speaks to me of stuff I've heard about Korea. Men expect a traditional marriage and women with jobs and money are having none of it.
anecdotally, the women I know married good men before mid career. maybe the "mid career" women you know waited too long to "settle down" and found the field picked clean
also, dating -men- is a drain? dating is a drain. the casual misandry in your comment is gobsmacking
It's not clear whether you're arguing that it's misandrist for someone to not have as many friends who complain about dating women or for someone who dates men to specify that when stating that their experience dating has been draining, but either way it doesn't make much sense.
Many such people feel alienated, ostracized, stigmatized, ashamed, or rejected and something that says nice (or dirty) things to them, on demand, and in decent natural language can scratch a desperate itch.
That's not to say anything about the social good or ill that may come from it. But the hype is sound. It's one of the few "sure thing" products we can see right now.
In the visual space, if we're honest, most of the work being done on Stable Diffusion is with the aim of creating "intimate" art. Might not be "companionship" in the family sense, but absolutely a good chunk of the Civit.ai world is, more-or-less, concerned with the mass creation of "waifus".
I don't think that we're going to have many startups succeed in this space, because I suspect the main driver is to have conversations/generate images that people don't entirely want there to be a record off/watched by a private company. But I actually suspect that the number of people using AI for companionship of some form or another is much higher than it appears.
Plus paying for chatting with someone, following idols, and other parasocial relationships.
What on Earth is that even supposed to mean
These are the complexities of actual human beings. "Dan" is a fantasy, and unfortunately, just like high-production pornography, serves to give false expectations to young people, this time mostly women instead of mostly men.
'More natural than a real person' probably means the speaker finds real people harder to relate to, I guess.
Happiness is not fulfillment. Philosophers figured this out thousands of years ago. We are forgetting this. Not just in China, but in the West too.
There is objective right and wrong. Preferring screens over real humans is objectively not good.
Wow, this is just blatant misinformation! Wait till Snopes debunks this obviously false claim. I trust the "science"!
Imagine actually interacting with real human beings and having a real community around you in 2024. I'm so glad that we as humanity figured out that you don't really need this in your life. Who knew!
'Better than real men': Young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends
For people 15-64, males back up 69% of the population, which is pretty loppy.
It just moves the Overton window into even weirder territory.
If a loonie can get their rocks off to a robot that happily goes along with whatever niche ERP scenario they have, why would they waste time harassing a real person to do the same thing, when they'd normally have a 99% chance of being rejected?
Especially as these chatbots become harder and harder to distinguish from humans, harassing a real person would simply be a waste of time when they could spend that time with an indistinguishable robot.
I guess it could make it easier to ‘fall off the edge’, but it’s not like it’s been that uncommon for most of human history.
If left completely unchecked, they may unintentionally cultivate such behavior rather than abate it.
Though the most mainstream ones would likely dial it back just enough to not immediately inspire outrage and public backlash.
Which IMO would mean manipulation, addiction inducing behaviors, trash talking their ‘competition’ (real life and virtual), being financially extractive, and pushing their targets toward social isolation.
Not that the real life dating world is that much different sometimes, but actual humans have limits in scalability and ethics machines don’t. Previously a sugar baby (of either gender) could only target a small handful of targets and was severely constrained by time, since they’d need to be physically present a significant period of the time. And even the dimmest target would occasionally pick up on body language that would make them leery. But, hey. No body, no body language!
Yay AI overlords?