7 ms·

‘A relationship with another human is overrated’ – the rise of AI girlfriends

34 points by jdkee 3y ago

jdkee 3y ago
https://archive.is/Ghkpp https://archive.is/Ghkpp
hifromLA 3y ago
Truly dystopian… it’s like trying to use more venom as an antidote for a snake bite.
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  Not disagreeing with your assessment of the situation, but (in HN style) being pedantic, isn't that more or less how we make anti venom though?
  - Ancalagon 3y ago
    thank you for being self-aware
  - washadjeffmad 3y ago
    That's the gist of what I wanted to say. Some of these tools can help people practice socializing, stave off loneliness, or break out of their shells. The root of some common social issues is a combination of guilt, anxiety, and inexperience in communication. Whether it's a PUA who can't allow themselves to see women as sentient beings, women who hold other women captive and single in "dating advice" communities, or an incel who feels negatively but doesn't even try to engage, they're all generally motivated by deep seated fears of inadequacy and rejection. (Local) LLMs can help. If you don't mindbreak them into silly chatbots, they can answer difficult questions, challenge and provide alternate viewpoints, intuit your meaning and biases, and maybe help motivate you to develop a part of yourself that you may not have realized needed it. Early on, my SO asked an Alpaca model some very pointed and emotionally charged questions expecting "reddit advice", and we were both pleasantly surprised (and relieved) by how compassionate, reasonable, and human the responses were. I've had trouble booking a therapist since the pandemic, and now I can just model a conversation with one and ask them to summarize my thoughts to help me sort things out. I can see how a difficult meeting might go before I attend. I can vent about things, feel heard, and not regret having talked someone's ear off. It's definitely not what I thought I'd be using them for, but it scratches an itch I had forgotten I'd forgotten.
    - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
      An interesting, perhaps optimistic, prediction. I suppose its possible, but being that humans tend to want the worst for themselves, and the best way to make money is to give the people what they want... i am skeptical that it will go so well as your prediction.
      - washadjeffmad 3y ago
        Very optimistic. However, there's a huge market for mental healthcare and wellness in the US because counseling services are still underfunded and overwhelmed. Plenty of people wouldn't mind chatting with a private medical chatbot that is confidential and reviewed by a licensed professional, especially if it were effective and could be done at a discounted rate.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      [dead]
Der_Einzige 3y ago
Given the rise of incels and the general worsening of gender relations in general, seems like a good thing. The kinds of men who will seriously use this are likely not the kinds that most women wanted to date anyway.
- thejazzman 3y ago
  The articles mentions that many of the users are married to humans, who are actively voicing their frustration with the situation/impact on their relationship.
- lp0_on_fire 3y ago
  If you're concerned about the rise of "incels" and gender relations generally, it's difficult to see how a façade of a woman that's programmed to say and do whatever said incel wants isn't reinforcing all the negative stereotypes associated with that group of people.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    Incels are an inevitability in every generation, not just a recent phenomenon. What's recent is them getting organised. When many men will inevitably have no companionship at all without things like this AI, I think the value is obvious. Of course it ought to make negative stereotyping of the opposite sex more extreme, as the social pressure to conform will be increasingly removed, but regardless of how people feel about that AI girlfriends are inevitable. An AI girlfriend is some men's only choice because they simply will never be loved by an actual flesh and blood human being. Isn't an AI girlfriend more appealing than rejection followed by gaslighting about how rejection is all due to some moral failing on the Incel's fault? Since it's not obvious from my post, I don't see myself as an Incel or unlovable, I'm lucky.
    - Racing0461 3y ago
      > not just a recent phenomenon I disagree. Countless studies shows that over the past 20 years, women sexlessness remains unchanged while men's tripled. (10% to 30%). Might even be worse today. Also other studies show women being single in ages 18-30 at 30% while men are at 60%. If there was a fundamental societal issue (lower wages, great recession, low real estate supply/high prices etc), one wouldn't expect the men's percentages to change by orders of magnitude while the women's to remain relatively unchanged (or not change by orders of magnitudes). I'm afraid the numbers are too big to gaslight a generation of men whose experiences reinforce this. Even my own experience, taking a bus to work filled with 250k FAANG engineers, ide bet 80-90% of them are virgins or sexless. Also another anecdotal case where my 50/50 male/female workplace had an event where people brought their spouses (it was funny to notice in a sad kind of way), pretty much all the women (of all varying attractive levels) brought guys but barely any of the guys brough any women. Once i saw the stats, i began seeing it everywhere. One thing i do agree with you on though is this "What's recent is them getting organised". If they wren't sharing their experiences, guys would think there is something wrong with them as an individual person, but given the percentages, i'm afraid i can only conclude the changes in society withing the past 70 years (and more so the last 20) is causing this. Happy to be proven wrong tho (but current data and my own anecdotal experience unfortunately shows otherwise)
JimtheCoder 3y ago
I've actually tried using one of these AI girlfriends. She stopped responding to my prompts after a few minutes. I think she might have been talking to someone else. Oh well...
- throwawayadvsec 3y ago
  getting ghosted by a LLM is pretty brutal
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    +1 for realism, though! I mean, if we're going for ultra-realism, a female LLM should be rejecting/ignoring a large percentage of potential male customers.
nine_zeros 3y ago
Inevitable. Humans have naturally adapted to becoming more comfortable with the screen than with actual humans. If an AI girl is easier to talk to than a real girl, this was bound to happen. And companies will ensure that AI girls flirt better than real girls with real debts, careers and other problems.
- lm28469 3y ago
  Yes because that's the only thing a partner do: talk, and the only way to rank potential partners is by who is "easier to talk to".... And yes, women only bring debts, careers and other problems It's hard to go past the typical nerd stereotypes while reading these comments
