You think that's bad, see this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Petloss/

Just because AI is different doesn't mean it's "sad and cringe". You sound like how people viewed online friendships in the 90's. It's OK. Real friends die or change and people have to cope with that. People imagine their dead friends are still somehow around (heaven, ghost, etc.) when they're really not. It's not all that different.

That entire AI boyfriend subreddit feels like some sort of insane asylum dystopia to me. It's not just people cosplaying or writing fanfic. It's people saying they got engaged to their AI boyfriends ("OMG, I can't believe I'm calling him my fiance now!"), complete with physical rings. Artificial intimacy to the nth degree. I'm assuming a lot of those posts are just creative writing exercises but in the past 15 years or so my thoughts of "people can't really be that crazy" when I read batshit stuff online have consistently been proven incorrect.

This is the logical outcome of the parasocial relationships that have been bankrolling most social media personalities for over a decade.

We have automated away the "influencer" and are left with just a mentally ill bank account to exploit.

Just because it's strange and different doesn't mean it's insanity. I likened it to pets because of the grief but there's also religion. People are weird and even true two-way social relationships don't really make a lot of sense practically, other than to feed some primal emotional needs which pets, AI boyfriends, OF and gods all sort of do too. Perhaps some of these things are still helpful, despite being "inasnity" while others might be harmful. Maybe that's the distinction you're seeing, but it's not clear which is which.

It's sad but is it really "cringe"? Can the people have nothing? Why can't we have a chat bot to bs with? Many of us are lonely, miserable but also not really into making friends irl.

It shouldn't be so much of an ask to at least give people language models to chat with.

What you're asking for feels akin to feeding a hungry person chocolate cake and nothing else. Yeah maybe it feels nice, but if you just keep eating chocolate cake, obviously bad shit happens. Something else needs to be fixed, but just (I don't want to even call it band-aiding because it's more akin to doing drugs IMO) coping with a chatbot only really digs the hole deeper.

Just give me the cake bro. Nothing in this society is ever getting fixed again.

Things have been worse than this in the past, and they were fixed.

Make sure they get local models to run offline. That they rely on a virtual friend in the cloud, beyond their control and that can disappear or change personality in an instant makes this even more sad. That would also allow the chats to be truly anonymous and avoid companies abusing data collected by spying on what those people are telling their "friends".