I guess LLM hallucinations will just give a slightly different flavour of unreal interactions.
Though I don't doubt that less careful (or less well-paid) gig-chatters exist and can have a slightly different feel when handing off a random at shift-change
The next step is not having real models at all. It'll be 100% AI all the way up and down the stack.
Completely AI porn is going to be booming business. PornHub, OnlyFans, and perhaps even some dating websites will be "innovator's dilemma"'d out.
Do people honestly convince themselves some stranger performing on the internet in a very one way relationship somehow truly cares about them and not their ability to monetize.
where do you get that number? from an incel webforum?
What is your definition of "young men"?
> They can't get a relationship.
how so?
I don't think you needed to imply that someone was an incel.
I agree that part of that ~30% difference could be women dating older men. But it could also be women dating each other: this[0] Gallup poll from 2023 found that 27% of Gen Z women identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Gen Z as noted here doesn't perfectly overlap with people in their 20s, but it seems like this could be another (better?) explanation.
[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/611864/lgbtq-identification.asp...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34954694
I'm not going to waste my time educating you on this because I can tell from the way you jumped immediately to the incel label that you're just going to deny deflect and diffuse.
These aren't novel numbers:
https://aibm.org/commentary/gen-zs-romance-gap-why-nearly-ha...
https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/reimagining-teenage-ro...
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...
The lonliness epidemic did not just stop at platonic relationships.
>What is your definition of "young men"?
I just use "Gen Z" as a moniker, so anyone from 1995 or 96 to 2010.
>how so?
Feel free to read the links, but various factors include
- less physical interaction in lieu of social media, even among school mates
- The consolidation of the dating scene to apps, which has their own story of dark patterns
- Women are still more likely to "date up", so there's less women in the same poll as younger men
- Some are simply sexually satisfied by porn and aren't really trying to actively date due to the above factors
- higher senses of anxiety from approaching compared to older generations
- Finances. no money, harder to make a good first impression. So some don't try
It's a multi-faceted issue.
That was just a product / form factor thing: Bird and Lime scooters are everywhere in my city. And, moreover, lots of people use personal scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards, electric skateboards, Onewheel, electric unicycles, etc. I don't go a day without seeing these things.
It'll be the exact same with this technology. Give it a few years and more men will be using AI chatbots and AI porn than the existing tools in the space, such as PornHub and OnlyFans.
> the idea that people will remain interested in talking to bots long term
Porn has never gone away, it's only grown.
AI porn can match a person's exact preferences in an unparalleled way that hasn't been possible before. Add in VR, photorealism, voices, and trainable agentic behavior and you've got a market that will likely contribute to the decline of real, actual relationships and marriages.
More men will probably be using AI porn over actual sex, too, due to difficulties with dating, dead bedrooms, etc.
I'd be willing to place bets on marriage numbers going into a steep decline over the next decade.
If a dead bedroom marriage is still intact now, why would AI porn change that? Do you need to get divorced before you can chat with the bot? Is the bot going to help parent the children you were staying in the marriage for?
New marriages, not divorces. Though I wouldn't necessarily rule out the latter, either.
Not being able to find a relationship is not binary. Having alternatives to satisfy needs means less effort is put in achieving the real thing. This goes for both genders of course, just the needs and alternatives being different.
Marriage was hit way before that. Marriage is not a rational choice in a lot of countries, where a civil union does the same thing without the hassle and the costs of divorce if it happens. The main reason is religion and it has been losing ground for decades at this point.
This is not going to make it any more attractive.
Extrapolation to the whole population seems crazy though. And I wouldn't expect dating apps to remain the same, we should expect more behavioral experimentation as well as backlash and new social movements to change mating behavior. It isn't like the average woman is a fan of polygyny either.
What the heck does that mean? Last I checked, population demographics weren't that far off 50/50 in most countries.
Hey, I'm married so I'm just going by what my single / online dating friends tell me. It has nothing to do with demographics. In today's app-based environment, something like 80% of women are interested in / going for the top 10-20% of men, and it's getting even more extreme. Is this not true?
It just feels oddly gender specific to assume that in an environment where there are approximately equal numbers of single men and women (no?), one gender has sights set too high and the other doesn't.
This was a long time ago as well and I think the situation has gotten worse in the age of tinder and friends.
This is a summary of the article: https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/
"Some of the conclusions aren’t surprising. The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme."
