Muses, Not Sirens – Motivation in the Era of AI-Generated Girlfriends | Hacker News Reader

Muses, Not Sirens – Motivation in the Era of AI-Generated Girlfriends

danfaggella.com

This may come to pass for many low-status men, but many more will continue to try to improve their status. Our brains know the difference between true social/sexual validation and substitutes. I think a large portion of low-status men will indulge in AI girlfriends while at the same time seeking real relationships with real women. Men already use porn and sex workers without totally giving up.

I think this bubble is about to pop. Low-Status is a whole new thing compared to back in the day. People have money and fun and the world is so dumb and obsessed at the moment that theres no other way but to just show off your dumbest and smartest self. It's kind of a when in Rome situation. The lower ranks always had the whole physical fitness hack if they wanted some validation. Or they can just be aggressively themselves (extroverted ADHD/or not types). Which is something AI girlfriends are a perfect sparring partner for.

Tune your wifu to whatever you do, your kinks and the boundaries of the 8 billion people out there, some of which are extreme enough to make most of us go "and here I thought I've seen it all", so be liberal, overstep a little but stay within a zone that would get you no more than a horny almost unspoken warning in the super market and then just do your thing and substitute your AI gf with real people.

I think this is a boringly naive take, and generally I think the author is quite a techno optimist transhumanist type and that is blinding him to some realities.

The first of those I see, which is contentious among tech people, is that AI is not intelligent at all, but I won't dwell on that, we have all had that discussion quite a number of times.

Men achieve for the admiration of women. Men don't achieve for the admiration of something that's going to show admiration whether you achieve or not. Nobody ever chronically jerked it to pornography and was inspired to achieve anything. A hooker cannot be a muse, except in that they might motivate you to have enough money to pay them again next time. In that sense, a crack rock can be a muse, and the word "muse" becomes meaningless.

You can say "we can design an AI that encourages achievement" but if social media is an indicator, it's more profitable to give people what they want emotionally while requiring little effort from them, no AI company trying to break into the AI girlfriend space is going to be financially motivated to withhold admiration, only real people with real wants, needs and expectations do that.

I'm sure there are some subset of men that want to achieve but just need their frustrations sated, and this might work for them, but that's not most men. And even then, that ignores the fact that, just like pornography or social media or fast food, it's empty calories, it fools your endocrine system into thinking you've got something of substance, it doesn't actually nourish, and we all see and feel the impact of that.

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