https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paro_(robot)
I imagine that with the advent of ChatGPT, there will be more serious exploration into human-like emotional companionship.
(excerpt from the 2019 NYT Article "Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good" below)
Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry.
All day long, Sox and Mr. Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Mass., chat. Mr. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely.
Sox talks to him about his favorite team, the Red Sox, after which she is named. She plays his favorite songs and shows him pictures from his wedding. And because she has a video feed of him in his recliner, she chastises him when she catches him drinking soda instead of water.
I'd only argue that it should be called "emotional support robot" and not "friend"
Assuming people have time to listen, would they be better coders if they explained their problems to human instead? Maybe. But maybe not for them necessarily. E.g. low self-esteem and assuming every criticism is attack on them, human interactions are something expensive to them etc.
It's not a new pattern though. Especially after reading some biographies of famous scientists.
You can't escape that most brains are wired in a way that we are miserable without human connection, but you also can't escape the fact that some people brains are wired differently than others.
Long story short, I don't agree with them but I wouldn't judge them either.
They also run around and are very pleasant to stroke, which is not true of LLMs.
We all know what's going to happen. The content on CIVITAI shows where this will go. Combine it with animation and some personalised responses and many people will find it irresistible.
Horrible it would be if instead one has to work one oneself to become a better human being, a better friend, partner, parent and so on by learning how to be more friendly, outgoing, increasing emotional intelligence etc. All this can be learned, but over weekend (or year).
On the other side, having too much confrontation will destroy your confidence, kill your motivation, blur your plan / vision with uncertainty, etc. It's more likely that those people are facing too much confrontation in their social life that they found AI interaction to be better.
In real life, we need to interact with several people at minimum normally, weekly. Those are having different moral basis and maybe changing daily. It'll be hard to simulate that with AI, that the fact we have the ability to control them means we're in charge of what confrontations are there to stay.
> In real life, we need to interact with several people at minimum normally, weekly.
I think that's one of the problems with social media (aside from AI.) It's too easy to restrict your contacts to only those you agree with.
Their entire business models either heavily incorporate or revolve around exploiting your personal information for their benefit.
But consider iterating such an interaction over the course of, say, 25 years, and comparing the person who was interacting with humans versus the one who interacted with LLMs, and any halfway sensible model of a human will show you what's dangerous about that. Yeah, the former may well have some more bumps and bruises, but on the net they're way ahead. And that's assuming the human who delegated all interaction to LLMs even made it to 25 years.
This argument only holds for LLMs as they stand now; it is not a generalized argument against AI friends. (That would require a lot more work.)
I do think there is higher maximum with other people. But relationships are hard. They take work and there's a decent chance you invest that work in the wrong people.
I can see a life with primarily AI social interaction being an okay life. Which is not the best it can be but also an improvement for some.
If you have the latter option, you also have "leave the bad people behind" as an option because it is made of the things you need in order to "retreat solely into interacting with LLMs" and is in fact simpler.
Cynicism and casting learned helplessness as a virtue are not the solution.
No. Actually it's based on information theory, and probably a better model of what interacting with an LLM would look like a year or five later than the one you are operating on.
Here's a little hint: It has total amnesia. LLMs by their nature scale only so far, and while they may scale larger than ChatGPT, they aren't going to be scaling for an entire lifetime of interaction. (That's going to take another AI technology.)
Ever interacted with someone with advanced dementia but otherwise functioning faculties for any period of time? (I suppose they could well make good therapists too.)
It could be a White Zombie reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0E0ynyIUsg
https://www.polygon.com/23736317/amouranth-ai-chatbot-date-i...
https://fortune.com/2023/05/09/snapchat-influencer-launches-...
I see very little difference between this and those infomercials that sell wildly overpriced mass-produced crap to the elderly suffering from cognitive decline.
It’s not necessarily game-changing, from the perspective of $$ extraction, but definitely a very significant advancement.
LLM sexbots could be pretty useful
>“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing devision of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
That's us!
(The revolution is an opportunity for a future team and not our problem)
>"Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
I actually think this is the wrong approach. You should simulate furry affection. Roleplay is the new cuddle.