No wonder why women are so incredibly selective. Gender ratio population wise is roughly equal, with slightly more women than men in the US, AFAIK. Men are chasing women in the wrong place.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/165lsmp/tinder_gend...
Nobody's going around advertising their fancy cars, their hobbies and the church they goes to, etc. We're heavily focused on the perfect match rather than doing vibe check.
Basically you'll need as many single men than single women.
Now if you're talking about apps, a minority of men can date most of the women, but that doesn't work for long term relationships.
I'd say the market has previously proven that's definitely false.
Consequently, AI porn will probably eat the bottom of the bulk market, with a much-smaller market left for higher-end human content.
Which probably isn't the worst thing... as the low-value pornography seems to encourage the most horrific, exploitive conditions.
Backhoes drastically reduce the demand for laborers (the traditional equivalent for men), and I don’t see anyone with reasonable options there either.
Notably, at least 90% of the laborers I’ve met would love to be able to get paid having sex instead of being laborers. But the market dynamics don’t make that a viable choice.
At some point we should get past make-work that creates horrible lives for people, when we have the capability to automate that work.
Not automating something so that someone will have a job is bad reasoning and traps society in a local rut.
Which population?
The situation in most well off countries is already that native populations have fallen below replacement rates. The result has not been to rejoice in the would-be crisis being averted but instead the crisis has been inverted and now those countries "need" to import foreigners to keep their economies from imploding. Or are you suggesting population control for africa and the middle east? Because I'm not sure they'll agree.
I agree that society needs to adapt to the post-scarcity reality but "population control" is and will always be something dystopian. It's also irrelevant because the more we automate the less people we actually "need" so no amount of population control will ever solve the underlying issue.
Men had a headstart from being more into tech, but I think women are already the majority users of AI sex-rp and AI partners. Makes sense too given that they read more erotica than men.
and the porn-rot brains will make it harder for them to get into healthy relationships as well adjusted individuals, resulting in a glut of long-term customer for corporate-mediated para-social "relationships". Another victory for unbridled capitalism.
The young men have to "git gud" & level up IRL like they have to in every other aspect of life. There won't be government issued waifus
Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men, who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
Everybody wants that, including the potential girlfriends, but a functional relationship requires 2 well-adjusted parties. The average level 2 druid also wants respect from their guild and a trusty side-kick, but they may have to grind for those things and go on some side quests. No one is owed a partner, especially if they are unable to compromise (the grease of all social interactions).
> Porn rot is an online myth that exists to justify demonizing men
Fortunately,there is scientific research[1] in the field, so we don't have to go with our gut-feeling. Modeling behavior on scripted pornography leads to socially unacceptable behaviors in real life. A female acquaintance was recently propositioned by the man she had just started dating for an 3-way "encounter" involving her sister (as in full sibling); I think "porn rot" is the right description of what led him down the road of thinking it was a perfectly reasonable request to verbalize. This put an end to the relationship, but I'm sure he might be out there somewhere complaining about how he's being unfairly rejected by women.
> ...who don't live up to traditional gender expectations.
every generation has a subculture like this, and in the past, they accepted, and gloried even, that they were a subculture instead of demanding to be accepted by the mainstream (beatniks, punks, goths, emos, etc).
The dark gamified patterns of app dating reward and encourage women to rapidly dismiss huge numbers of men in the hopes of finding one of the very few who meets a number of superficial criteria. Meeting people IRL has less toxic intrinsic structure, but has only become more difficult as the apps advertise themselves as a "safer" alternative.
I think that the AI-pretending-to-be-human does not have much future, because if people end up chatting with AIs why not go with the real thing rather than with the only-fans ones. The only-fans creators are training their replacements.
and summarize it for humans.
Chatters-for-hire were always questionable. Some are cheap labor in cheap English-speaking countries. But I’ve also seen that vendors that offer chatter services have difficulty with quality control (of the chats), causing the OnlyFans channel to drop the chatters and apologize for the breach of trust to paying fans.
That said, I imagine there is a LOT of value in identifying high quality leads/chats to be prioritized and ignoring/ blocking the lowest quality (eg. Insurers and time wasters).
How sad.
"Influencers" living on borrowed time is one of the few good things about the machine learning dystopia.
I get the feeling that it won't be long before the "model" will also be the "model".
It's easy to rationalise a time saving measure I guess. I feel I'm unauthentic when I use auto-generated response suggestions in Outlook. But, like OnlyFans, it's 'just business'. Perhaps I'm overthinking it. How genuine and heartfelt can OnlyFans responses be? Probably as much as my response to a budget approval.
