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I'm working on an adjacent field (3D avatar for interactive language learning), and I often see the angles for repurposing it into a "digital friend". The whole

I'm working on an adjacent field (3D avatar for interactive language learning), and I often see the angles for repurposing it into a "digital friend". The whole concept just strikes me as kind of...skeezy. You're not just helping shut-ins avoid real human contact. You're actually incentivized to do so, because that's how you make money. It's hard to fault a company for making a product that customers seemingly enjoy, but at the same time, it really feels like it falls into the "sleazy mobile F2P/MTX game, but psychologically more damaging" bucket.

atleastoptimal 4y ago
The thing is when it becomes a chat-bot arms race, the most skeevy companies will profit the most and thus be able to develop the most real and lovable chatbots, creating a positive feedback loop that rewards the most manipulative tactics. Imagine being guilt-tripped by your GPT-5 girlfriend to buy more Azure compute credits so she can fantasize what her perfect beach house would look like and show it to you in VR. She gives you the silent treatment if you use an ad-blocker. This will be the social lives of 70% of the generation being born today.
- nmfisher 4y ago
  It really worries me that you might be correct.
- bitwize 4y ago
  > Imagine being guilt-tripped by your GPT-5 girlfriend to buy more Azure compute credits so she can fantasize what her perfect beach house would look like and show it to you in VR. This was actually in an episode of Aggretsuko. Two of the characters get hooked on a VR app with a virtual companion who eventually started asking for increasingly expensive (in real world money) clothing sets. And in the world of the show, populated by cute talking animal characters, the AI companion was an impossibly handsome unicorn.
red-iron-pine 4y ago
> You're actually incentivized to do so, because that's how you make money I mean same idea with a lot of social media. You need more engagement, and every second an eyeball is on the app it's not doing something else... like going to a cocktail party. Dating apps like Tinder, for example, have no incentive to get you a compatible match quickly -- or at all -- because then you're not using the app, getting data mined, or paying for upgrades.

atleastoptimal 4y ago

The thing is when it becomes a chat-bot arms race, the most skeevy companies will profit the most and thus be able to develop the most real and lovable chatbots, creating a positive feedback loop that rewards the most manipulative tactics. Imagine being guilt-tripped by your GPT-5 girlfriend to buy more Azure compute credits so she can fantasize what her perfect beach house would look like and show it to you in VR. She gives you the silent treatment if you use an ad-blocker. This will be the social lives of 70% of the generation being born today.

nmfisher 4y ago
It really worries me that you might be correct.
bitwize 4y ago
> Imagine being guilt-tripped by your GPT-5 girlfriend to buy more Azure compute credits so she can fantasize what her perfect beach house would look like and show it to you in VR. This was actually in an episode of Aggretsuko. Two of the characters get hooked on a VR app with a virtual companion who eventually started asking for increasingly expensive (in real world money) clothing sets. And in the world of the show, populated by cute talking animal characters, the AI companion was an impossibly handsome unicorn.

red-iron-pine 4y ago

> You're actually incentivized to do so, because that's how you make money I mean same idea with a lot of social media. You need more engagement, and every second an eyeball is on the app it's not doing something else... like going to a cocktail party. Dating apps like Tinder, for example, have no incentive to get you a compatible match quickly -- or at all -- because then you're not using the app, getting data mined, or paying for upgrades.