It seems clear that people (lonely/depressed people especially) will overdose on this sort of thing once it is developed, commercialised, and less bleeding edge.
It's vapour filling the place of human connection. It's stevia. It's not going to give you cancer, but it's still unhealthy and will certainly exceed the parameters of entertainment.
At least if they switch from parasocial relationships with influencers to parasocial relationships with open source bots they won't be financially exploited by the influencers. GPT doesn't have anything to sell us.
Except the vast majority of people aren't able to host such a bot themselves, so it seems inevitable that paid hosting services for such bots will arise. Then there's just the potential for financial exploitation at greater scale.
I would call it Top W University.
Right now it's a prototype, but in the future local LLMs will be everywhere.
Lol ...(worth the downvotes).
Just you wait and see.
It will either find something to sell us, or we will be giving it ourselves to sell.
"If you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer"
From the outside this could be seen as a good thing, but for someone involved in the relationship, someone who may struggle with a traditional relationship and may see this as the only available option, I'm lead to understand the event was remarkably traumatic.
Go on…
Sounds much less exploitative and unhealthy than the streamer/influencer parasocial relationships these people are probably currently invested in.
This makes me think if ChatGPT-based bots could be useful for teaching social skills in a therapeutic context. A therapist could use such LLM to synthesize examples of realistic dialogue by describing people and the situation, and discuss them with the patient. They could set up a bunch of bots with (hidden) priorities and goals, and have the patient navigate a conversation/situation with them - whether as a short exercise, or a prolonged one (e.g. couple weeks of talking with ChatGPT-powered fake "friends" on an IM app).
In fact, take the last bit as a free startup idea: a platform for psychologist and therapists to set up GPT-4 (or whatever comes next)-powered chatbots, with an easy interface for configuring their personalities and setting up scenarios for patients to navigate, and helping evaluate their progress over time.