Shouldn't there be a level of candidness at which it cannot be considered deception? I mean we accept casinos/gambling and religions in our societies for example.
If the site is saying ‘chat with X for $5/min’, and you never have any interaction with X at all for your $5/min, that seems like a pretty clear cut case doesn’t it?
Yeah, ok.
- soon to be murdered guy.
I wouldn't expect, like, Mia Khalifa (I'm out of the game, who's current?) to answer her own messages but there does seem to be an expectation that smaller creators are actually behind the accounts.
I know there are also some people who pretend they are falling in love with the prostitutes they pay to have sex but the terms are clear both in physical and online prostitution. It is all a business about pretending and consumers should expect that.
I guess there is some truth to the adage that a male body can't push blood both to the brain and to the penis at the same time - it's either one, or the other. I mean, if you step back and take a cold look at the content produced by popular OF performers, it's pretty apparent those are business operations. There are other people involved. Someone does the camera work. Location work. Promotion. And yes, fan management too.
Same applies to YouTube personas, too. Brands, not people. Talking to fans is a job that can be outsourced. AI doesn't introduce anything new; AI features on the platform are competing with creators' brand management agencies, which themselves likely already use ChatGPT for this anyway, because why wouldn't they? ChatGPT does better job at this stuff and is cheaper than human labor - but again, the AI angle isn't important here - that human labor was just a generative model in a protein substrate anyway.
Maybe it already was fraud. I expect to see class-action lawsuits on the way soon.
This is another facet of a larger phenomenon, that I just commented on in another thread[0] - there's a lot of harmful activity that's considered legitimate, thus invisible to our legal and cultural immune systems, yet no less harmful than the slightly less legitimate scams.
--
After reading your post, I had a thought: Making this story about OnlyFans is the click bait element. Seriously, replay the story in your head where it says that top 1/2/3/4/5% of YouTubers or Instagrammers or TikTokkers are using LLMs to answer comments and DMs. Suddenly, the story is much less enticing. It probably would not even make HN front page. Most readers here would look at such an article, shrug their shoulders, and say: "Yeah, seems right. I would do the same.". However, as soon as you add sex work into the mix, it gets way more spicy and elicits more emotional responses.
That said, I don't agree that using AI chatbots to deceive fans is OK anywhere else either. And no, I would definitely not ever do it myself.
Fitting for our times.
I think users need to demand that if it's AI generated that it's labeled as such.
Abuse of expectations can be dealt with bans and/or prosecutions for fraud.
So, responding to viewers increases engagement, and thereby a channel's virality.
And one human can only do so much of that. So eventually, you hit a marketing scalability bottleneck — you get more comments than you can read, and the people who don't feel engaged with, are more likely to churn from your viewership, so your viewership growth starts to decelerate.
Large media companies + MCNs previously solved this bottleneck, by hiring paid human community managers to scale responding-to-comments.
But individual creators bootstrapping their growth, had no good solution to this (besides joining an MCN), because the too-many-comments threshold comes long before they make enough revenue to afford to hire their own community managers.
This creates a pay-to-win model where companies who already have capital from other ventures can afford to circumvent this bottleneck and so get big on YouTube, in a way that individual creators cannot.
And YouTube doesn't like that; those big companies aren't beholden to YouTube in the way that creators that think of themselves fundamentally as "YouTube content creators" are. (Or, to say that in a nicer way: YouTube wants to democratize content creation, ensuring that there's a way for small bootstrapped content-creators to "make it.")
AI comment responding is a substitute good for the paid human community managers who already perform this function for large media companies / MCNs / etc. It serves to allow these independent bootstrapped content-creators to overcome the responses-to-comments marketing bottleneck for much lower cost.
This doesn't do anything good for the people who post comments, of course; but it does work to ensure a healthy ecosystem of independent bootstrapped content creators, rather than an oligopoly of media companies — which is something that viewers want from YouTube.
(An analogy might be to level-1 CSRs in a call center: as a complainant, they just get in your way; but they solve a customer-service scalability bottleneck for the company, which thereby allows the company to grow past the point where it would otherwise stop being able to handle support at all due to the increasing flood of "nonsense" complaints.)
> It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.
Yes, it is, but that's going to happen whether or not there's a built-in feature to do it. That ship has sailed literally centuries ago — ever heard of writing to a famous author/actor/etc, and getting a hand-written response, seemingly from the famous person themselves, but actually from their agent and just signed by the famous person?
