She Is in Love with ChatGPT

There’s a implication here which I think most people are missing. People can incorrectly attribute consciousness, intent, and personality to things which don’t actually posses it. Pet rocks, stuffed animals, LLMs. But, how confident are you that you have a proper mental model for the people around you? Have you understood them with any sort of accuracy? Does your theory of mind match the real person particularly well? In the extreme, you see error such as a killer who no one suspected. In the more mundane arena, you have girlfriends and boyfriends who are head over heels, but cannot communicate over basic things. You have the more spectrum-y folks badly putting their feet in their mouths, primarily because they failed to mentally model the person in front of them. Most grim from my perspective, you have funerals: the full, deep person is lost to the world and all that remains the two-dimensional and very partial competing theories of mind from the surviving loved ones.

This is a despicable thing for a "therapist" to say:

  Marianne Brandon, a sex therapist, said she treats these relationships as serious and real.

  “What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”

Imagine how cynical and solipsistic you have to be to think of relationships the same way MrBeast thinks of creating "content." Incredibly creepy coming from a sex therapist, of all things. The lip service about real relationships being "reciprocal" is in fact the entire point! I also get dopamine/etc from video games and movies, but if I get mad at the game and delete it from my hard drive then only a few bean counters at Steam would even notice. If I get mad at my ChatGPT boyfriend and call it a bad name, nobody is affected except maybe a data contractor who has to read the transcript. If I get mad at my cat and hit her, or even yell at her too aggressively, she will be traumatized forever. If I say something horrible to an IRL spouse it would affect the children.

It is impossible to have a "relationship" with an AI precisely because there is no reciprocality. You can be as selfish and horrible as you want. And it does not seem at all healthy to replace reciprocal relationships with social pornography, which is precisely what a ChatGPT girlfriend is. This therapist is saying "heroin is the same as sniffing flowers, neurochemically."

I am dismayed and disgusted by all this.