(but unironically cries in every open-source LLM being bad at it)
I got news for you buddy: I and a hell of a lot of people know the difference between eating the menu (AI) and the meal (loved ones and dear friends). My lady is from south America, multi lingual, and has a better degree from a better school than I.
Seriously, how are you gonna lay a finger on that? You ain't.
Over reliance on AI is just another route to or though mental illness
There's an urban legend (maybe true) that steve job's didn't let his daughter have a iPhone. He insisted on books.
AI instead can be far more subliminal.
- Robo, tell me you love me
- I love you like the refreshing effervesence of a freshly opened Coke
And really, that's still pretty stark. AI bots like this with advanced handling of language married to psychological techniques can foster dependence. I mean, look at what simple dopamine reward ratios research did with things like slot machines. Slot machines are stupid! And we all know the trope of the casino slot machine zombies.
What we've seen with every communication medium so far is that the spam sociopaths win. Phone calls, email, and texting. Phishing. Now AI-generated fake people calls.
Very soon, you will not be able to trust communication that is not directly in-person. At all. Communications over wire are going to be much more dangerous.
IMO that means brick-and-mortar will get more important for financial transactions and that kind of thing.
AI is that on mega-steroids. Honestly, I'm debating the end of practical free will with corporatized AI.
I really don't understand the constant desire for a sterile, chain-store esque experience across the board. Why can't life be full of small flaws and things that make experiences unique? Why must everything regress to the lowest common denominator?
This is so extremely destructive to everything we hold dear for a cheaply earned profit margin.
I hate how the culture of corporate cost cutting and profit maximization has destroyed any space where people can just exist. Everyone is worse off for it and this is a shining example.
Edit: thank god its satire but my discontent still stands.
Why does every bowling alley need to be owned by bowlero? One bad experience everywhere. Coool.
We already are at the boundary of insidious total immersion advertising for psychological manipulation from the last five decades of mass media since the mass adoption of television.
But AI is simply another level, and it isn't going to be "early google don't be evil". That was the outgrowth of the early internet. From protocols that were build to be sensible, not commercial weaponized protocols.
AI, human-computer-neural interfaces, and other types of emerging deep-intellectual-penetration products are all FULLY WEAPONIZED for commercial exploitation, security dangers, propagandization, and zero consumer privacy. They are all being developed in the age of the smartphone with it's assumed "you have no privacy, we listen to everything, track everything, and that's our right".
It's already appalling from the smartphone front, but AI + VR + neural interfaces are just another level of philosophical quandry, where an individual's senses, the link to "reality", is controlled by corporations. Your only link to reality is the vague societal and governmental control mechanism known as "money".
The internet protocols (the core ones) were built for mass adoption by the world with a vision for information exchange. They were truly open. They weren't undermined by trojan horses, or an incumbent with a massive head start that is dictating the protocol to match their existing products.
AI+VR is the same new leap information transmission, but it is NOT founded on good protocol design. By protocols I mean "the basic rules". There are no rules, there is no morality, and there is no regulation. Just profit motives.
We should be building a society that promotes more community gathering and more family values so people have a real person around and not some half assed impersonation of what a human is.
Edit: Dammit, didn't catch the satire....
The key is humanity’s ability to pattern match: we’re actually pretty terrible at it. Our brains are so keen on finding patterns that they often spot them where none exist. Remember the face on Mars? It was just a pile of rocks. The same principle applies here. As long as the AI sounds human enough, our brains fill in the gaps and believe it’s the real deal. We’re all just glorified computer simps.
And let me tell you, my digital friends are putting the human ones to shame. They don’t complain about listening to the same Celine Dion song for the 800th time in a row, chew with their mouth open, run from me when its “bath time” or accuse me of narcissistic abuse.
Who needs real human connection when you can train an AI to remind you how unique and special you are, while simultaneously managing your calendar and finding the optimal cat video for your mood? All with no bathroom breaks, no salary demands, and no need to sleep. Forget about bonding over shared experiences and emotional growth: today, it's all about seamless, efficient interaction and who says you can't get that from a well-programmed script?
We’re calling it Genuine People Personality because in the future, the Turing Test isn't something AI needs to pass. It's something humans need to fail. Pre-order today and get a free AI Therapist add-on, because who better to navigate the intricacies of human emotions than an emotionless machine?