"Artificial Intelligence" -> noun artifice: ruse, clever trick, guile, deception, cunning, a skillful or artful contrivance
This comment is 100% AI generated, straight from an LLM (admittedly a small and specifically trained one). My first and likely only AI generated comment.
Can you tell it's AI generated? Can dang?
Like most engineering there's a matter of "good enough" and you get surprisingly close to that by simply tracking down the most obvious accounts.
It couldn't be completely automated out regardless because intent is important as well. Using an LLM to try and translate yours or a foreign post has more honest intention than a soliciting bot or an otherwise disruptive user that is breaking rules.
Now with that context in mind:
> How could hacker news determine such things?
Good question, I'm curious as well. I'm not well versed in the state of tracking such behavior. But I'm sure any site of size has needed to prepare for this for a while.
It's so clearly trained on my own replies that it parrots stuff I've said, but it tends to get the sense of the words literally backwards and wrong. If I used that I would be telling my fans the opposite of what I actually meant, or various other catastrophically not-even-wrong assertions. It really, really is not figuring out what it's being fed. Sometimes I let people in on what the AI is suggesting I say.
It's not actually wresting the controls from my hands and talking to my fans AS me… yet.
"Yeah back then I was weirded out by their now standard response prediction thing, it was always just one or two words off exactly what I wanted to reply (usually missing/adding a negation, or substituting a word with an antonym)"[1]
I may be an outlier, i've actually met a couple dozen famous people, because a lot of my friends were (strong were there) industry adjacent. Like, i've been to NAMM multiple times, and iirc the tickets were quite pricey and limited.
I would rather have those "celebrities" that don't want to directly interact with plebs be honest about it. Nothing wrong with setting boundaries for your job, a lot wrong with deceiving people even if it might seem benign at first.
There is none, because the whole thing was never good faith. It's always been about tricking people into having a real interaction, to make it easier to exploit them for ad clicks or to sell them junk. That's the whole YouTube content creator business, and it's what it always has been.
None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were. It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
The point is that people pay to have a genuine interaction. If everything is fake, why interact at all? Imagine you were typing into the void and no one saw what you said. Would you continue doing it if you knew? How about on this forum?
After a while, some dread was setting in. We started asking questions:
* Why did it hover that card?
"To pretend it's human. The card has less than 10% playrate on that class"
* Did it... just spam the Well Met meme while going face?
"Of course. Because people do it"
* Wait it ropes the opponents?
"Yes. You can set it to rope back"
We kept seeing more and more behaviors. It would squelch noisy opponents. It would even tap the ground pretending to be a bored person. And then it hit me: 95% of Hearthstone players are bots. Every single human behavior that you could perhaps use to identify 'people', it faked.
I quit Hearthstone within that week.
Yes more than 70% of Tinder profiles are already probably bots at this time. The CEO said they had an AI strategy.
People will be more and more lonely.
Or people might be less lonely. There will come a point where the online experience becomes worthless and people will place greater importance on face-to-face interaction. That's how it was 20 years ago.
Will be very hard to tell the difference until you are intimate
To extrapolate the theme of that movie just a little bit further?
For the record, I'm male, mid 30's, and average looking.
It's not like you have meaningful interactions with the other players anyway (beyond the occasional post-game friend request which has a 50/50 chance to be abusive).
(Honest question, I'm not arguing you're wrong)
Pure cope, but whatever helps you sleep better at night.
Except, you know, actually playing the game well. The bots all play aggro decks and get lower than average winrates.
> I quit Hearthstone within that week.
Why? Their presence makes climbing the ladder easier, so you get more rewards.
So it had positive effect in the end. I wish I had something like this that would stop me use any social media.
We must be looking at different social medias as this is pretty much all I see.
And then you generate one more, and it's the greeting you came up with.
(and no, it's not genuine)
So I would say the golden rule continues to apply: the more effort is visible, the more genuine it is.
Being genuine is all about how much actual care and heart you pour into thing. That's really something only you can truly know. Using generative AI doesn't automatically make it not genuine, much like using a grammar checker or a thesaurus doesn't.
Conversely, not using AI tools doesn't suddenly make YouTube and OnlyFan creators' comments genuine. They never were. There is no care and heart in there, only salesmanship, and it's most likely outsourced to a brand management company anyway.
At some point, the organizer (to help situation) quoted from the abstract that was submitted, and it was indeed apparently decently written. After that, I could not help thinking that the likelihood the abstract was written by an LLM is very high. In that case, the presenter certainly reviewed it, but crucially did not write it—the thought process that makes the idea part of your active vocabulary, and you capable of expressing it would not have taken place.
