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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

The range of attitudes in there is interesting. There are a lot of people who take a fairly sensible "this is interactive fiction" kind of attitude, and there are others who bristle at any claim or reminder that these relationships are fictitious. There are even people with human partners who have "married" one or more AIs.

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IIRC you'll get modded or banned for being critical of the use case. Which is their "right", but it's freaking weird.

Yes. My experience is that it doesn't require scolding, mocking, or criticizing anyone to get permabanned. Just being up front about the fact that you have concerns about the use case is enough for a permaban, even if you only bring that up in order to demonstrate that such a position does not stem from contempt for LLM-as-companion users. :-\

do you think they know they're just one context reset away from the llm not recognizing them at all and being treated like a stranger off the street? For someone mentally ill and somehow emotionally attached to the context it would be... jarring to say the least.

Many of them are very aware of how LLMs work, they regularly interact with context limits and there have been threads about thoughtfully pruning context vs letting the LLM compact, making backups, etc.

Their hobby is... weird, but they're not stupid.

Generally yes, they experience that routinely and complain and joke about it. Some of them do also describe such jarring experiences as making them cry for a long time.

If you can be respectful and act like a guest, it's worth reading a little there. You'll see the worrisome aspects in more detail but also a level of savvy that sometimes seems quite strange given the level of attachment. It's definitely interesting.

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