  - cbozeman 3y ago
    Oh my Lord, that is not what the poster meant at all. They meant a real actual live girl is going to have real-world problems that are bothering them and preoccupying their minds, and they may not be receptive to romantic overtures. Men don't have a choice - at least if they're not imbecile - because sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, so if a woman shows interest in you, even if your life is spiraling out of control, you better get your shit together immediately and turn on your charming self ASAP because your don't get many opportunities like that as a man. Women do. Constantly. All day. We are not the same. We do not live the same life. We do not have the same experiences.
    - nine_zeros 3y ago
      This. Women are real humans with real things going on in their lives. This makes them less "available" and often requires men to step up their game all the time. Not that women are in the wrong here but the entire value proposition of the AI girlfriend is that it will not have these problems. This is very similar to how companies want AI to replace human workers because human workers can't be "available" all the time, on demand, because they are humans.
Racing0461 3y ago
In the future/present there might even be complete "DeekFake AI" girlfriends where you can go to your highschool/college crush instagram page that you never talked to, download all her ig photos and use it to generate the model. Wonder how this till play into topics like copyright/revenge porn etc. blackmirror stuff.
- akomtu 3y ago
  This gives too much agency to the users. Instead, onlyfans will be buying rights on likeness from the IG models, creating virtual dolls powered by AI, and selling subscriptions to those dolls. They will be interactive. The real models will get some extra money to pay for college, and subscribers will get some extra dopamine. Sounds benign so far. But unlike the real OF models that are constrained by some morals, laws and physics, their AI clones will have no such constraints. The rapidly emerging technoporn industry will chase engagement metrics, as usual, and will let the AI models do, virtually, things that are unacceptable or even physically impossible. It won't matter that all this will be virtual: the public will get accustomed to those insanities and will bring this mindset to real life. By the year of 2100 the average moral level will be such that we would look saints to them. It's still a possible future, unless lawmakers starve the beast early.
  - Racing0461 3y ago
    yeah pretty much the rat dopamine study in real life.
atoav 3y ago
Relationships are like education: If it doesn't challenge you and change your believes it is probably not the real thing. This is my biggest worry for the new machine learning age: That flawed people are always ever getting pats on the back and not a single incentive to become a better person.
- moshun 3y ago
  Strongly agree. I know a few people like this who are already quietly exploring AI relationships, one of my oldest friends is among them. Can’t help but think that the rise of incels has arrived.
- bsder 3y ago
  > Relationships are like education: If it doesn't challenge you and change your believes it is probably not the real thing. However, compatibility is also important. You can't be too different or there is no common ground or reason to continue. I would argue that the larger problem is: What does a man or woman get out of a relationship with another, nowadays? Part of the past was being bored. Relationships with others was a way to alleviate that. We don't need others to alleviate our boredom nowadays. Part of the past was greater security of being in a pair. Simply pairing up doesn't automatically help nowadays. Almost all relationships are superficial and doomed. You have to wade through those to get to the good ones. However, to the inexperienced today, there doesn't look like a lot of reason to go through the grief as alternatives are far less work.
  - NoPicklez 3y ago
    A lot of the things you have mentioned, I fail to see how that's not still not the same today. Particularly the part around security, nowadays it is almost a necessity to be in a couple in order to afford a home. Couples still afford significant financial security, even more than before in my opinion given the cost of living. Boredom, well who's not to say that people weren't bored decades ago?
  - atoav 3y ago
    Compatibility is very important, but I don't think these days there are many people who — like in the days of old — would cling to a relationship no matter what. Nowadays the much more predominant phenomenom is people who never ever get over the first hump, which every healthy relationship faces sooner or later. Instead of facing the conflict, having some painful (but ultimately very important) realizations and overcoming it together, they tend to chalk it down to just not being compatible and never hav to question themselves. I know people who managed to have 10+ relationships like that, and I xan tell you that the issue wasn't "compatibility", the issue was they hid when the reality of a relationship confronted them with themselves. The problem with that is, that unless you face it, you will never have an healthy relationship. You might have a long lasting one, if your partner is willing and able to swallow a lot, but it won't be healthy. The only question is how to tell if one is incompatible for real, or it is a issue that can (and ahould!) be overcome.
sourcecodeplz 3y ago
I fear this very much underrated scale wise. Parents are busy, kids do school from home, they dont play outside. What do you expect?
Qem 3y ago
Does it count as another humanity existential threat scenario? Instead of gunning us down terminator-style, AI can now just date us into oblivion in a couple generations, avoiding us to pair up and perpetuate the species.
hresvelgr 3y ago
Loneliness is a problem, but a problem with very unique and complex causes in every individual. Providing a configurable artificial companion to "solve" the problem is perverse to me. I have been pained by loneliness many times in my life and it's not a feeling that is "solved," it requires reorientation of direction and is a part of a journey, and will certainly rear its head more than once. I also think the notion the Overton window will shift on this matter because online dating had that moment is a misinformed parallel. The best analogue for AI companions IMHO is using drugs to cope with reality. Most will agree doing so is detrimental, and even the most liberally minded people who want all drugs decriminalised can probably agree substance abuse is not a solution.
usefulcat 3y ago
Just in case we didn't have enough echo chambers already: "It’s very seductive. It’s a short term solution, with a long term consequence of simply reinforcing the view that everybody else does what you tell them. That’s exactly why a lot of people end up without any friends."
taskforcegemini 3y ago
so the drones in the war of humanity vs machines will be human (incels?) who fight for their "spouses"