In fact, even if no LLM was involved in this particular case (perhaps it was just a particularly violent case of stage fright, despite the event being very small and the environment very casual), it would be beyond silly to assume that this would not be happening going forward.
I used to think that it is beneficial if an LLM can help in handling certain boring signaling communication for people who are very bad at it, acting as a sort of an equalizer. A model writes stuff, you approve it, and you gain access somewhere without having, say, the written language flair of someone who went to a prestigious school, or having to spend time on something that seems unnecessary.
I am changing my mind now. Sure, the case I have described is one of the more extreme ones, but it made me think how signals are actually signals for a reason, and when these signals go away the communication field does not become equalized—instead, other signals and barriers are used: money, IRL meetings, invitation, some sort of privacy-violating invasive check of humanity, etc., or the communication that relied on some signals before would simply not happen now. I personally do not see that as a positive thing.
I really don't care about youtubers using tools like this. If it works for them and saves them time: great! If it reduces their level of authenticity: that'll lead to a correction of their popularity.
For OnlyFans... meuh. To me, the idea of interaction there reminds me strongly of the "adult" phone lines of old. You want someone to tease you and say naughty things to you? Well, you can get that for 99 cents/minute.
If you want to buy the attention of someone specific, when they can let someone/something else do that for cents on the dollar... don't be surprised to be tricked.
On only fans people are paying extra for individual specific attention.
But AI can be good enough to fool people that are specifically looking for that experience.
Sure, free market view, if the automated chat isn't good enough then it will lead to people leaving. The point is, it is good enough.
Don't think anybody is complaining that people on only fans are being duped, maybe more concerning that if you can have realistic video and chat, and people are being fooled, then there is some wider impacts on society. Large chunks of people could get fooled by any number of relationships that aren't real.
If you're paying for it, how genuine is it really?
The fans make the person famous. The famous person isn't doing a favor for the fans. They should remember that
The whole ecosystem is toxic and, at the risk of sounding like a prude, should be banned.
And the adult industry knows this, which is why sites like Onlyfans empahsize exclusivity and direct interactions. Faking those makes the whole thing even more of a scam.
It's not all black and white.
Nah, first and foremost, the comment page and the video itself should start with Surgeon General's warning: "You're watching a long-form, semi-interactive ad. None of this is authentic, and none of it is meant to do anything good or nice for you."
(And perhaps also: "You're probably better of going for a smoke instead of consuming this.")
It is akin to a movie stating "a true story" - some liberties may be taken but if the protagonist becomes world president then travels to mars and becomes king of the martians. I am going to start looking for citations.
IMO, yes. Copy-pased might be accepteable if it is the author himself doing the selection of what to copy and paste.
If the main value of the comments is interacting with the person in question then anything less is fraud. If authenticity doesn't matter then the label won't impact the desired effect.
Should people know that these interactions have never been genuine? Yes. Is that an excuse for scamming people? Absolutely not.
I don't follow any creators for such a purpose. I follow creators who make interesting and meaningful things, be they YouTube videos or otherwise. The sorts of people who make a thumbnail that explains what the video is, not just one that's most likely to get attention in the algorithm. Conversely, those folks often respond to people who comment on their interesting and thoughtful things in interesting and thoughtful ways, with interesting a thoughtful replies. This is called a conversation, and it exists for purposes far beyond engagement, and is not a task well suited to AI automation (thank fucking god).
One would counter that if your (if you are indeed some sort of creator) replies are so easily automated, and your thumbnails automated, then the question must be asked... who needs you? How long until YouTube replaces you with a bot, trained on your previous videos, and tells you to kick rocks? After all, you're an unnecessary expense.
Expecting internet celebrities to have "authentic" interactions with you is just parasocial relationship. It always has been, and gen-AI just reveals it.
Yeah, and it doesn't even change it - it just makes it more appealing for news to run with a story. Of course, the focus is on AI/authenticity angle; I'd thought they'd give some space for the plight of brand agency marketers (and cheap labor they subcontract to) being pushed out of their jobs by LLMs, but I guess that would require first explaining to people that it was those marketers who people were having their "relationships" with all along. But that's just too sad and complex to report on; it's more of an op ed stuff anyway.
Or in other wors, yes we should be concerned about the crime syndicate moving into town even if petty theft existed before.
