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Comment by creata | Hacker News Reader

> The sycophantic and unchallenging behaviours of chatbots leaves a person unconditioned for human interactions.

To be honest, the alternative for a good chunk of these users is no interaction at all, and that sort of isolation doesn't prepare you for human interaction either.

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> To be honest, the alternative for a good chunk of these users is no interaction at all, and that sort of isolation doesn't prepare you for human interaction either.

This sounds like an argument in favor of safe injection sites for heroin users.

Hey hey safe injecting rooms have real harm minimisation impacts. Not convinced you can say the same for chatbot boyfriends.

That's exactly right, and that's fine. Our society is unwilling to take the steps necessary to end the root cause of drug abuse epidemics (privatization of healthcare industry, lack of social safety net, war on drugs), so localities have to do harm reduction in immediately actionable ways.

So too is our society unable to do what's necessary to reduce the startling alienation happening (halt suburban hyperspread, reduce working hours to give more leisure time, give workers ownership of the means of production so as to eliminate alienation from labor), so, ai girlfriends and boyfriends for the lonely NEETs. Bonus, maybe it'll reduce school shootings.

Seeing society as responsible for drug abuse issues, of their many varieties, is very Rousseau.

Rousseau and Hobbes were just two dudes. I'd wager neither of them cracked the code entirely.

To claim that addicts have no responsibility for their addiction is as absurd as the idea that individual humans can be fully identified separate from the society that raised them or that they live in.

And there we are . . . "Our society is unable to do what's necessary on issue X, and what's necessary is this laundry list of my unrelated political hobby horses."

If you don't deny that the USA is plagued by a drug addiction crisis, what's your solution?

The person who introduced the topic did so derisively. I think you ought to re-read the comment to which you replied and a few of those leading to it for context.

Given that those tend to have positive effects for the societies that practice this is that what you wanted to say?

Wouldn't they be seeking a romantic relationship otherwise?

Using AI to fulfill a need implies a need which usually results in action towards that need. Even "the dating scene is terrible" is human interaction.

We do see - from 'crazy cat lady' to 'incel', from 'where have all the good men gone' to the rapid decline of the numbers of 25-year-olds who have had sexual experiences, not to mention from the 'loneliness epidemic' that has several governments, especially in Europe, alarmed enough to make it an agenda pointt: No, they would not. Not all of them. Not even a majority.

AI in these cases is just a better 'litter of 50 cats', a better, less-destructive, less-suffering-creating fantasy.

Swiping on thousands of people without getting a single date is not human interaction and that's the reality for some people.

I still don't think an AI partner is a good solution, but you are seriously underestimating how bad the status quo is.

> Swiping on thousands of people without getting a single date is not human interaction and that's the reality for some people.

For some people, yes, but 99% of those people are men. The whole "women with AI boyfriends" thing is an entirely different issue.

Despite the name, the subreddit community has both men and women and both ai boyfriends and ai girlfriends.

I looked through a bunch of posts on the front page (and almost died from cringe in the process) and basically every one of them was a woman with an AI "boyfriend".

Interesting. I guess it's changed a lot since I looked at it last time. I remember it being about 50/50.

If you have 100 men to 100 women on an imaginary tinder platform and most of the men get rejected by all 100 women it's easy to see where the problem would arise for women too.

In real dating apps, the ratio is never 1:1, there's always way more men.

The "problem" will arise anyway, of course, but as I said, it's a different problem - the women aren't struggling to find dates, they're just choosing not to date the men they find. Even classifying it as a "problem" is arguable.

What else do you expect them to do if none of the choices are worthwhile?

Maybe lower their standards to the point that they can be satisfied by a real person, not a text completion algorithm that literally worships the ground they walk on and outputs some of the cheesiest, cringiest text I've ever read.

>Maybe lower their standards to the point that they can be satisfied by a real person, not a text completion algorithm that literally worships the ground they walk on and outputs some of the cheesiest, cringiest text I've ever read.

The vast majority of women are not replacing dating with chatbots, not even close. If you want women to stop being picky, you would have to reduce the "demand" in the market, stop men from being so damn desperate for any pair of legs in a skirt.

They are suffering through the exact same dating apps, suffering through their own problems. Try talking to one some time about how much it sucks.

Remember, the apps are not your friend, and not optimized to get you a date or a relationship. They are optimized to make you spend money.

The apps want you to feel hopeless, like there is no other way than the apps, and like only the apps can help you, which is why you should pay for their "features" which are purposely designed to screw you over. The Match company purposely withholds matches from you that are high quality and promising. They own nearly the entire market.

Making a lot of assumptions there, my dude.

Expectations and reality will differ. Ultimately we will have soft eugenics. This is a good thing in the long run, especially with how crowded the global south is.

Nature always finds a way, and it's telling you not to pass your genetics on. It seems cruel, but it is efficient and very elegant. Now we just need to find an incentive structure to encourage the intelligent to procreate.

> the ratio is never 1:1, there's always way more men.

Isn't it weird? There should be approximately equal number of not married men and women, so there should be some reason why there are less women on dating platforms. Is it because women work more and have less free time? Or because men are so bad? Or because they have an AI boyfriend? Or married men using dating apps shift the ratio?

Obviously men are people and therefore can vary, but a lot of them rely on women to be their sole source of emotional connection. Women tend to have more and closer friends and just aren't as lonely or desperate.

A lot of dudes are pretty awful to women in general, and dating apps are full of that sort. Add in the risks of meeting strange men, and it's not hard to see why a lot of women go "eh" and hang out with friends instead.

> Even "the dating scene is terrible" is human interaction.

For some subset of people, this isn't true. Some people don't end up going on a single date or get a single match. And even for those who get a non-zero number there, that number might still be hovering around 1-2 matches a year and no actual dates.

Are we talking people trying to date or "trying to date"?

I am not even talking dates BTW but the pre-cursors to dates.

If you bring up Tinder etc then I would point out that AI has been doing bad things for quite a while obviously.

> Are we talking people trying to date or "trying to date"?

The former. The latter I find is naught more than a buzz word used to shut down people who complain about a very real problem.

> If you bring up Tinder etc then I would point out that AI has been doing bad things for quite a while obviously.

Clearly. But we've also been cornered into Tinder and other dating apps being one of very few social arenas where you can reasonably expect dating to actually happen.[1] There's also friend circles and other similar close social circles, but once you've exhausted those options, assuming no other possibilities reveal themselves, what else is there? There's uni or collage, but if you're past that time of your life, tough shit I guess. There's work, but people tend to have the sense to not let their love life and their work mix. You could hook up after someone changes jobs, but that's not something that happens every day.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1908630116

In this framing “any” human interaction is good interaction.

This is true if the alternative to “any interaction” is “no interaction”. Bots alter this, and provide “good interaction”.

In this light, the case for relationship bots is quite strong.

Not all human interaction is a net positive in the end.

Why would that be the alternative?

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