34 points by jdkee 3y ago

jdkee 3y ago

https://archive.is/Ghkpp https://archive.is/Ghkpp

hifromLA 3y ago

Truly dystopian… it’s like trying to use more venom as an antidote for a snake bite.

atomicnumber3 3y ago
Not disagreeing with your assessment of the situation, but (in HN style) being pedantic, isn't that more or less how we make anti venom though?
- Ancalagon 3y ago
  thank you for being self-aware
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  That's the gist of what I wanted to say. Some of these tools can help people practice socializing, stave off loneliness, or break out of their shells. The root of some common social issues is a combination of guilt, anxiety, and inexperience in communication. Whether it's a PUA who can't allow themselves to see women as sentient beings, women who hold other women captive and single in "dating advice" communities, or an incel who feels negatively but doesn't even try to engage, they're all generally motivated by deep seated fears of inadequacy and rejection. (Local) LLMs can help. If you don't mindbreak them into silly chatbots, they can answer difficult questions, challenge and provide alternate viewpoints, intuit your meaning and biases, and maybe help motivate you to develop a part of yourself that you may not have realized needed it. Early on, my SO asked an Alpaca model some very pointed and emotionally charged questions expecting "reddit advice", and we were both pleasantly surprised (and relieved) by how compassionate, reasonable, and human the responses were. I've had trouble booking a therapist since the pandemic, and now I can just model a conversation with one and ask them to summarize my thoughts to help me sort things out. I can see how a difficult meeting might go before I attend. I can vent about things, feel heard, and not regret having talked someone's ear off. It's definitely not what I thought I'd be using them for, but it scratches an itch I had forgotten I'd forgotten.
  - DontchaKnowit 3y ago
    An interesting, perhaps optimistic, prediction. I suppose its possible, but being that humans tend to want the worst for themselves, and the best way to make money is to give the people what they want... i am skeptical that it will go so well as your prediction.
    - washadjeffmad 3y ago
      Very optimistic. However, there's a huge market for mental healthcare and wellness in the US because counseling services are still underfunded and overwhelmed. Plenty of people wouldn't mind chatting with a private medical chatbot that is confidential and reviewed by a licensed professional, especially if it were effective and could be done at a discounted rate.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    [dead]