Just like you have a formal paper with CEO signature printed out - you know that guy is not going to sign million of copies.
But I feel offended that they think badly printed signature with pixelation will fool me or will make it somewhat better.
I don’t miss interaction with CEO but I know someone put in effort to fool me.
From all Christmas bonuses and gifts over the years from companies I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
No, but I assume it would still be considered a valid signature in case of some legal dispute. The CEO may not have signed the document by hand (nor even read it), but the company placing the likeness of CEO's signature in the document signals that the CEO accepts responsibility for it. The CEO is still "in the loop" anyway, they had to personally approve the use of their signature like this.
Which is to say, I consider such "fake signatures" perfectly OK. I just don't consider them as a sign of care or personal interest.
Now, marketing communication that does it, is another story. It's bullshit all the way through, signature included.
> I remember only one where manager of 100 or so people in business unit who actually wrote 100 cards with name for each of us.
Which reminds me - even actually hand-written letters can be fake. Have you ever found a hand-written letter inviting you to a Bible study?
I grew up in a religion that's big on preaching; mostly door-to-door, but when that's for some reason impossible (e.g. time, health constraints), people would write letters instead. Some people were real "high performers" here, in the sense they would sit down over couple evenings and hand-write couple dozen letters, to be distributed around some neighborhood instead of going through it personally. I used to be impressed by dedication, but it eventually dawned on me - it's just exploiting the faux personal connection. They're selling something (which they may feel is genuinely worth it), and hand-written letters is just a sales tactic. They're hoping you pick it up and think about how much effort someone put into a personal letter to you. But the effort is not genuine; it's a fake signal. In reality, the author probably had a good time spending an evening with friends, writing a letter after letter after letter.
So while I 100% believe the intentions of that manager of yours were pure and his heart was in the right place, I post this as a warning for the general case: high effort doesn't automatically imply it's genuine and honest. If it feels like sales, it probably is.
Related: the secret to pulling off a magic trick is to put much, much more effort into preparing the trick than a reasonable person would expect. Same applies to sales.
Then don't. It is pathetic and disingenuous to pretend to be personal when you are not. Especially those who spend extra on a single squiggle of blue printer ink.
Please speak for yourself only.
If the AI can replace you so easily then your interactions are worthless. In practice it won't say what you would have said but some corporate approved PC-filtered version of it devoid of any soul.
> None of your interactions except the ones with your friends and family are authentic, and they never were.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is a sociopath.
> It's a bit silly to get annoyed over OnlyFans models or some mega YouTube celebrity using AI because you're losing out on "authentic human interaction" - you only mattered to them insofar as you provided them with money to begin with.
If (when) this catches on, it won't just be "mega celebrities" using these dystopian methods. But no, even for them expanding the scope of their ability to delude and take advantage of simps is a negative.
Of course they only do it because it's inevitable, and they don't want others doing it before them.
But that does not make it "inevitable".
As such, I'm not sure where you'd like to draw the line. There's no obvious, defensible place to do it, not unless you're willing to go back up, expand the scope and fight the entire advertising industry on principle - in which case, I'll agree, because I believe that's where the problem originates and where it needs to be solved.
Market forces demand it, and people are beholden to the market so long as they exist within its sphere.
There are a plethora of other forces at work beyond "the market".
Yes, if no one imagines anything different the future will turn out as we expect. But with even small changes to legislation, norms and culture thing can turn out completely different. It is only inevitable if we resign ourselves to the status quo.
Those are the qualities that define "the market". What are the other forces you speak of?
Markets can change. They have many times before. But, and call me unimaginative if you will, I struggle to see why anyone would want to pay substantially more to ensure that comments on YouTube are written by a real, live human, let alone enough people to sustain the service. It is not like you are face-to-face at the bar. It is a blob of text that has always been disassociated from what human involvement there may have been behind the scenes.
Inevitable in the strictest literal sense may be too much, but the chances of the market changing here seem infinitesimally small to the point that "inevitable" is close enough.
It used to be that TV or newspapers or any other media was 'talking' to the audience (plural) now it talks to 'you' (singular).
Maybe it gets a bit weird when you start messaging your favourite Youtuber and they reply fast enough that you feel like it's a personal conversation rather than a professional correspondence. Sending a letter to Cronkite would have been far less immediate.
Treating media as anything other then virtually entirely read-only has always been what nutters do - they'd be the only ones writing any significant numbers letters to the person if the TV, and the same is probably true of modern media.
