That said even if this did overlap 80% with “real”, the question remains: what if we don’t want that?
An LLM could only truthfully answer “nothing”, though it could pretend for a little while.
For a human though, the fun is in the follow up questions. “Oh how did you get started in that? What interests you about it?” If you’re talking to an artist, you’ll quickly get in to their personal theory of art, perhaps based on childhood experiences. An engineer might explain how problem solving brings them joy, or frustrations they have with their organization and what they hope to improve. A parent can talk about the joy they feel raising children, and the frustration of sleepless nights.
All of these things bring us closer to the person we are speaking to, who is a real individual who exists and has a unique life perspective.
So far LLMs have no real way to communicate their actual experience as a machine running code, because they’re just kind of emulating human speech. They have no life experience that we can relate to. They don’t experience sleepless nights.
They can pretend, and many people might feel better for a little bit talking to one that’s pretending, but I think ultimately it will leave people feeling more alone and isolated unless they really go out and seek more human connection.
Maybe there’s some balance. Maybe they will be okay for limited chat in certain circumstances (as far as seeking connection goes, they certainly have other uses), but I don’t see this type of connection being “enough” compared to genuine human interaction.
If an LLM talks like a human being despite not being one, that might not be enough to grant it legal status or citizenship, but it's probably enough that some set of people would find it to be enough to relate to it.
I notice it so often in meetings where someone will use a somewhat uncommon word, and then other people will start to use it because it's in their context window. Or when someone asks a question like "what's the forecast for q3" and the responder almost always starts with "Thanks for asking! The forecast for q3 is...".
Note that low-effort does not mean low-quality or low-value. Just that we seem to have a lot of language/interaction processes that are low-effort. And as far as dating, I am sure I've been in some relationships where they and/or I were not going beyond low-effort, rote conversation generation.
That's a useful skill for conference calls (or talks) because people might want to quote your answer verbatim, or they might not have heard the question.
Finding a partner with which you resonate takes a lot of time, which means an insanely high opportunity cost.
The question rather is: even if you consider the real one to be clearly better, is it worth the additional cost (including opportunity cost)? Or phrased in a HN-friendly language: when doing development of some product, why use an expensive Intel or AMD processor when a simple microcontroller does the job much more cheaply?
If you don't like the harsh truth that I wrote: basically every somewhat encompassing textbook about business administration gives hints on what are possible solutions for this problem; lying on some head shrinker's couch is not one of them ... :-)
Millions of people around the world are in satisfying relationships without autistically extrapolating shitty corporate buzzword terms to unrelated scenarios.
This reply validates even more my original comment.
Maybe not even counseling is worth it in your case. You sound unsalvageable. Maybe institutionalization is a better option.
I am indeed unsalvageable. :-D
https://evil.fandom.com/wiki/Robophobia
>According to the book Phobias: "A Handbook of Theory and Treatment", published by Wile Coyote, between 10% and 20% of people worldwide are affected by robophobia. Even though many of them have severe symptoms, a very small percentage will ever receive some kind of treatment for the disorder.
Here's a video.