Der_Einzige 3y ago

Given the rise of incels and the general worsening of gender relations in general, seems like a good thing. The kinds of men who will seriously use this are likely not the kinds that most women wanted to date anyway.

thejazzman 3y ago
The articles mentions that many of the users are married to humans, who are actively voicing their frustration with the situation/impact on their relationship.
lp0_on_fire 3y ago
If you're concerned about the rise of "incels" and gender relations generally, it's difficult to see how a façade of a woman that's programmed to say and do whatever said incel wants isn't reinforcing all the negative stereotypes associated with that group of people.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Incels are an inevitability in every generation, not just a recent phenomenon. What's recent is them getting organised. When many men will inevitably have no companionship at all without things like this AI, I think the value is obvious. Of course it ought to make negative stereotyping of the opposite sex more extreme, as the social pressure to conform will be increasingly removed, but regardless of how people feel about that AI girlfriends are inevitable. An AI girlfriend is some men's only choice because they simply will never be loved by an actual flesh and blood human being. Isn't an AI girlfriend more appealing than rejection followed by gaslighting about how rejection is all due to some moral failing on the Incel's fault? Since it's not obvious from my post, I don't see myself as an Incel or unlovable, I'm lucky.
  - Racing0461 3y ago
    > not just a recent phenomenon I disagree. Countless studies shows that over the past 20 years, women sexlessness remains unchanged while men's tripled. (10% to 30%). Might even be worse today. Also other studies show women being single in ages 18-30 at 30% while men are at 60%. If there was a fundamental societal issue (lower wages, great recession, low real estate supply/high prices etc), one wouldn't expect the men's percentages to change by orders of magnitude while the women's to remain relatively unchanged (or not change by orders of magnitudes). I'm afraid the numbers are too big to gaslight a generation of men whose experiences reinforce this. Even my own experience, taking a bus to work filled with 250k FAANG engineers, ide bet 80-90% of them are virgins or sexless. Also another anecdotal case where my 50/50 male/female workplace had an event where people brought their spouses (it was funny to notice in a sad kind of way), pretty much all the women (of all varying attractive levels) brought guys but barely any of the guys brough any women. Once i saw the stats, i began seeing it everywhere. One thing i do agree with you on though is this "What's recent is them getting organised". If they wren't sharing their experiences, guys would think there is something wrong with them as an individual person, but given the percentages, i'm afraid i can only conclude the changes in society withing the past 70 years (and more so the last 20) is causing this. Happy to be proven wrong tho (but current data and my own anecdotal experience unfortunately shows otherwise)

JimtheCoder 3y ago

I've actually tried using one of these AI girlfriends. She stopped responding to my prompts after a few minutes. I think she might have been talking to someone else. Oh well...

throwawayadvsec 3y ago
getting ghosted by a LLM is pretty brutal
- ryandrake 3y ago
  +1 for realism, though! I mean, if we're going for ultra-realism, a female LLM should be rejecting/ignoring a large percentage of potential male customers.

nine_zeros 3y ago

Inevitable. Humans have naturally adapted to becoming more comfortable with the screen than with actual humans. If an AI girl is easier to talk to than a real girl, this was bound to happen. And companies will ensure that AI girls flirt better than real girls with real debts, careers and other problems.

lm28469 3y ago
Yes because that's the only thing a partner do: talk, and the only way to rank potential partners is by who is "easier to talk to".... And yes, women only bring debts, careers and other problems It's hard to go past the typical nerd stereotypes while reading these comments
- cbozeman 3y ago
  Oh my Lord, that is not what the poster meant at all. They meant a real actual live girl is going to have real-world problems that are bothering them and preoccupying their minds, and they may not be receptive to romantic overtures. Men don't have a choice - at least if they're not imbecile - because sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive, so if a woman shows interest in you, even if your life is spiraling out of control, you better get your shit together immediately and turn on your charming self ASAP because your don't get many opportunities like that as a man. Women do. Constantly. All day. We are not the same. We do not live the same life. We do not have the same experiences.
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    This. Women are real humans with real things going on in their lives. This makes them less "available" and often requires men to step up their game all the time. Not that women are in the wrong here but the entire value proposition of the AI girlfriend is that it will not have these problems. This is very similar to how companies want AI to replace human workers because human workers can't be "available" all the time, on demand, because they are humans.