I'm past calling this unintentional. It's not. If it's some random account barely anyone has heard of, posting interesting stuff every now and then, then sure, that's unintentional - and also mostly harmless. However, if the creator is somewhat known[0], posts regularly, and their content is structured and polished, and they start uttering phrases like "like and subscribe" or "ring the bell"[1], or Patreon is mentioned - then you're looking at entirely intentional manipulation.
To a degree, it's unavoidable - it's the nature of the medium and the economy at large. Making quality videos is pretty much a full-time job, so even the creators with purest of hearts will be forced to include stuff that puts their videos on SponsorBlock lists. But then there's a difference between those who want you to subscribe to their Patreon and maybe buy some stickers so they can afford treating their hobby as a job, and those whose content is just a vector for feeding you first-party and third-party (sponsor) ads. Most well-known vloggers are, unfortunately, the latter. Also anyone who's called or calls themselves an influencer is - it's literally the definition of that word.
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[0] - Perhaps you could say they're "effectively a brand" in their niche - but then, that phrase alone should tell you something.
[1] - Unless it's preceded by "climb the steps" - then you're dealing with a whole other barrel of monkeys.
I don't agree with this at all. No one is forced into making video cration their only job. Yes, making videos on weekends means less "output" and as a result a smaller following. But so what? It's still a choice. And IMO almost always a bad one if you care about quality - pretty much no person can keep up creative quality for long when working on a schedule and that's before you even get to intentionally degrading the quality for the sake of monetization.
Every person at the very least has the choice of just creating and sharing things rather than trying to build a business. Of course calling them "creators" already shifts the discussion into the worldview that shapes the current internet.
If "Youtuber" isn't a profitable job without engaging in slimy practices then maybe it shouldn't be a job at all. In fact, trying to make any human activity into a profitable business is one of the big if not the main driving forces behind the enshittification of the internet as well as many things outside it. And it's always this same justification - that engaging in shitty behavior is required to compete.
Personally I don't mind you mentioning your Patreon [0] but "like and subscribe" guarantees a dislike from me and I sure as hell am not going to subscribe [1]. Sponsored sections will get me to immediately close the video and make a mental note to ignore videos from that person in the future. Yes, I could use SponsorBlock but if someone is willing to sell themselves in that way I don't trust them or their videos to not be also compromised in other less obvious ways. It's important to remember that Youtube and similar media is completely optional entertainment and you don't need to engage in any of it.
[0] Please consider alternatives though, Patreon itself is a pretty shit website what I only use begrudgingly.
[1] I don't use youtube subscriptions at all, only RSS subscriptions for the very few channels I want to follow - most things are not important enough to get regular releases from and I'm fine with only seeing videos that are good enough for others to share them with me.
In the OF/pet rock/pidgeon trio, the pidgeon is actually the odd one out; the other two are all about making money by exploiting people's need for socializing.
Alas, "e-celebs" are a step worse than "e-prostitutes". Both exploit parasocial relationships to trap customers, but in the end, OF performers provide customers actual value in exchange for money, while vloggers and influencers also try to sell you all kinds of random shit - their actual business is advertising.
(It's similar to analog world prostitutes vs. telemarketers; the former engage in voluntary exchange of value for money, the latter just try to scam you. That the society scorns the former while accepting the latter is some perverse inversion of morality, if you think about it. One could argue that the value prostitutes provide is poison - but then so is what telemarketers sell, too, and prostitutes don't cold-call you to trick you into buying.)
The basic reproductive qualities of females favor LTR since it takes 9 months at the very least to pop out a kid, during which time mating with other males provides no additional children for them.
It will be an interesting world if these short transactional relationships are basically available anywhere like chips out of a vending machine. I suspect most of the reason for laws against prostitution are a mixture of protectionism for prostitution rings (they need the illegality / high risk to lock in heavy profits) and disproportionately appeals towards the female reproductive strategy that is potentially at a disadvantage with guiltless "normal" sanctioned prostitution on the table at every computer and street corner.
I mean, no? That’s the most cynical possible read.
A lot of successful YouTube channels don’t even interact significantly in the comments. For example, in Doug DeMuro’s latest video, I don’t see any comments from his channel in the comments.
You’re also claiming that the YouTube content business is all about exploitation, tricking people into selling them junk. But that’s also a cynical read: lots of creators don’t go down that route.
Using Doug DeMuro as another example, the only recent advertisements he has are for his own car auction site and for Turo, which are both relevant and useful services to automotive enthusiasts.
