Re:YouTube millionaires are not your friends
by satvikpendem on Saturday March 18, 2023 @06:33AM
(#35207856)
You enjoy the feeling of having friends, as you develop a parasocial relationship with the person on the screen.
It is essentially a hack for the brain's social processing systems. Generally, we'd have only seen others in real life and interacted with them. This confers evolutionary advantage so we feel good interacting further with people, and perhaps even seeing people do things we find enjoyable in the first place.
Now with video, we feel good as we "spend time" with the other person, even though they don't know of our existence. Our caveman brain doesn't know about this sort of one sided relationship at all, it wasn't present in the olden days.
We will see the same with AI and chatbots as the decades pass, only at least now we're actually able to interact in a two sided way. There are already people doing this with ChatGPT or even Replika.
It is essentially a hack for the brain's social processing systems. Generally, we'd have only seen others in real life and interacted with them. This confers evolutionary advantage so we feel good interacting further with people, and perhaps even seeing people do things we find enjoyable in the first place.
Now with video, we feel good as we "spend time" with the other person, even though they don't know of our existence. Our caveman brain doesn't know about this sort of one sided relationship at all, it wasn't present in the olden days.
We will see the same with AI and chatbots as the decades pass, only at least now we're actually able to interact in a two sided way. There are already people doing this with ChatGPT or even Replika.