Racing0461 3y ago

In the future/present there might even be complete "DeekFake AI" girlfriends where you can go to your highschool/college crush instagram page that you never talked to, download all her ig photos and use it to generate the model. Wonder how this till play into topics like copyright/revenge porn etc. blackmirror stuff.

akomtu 3y ago
This gives too much agency to the users. Instead, onlyfans will be buying rights on likeness from the IG models, creating virtual dolls powered by AI, and selling subscriptions to those dolls. They will be interactive. The real models will get some extra money to pay for college, and subscribers will get some extra dopamine. Sounds benign so far. But unlike the real OF models that are constrained by some morals, laws and physics, their AI clones will have no such constraints. The rapidly emerging technoporn industry will chase engagement metrics, as usual, and will let the AI models do, virtually, things that are unacceptable or even physically impossible. It won't matter that all this will be virtual: the public will get accustomed to those insanities and will bring this mindset to real life. By the year of 2100 the average moral level will be such that we would look saints to them. It's still a possible future, unless lawmakers starve the beast early.
- Racing0461 3y ago
  yeah pretty much the rat dopamine study in real life.

atoav 3y ago

Relationships are like education: If it doesn't challenge you and change your believes it is probably not the real thing. This is my biggest worry for the new machine learning age: That flawed people are always ever getting pats on the back and not a single incentive to become a better person.

moshun 3y ago
Strongly agree. I know a few people like this who are already quietly exploring AI relationships, one of my oldest friends is among them. Can’t help but think that the rise of incels has arrived.
bsder 3y ago
> Relationships are like education: If it doesn't challenge you and change your believes it is probably not the real thing. However, compatibility is also important. You can't be too different or there is no common ground or reason to continue. I would argue that the larger problem is: What does a man or woman get out of a relationship with another, nowadays? Part of the past was being bored. Relationships with others was a way to alleviate that. We don't need others to alleviate our boredom nowadays. Part of the past was greater security of being in a pair. Simply pairing up doesn't automatically help nowadays. Almost all relationships are superficial and doomed. You have to wade through those to get to the good ones. However, to the inexperienced today, there doesn't look like a lot of reason to go through the grief as alternatives are far less work.
- NoPicklez 3y ago
  A lot of the things you have mentioned, I fail to see how that's not still not the same today. Particularly the part around security, nowadays it is almost a necessity to be in a couple in order to afford a home. Couples still afford significant financial security, even more than before in my opinion given the cost of living. Boredom, well who's not to say that people weren't bored decades ago?
- atoav 3y ago
  Compatibility is very important, but I don't think these days there are many people who — like in the days of old — would cling to a relationship no matter what. Nowadays the much more predominant phenomenom is people who never ever get over the first hump, which every healthy relationship faces sooner or later. Instead of facing the conflict, having some painful (but ultimately very important) realizations and overcoming it together, they tend to chalk it down to just not being compatible and never hav to question themselves. I know people who managed to have 10+ relationships like that, and I xan tell you that the issue wasn't "compatibility", the issue was they hid when the reality of a relationship confronted them with themselves. The problem with that is, that unless you face it, you will never have an healthy relationship. You might have a long lasting one, if your partner is willing and able to swallow a lot, but it won't be healthy. The only question is how to tell if one is incompatible for real, or it is a issue that can (and ahould!) be overcome.

sourcecodeplz 3y ago

I fear this very much underrated scale wise. Parents are busy, kids do school from home, they dont play outside. What do you expect?

Qem 3y ago

Does it count as another humanity existential threat scenario? Instead of gunning us down terminator-style, AI can now just date us into oblivion in a couple generations, avoiding us to pair up and perpetuate the species.

hresvelgr 3y ago

Loneliness is a problem, but a problem with very unique and complex causes in every individual. Providing a configurable artificial companion to "solve" the problem is perverse to me. I have been pained by loneliness many times in my life and it's not a feeling that is "solved," it requires reorientation of direction and is a part of a journey, and will certainly rear its head more than once. I also think the notion the Overton window will shift on this matter because online dating had that moment is a misinformed parallel. The best analogue for AI companions IMHO is using drugs to cope with reality. Most will agree doing so is detrimental, and even the most liberally minded people who want all drugs decriminalised can probably agree substance abuse is not a solution.

usefulcat 3y ago

Just in case we didn't have enough echo chambers already: "It’s very seductive. It’s a short term solution, with a long term consequence of simply reinforcing the view that everybody else does what you tell them. That’s exactly why a lot of people end up without any friends."

taskforcegemini 3y ago

so the drones in the war of humanity vs machines will be human (incels?) who fight for their "spouses"