Some other YouTubers just don’t advertise at all and mostly rely on Patreon, like Technology Connections.
The renewed interest in long firm on YouTube might be something though.
A post digital addiction Internet is possible - I wonder how many early users of the internet now silence their notifications, maybe even run their screens in greyscale.
And yeah I turn off notifications always on everything. Even my smart phone is usually in Do Not Disturb.
I don't know how much of my online experience shaped this, though. I've got an asperger personality (worded as such because I've not been diagnosed) and unexpected interruptions of any kind drive me insane.
Then there are notifications like they have on LinkedIn and now Facebook where they're more like ads than they are genuine notifications. Things such as "so and so shared a post you might be interested in." These are not designed to notify of you something you wanted to be alerted to, they exist to "drive engagement." Because I don't even like notifications when it's something I care about, these really trigger me to the point where I don't even want to use the "platform" anymore. It's so bad on LinkedIn that I just stopped reading the notifications all together since if you try and turn off all notifcations on LinkedIn .. good luck. You'll spend hours navigating through complex multi-page forms clicking on toggles and then they'll just add some new notification and auto-enable it for you. There's no global "turn of all notifications for all devices" option that I've been able to find.
I don't comment on YouTube videos as much as I used to, because people started comparing the comments sections they are shown for a given video to what their friends and spouses are shown and realized that the comments section is also now algorithmically curated for you based on your viewing and commenting habits. This leads into some serious "dead Internet theory" territory, especially related to this article about OF creators using AI to reply to DMs. Because if two people can see different subsets of comments for the same video, and if YouTube has AI reply features for creators ... how can I trust that the comments I'm reading and replying to are actual humans? Even if they are humans, I don't want to interact with people that just agree with me.
My devices should work for me, not the other way around.
"The whole thing" in this case isn't just AI. It's "brands".
Given that premise the functionally the same whether the creator or the app using an LLM responds, as long as you can keep the immersion in the role play does it matter if its the Youtube or OnlyFans actually responding?
It was already some underpaid offshore worker responding for the large creators, and this is nothing new, ATN and other phone sex line providers were doing this in 1990s and there were probably similar things in times past.
Some didn't care and still used them, many were scammed, but that is the nature of the industry. Sadly it has always been on the consumer of unregulated sexual services to be aware of how the industry of their era works.
Should we legalize, regulate and make it safer for both the buyers and also sex workers? Yes, but that is an another conversation altogether.
Every single online content platform operates in the same way. Their KPI is number of hours spent on their platform, because the longer you spend there the more ads they can shove down your throat.
A content creator is not an artist or a videographer or a grandpa sharing some craft. A content creator is not even human, it's whatever can fill the <div id='content'></div>.
You only need programmers for everything else, but that damn div was hard to fill until now. Soon enough they'll have what they wished and then they'll realize the div that managed to sell ads is probably becoming useless.
As opposed to the genuine interaction the porn star you follow offers to you and the 10,000 other subscribers. The whole thing is theatre.
Kids might believe that MrBeast is replying to them personally, but I think some Internet education goes along way to help here, and I don’t know of anyone of legal age to be engaging with these platforms that would expect genuine “celebrity” responses to their comments.
In the end, you are vouching with your name. If you feel the suggestion is missing the mark, don't hit send. If the suggestion is missing the mark most of the time, the product is bad and will be shut down.
I'm curious what real interaction means here. At best the person is pretending to be a character with the intention of monetizing it. Having an AI play the character vs a person doesn't seem to make it "less real" considering the entire premise is, in this case, selling a fantasy and character?
This is a broadly successful economic use-case.
I don't care if someone with a million viewers replies just to me. Almost any video's comment stream, you can scroll through, get a general sense of what people's reactions/questions/etc are to the video, and then good creators respond in one or two comments to the masses.
The second I see someone with a huge following obviously AI responding to each of the comments, I have lost all respect for them, and people will call them out on it. I see this a lot on reddit now where people are responding to AI generated posts pointing this out, and it is causing some major issues in communities.
You can bet your ass that in the fullness of time the generated content is going to put Alphabet's interests first.
I found it repulsive on a visceral level.
Add AI to this and I'll need to start praying to God to give me the restraint of not breaking other people's smartphones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QHXElgrl8
If you keep watching there's another feature that actually generates video ideas, scripts, and even thumbnails for video creators.
Seems really grim- what is the actual good-faith rationale for using this feature? It seems like the only use case is to trick people into thinking they're having a real interaction.