Feel like the hype surrounding “AI companionship” is very inorganic and fake - manufactured by the AI industry & VCs. There are fundamental reasons why AI as a companion is not good UX once novelty wears off.
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.
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.
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.
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.