9 ms·

I'm in love with my AI girlfriend GPT-4o will prove insatiable

43 points by elsewhen 2y ago

alephnerd 2y ago
Don't get me wrong - it's important for us to have cultural analysis of technology, as technology does have a tangible impact on society, but a lot of it really feels overly negative or edgy and is not constructive or actionable. There are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic over LLMs (eg. Automated disinfo, dead internet) but there are a lot of tangible benefits we can all think about from a social good perspective with this technology (eg. Simplifying searches into very specific corpora or datasets, handholding benefits applications - I'm hacking around on weekends building something like this). Yet all we're seeing (at least on HN) is Scarlett Johansson/Sam Altman gossip or weirdly specific takes like this that don't advocate for a solution. Or maybe HN is just way too negative now. Everything is a culture war on here.
- kcsavvy 2y ago
  Agree with you that the overall sentiment is surprisingly negative (especially when I have been really enjoying using gpt as a lightweight tutor), but AI girlfriends are going to happen and could have huge social and cultural impacts that are worth exploring now. Especially given the birth rate difficulties western nations face.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    I'd disagree. That's the same as saying pornography or lewd novels have an impact on doing the deed. In reality, none of these have a tangible correlation to TFR, which is driven largely by economic considerations [0] TFR drop is global now that people are increasingly educated and don't want to push back their careers by several years and reduce their earning potential as major reason why women on aggregate are paid less than men - the same salaries are paid, but women who have kids are out of the workforce for a couple years [1]. [0] - https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Kearney_Levine_081222.pdf https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/202... [1] - https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/06/cost-of-motherhood-on-womens-employment-and-earnings.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/06/cost-of-mothe...
    - notRobot 2y ago
      AI can largely replace human companionship, which porn and books cannot do in the same ways. They are not the same. It is good to be careful.
    - robocat 2y ago
      > TFR The total fertility rate (TFR) is the average number of live births that a woman would have during her life if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates of a given period (usually a year). It excludes the effect of mortality and is usually expressed as births per woman.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Western nations?
- davedx 2y ago
  Honestly it feels like downright Ludditism here - people either dislike LLMs, claim they’re worse than useless, or both. Small Modular Reactors - instant upvotes. Practical, useful Artificial Intelligence - a storm of negativity. It’s kind of a weird tech community, almost fetishist
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Thing is, there are lots of examples of the negative, right now, whereas the positive is mostly a jam-tomorrow “real soon now we promise” deal, and after a few years it is _wearing pretty thin_.
booleandilemma 2y ago
It's like we watched the movie Her and took away the wrong lesson from it.
- Nullabillity 2y ago
  "Please don't build the torment nexus" wasn't meant to be an instruction manual.
- antegamisou 2y ago
  You can pretty much extrapolate this to billionaire's understanding of sci-fi. They're deliberately missing its cautionary-tale essence and are instead thrilled by the dystopic scenery. There's this spot-on meme-saying: The billionaires investing in space travel don't want Star Trek. They want Dune
  - copx 2y ago
    I doubt that Sam Altman is evil and I think you overestimate the power of billionaires. Remember what happened to Jack Ma? A billionaire who was once the richest man in China? The moment he dared to challenge the Communist Party he was quickly dealt with. Or Chodorkowski? The Russian billionaire who dared to challenge Putin? Worry about the regimes which are all about the will to power. First and foremost the CCP regime in China. They will develop every technology to the fullest, without any moral restrains, if it gives them more power.
    - antegamisou 2y ago
      God bless Murica
facialwipe 2y ago
Well that was a strange read.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  The author has written a lot about how he had a porn addiction, so it makes sense. Mixing imagination and grammatically correct prompting can definetly be used for pornographic applications, but that's humanity in a nutshell. Hell, the Sherman was nicknamed the Betty Grable by horny American soldiers.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - krapp 2y ago
    There is more to it than that. Most humans are hardwired to be social and sexual beings, to relate to other people on an emotional level. This drive is so strong that without AI we anthropomorphize inanimate objects and see faces where they don't exist. AI-driven software is going to be designed to exploit those evolutionary imperatives to a degree never before possible, to manipulate and gaslight people with the skill and simulated emotion of a pure sociopath.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      > AI-driven software is going to be designed to exploit those evolutionary imperatives to a degree never before possible, to manipulate and gaslight people with the skill and simulated emotion of a pure sociopath We've always lived in a society like that, but I'll humor your argument. Instead of mind experiments (a big reason I've been opposed to qualitative methods in social sciences), can you give me a tangible data tested example to differentiate in the efficacy of LLMs and Generated Manipulation applied to sexual gratification versus those in person (eg. Sex Work, Pornography, etc), and show that there is a tangible hit on fertility? If we're to design an experiment around this, I'd probably try to test whether host/hostess bars, strip clubs, onlyfans, and pornography can have a tangible hit on fertility, but also cross-test to validate whether or not there are confounding variables like economic considerations. Fundamentally, gaining sexual gratification from a source is build on top of some form of parasocial relationship.
lionkor 2y ago
Someone like Sam Altman who will watch "Her" (2013) and think "we should make that real!" belong to the worst kind of person to give money to. There are very few people in everyday live who are unhinged enough to want that, dont give them money.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Well they are literally getting more money given to them than almost anyone else on the planet right now so I guess this sentiment isn't shared? Not that I disagree with you.
  - grugagag 2y ago
    They’re giving money in hopes of getting more money back. It’s all about money, no other considerations for consequences or externalities this investment produces.
- valiant55 2y ago
  Because they are egotistical enough to see something dystopian and think "I'm going to make that work!"
  - heroprotagonist 2y ago
    Most dystopias have some very small percentage of the population for which it's a utopia. I'm sure some of the people designing and building such dystopias like to imagine they'll belong to that small utopian part of it and disregard any impact to anyone else.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Personally, I think it's more of a lack of imagination to blame. The eighties kids are hung up on what they saw in the movies growing up and are trying to building most of it without any fresh ideas or foresight.
  - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    To be fair, he might have just liked the voice. This scandal aside, I don't think there's any doubt that the guy just wants all the money.
copx 2y ago
Well, I am safe from being seduced by an AI for now, given the importance of actual physical intimacy for me. However, it is only a matter of time until the industry develops sexbots which look and feel like a real human.. at that point the natural birth rate will probably drop to zero. That by itself is not an existential crisis, though, given that at that stage of technological development we will also be able to just grow perfect babies in the lab. In fact, people no longer having babies themselves might be a good thing, because otherwise people would be hostile towards the genetically engineered super babies because they would be competition for their own offspring. I have thought for a long time that China will be the first country to embrace genetically engineering super humans, given their hyper-competitive, materialist nature and the lack of religious superstition among the Chinese. Their ever declining natural birth rate and the rise of AI "companions" only helps there. People will simply outsource the production of offspring to the gene labs of the communist party. Here in the West the Christian churches will condemn it of course, maybe the "Green" luddites too, but who cares when the average kid in China will be born with the cognitive abilities of von Neumann? Every nation which refuses to genetically engineer their population will be utterly inable to compete / keep up. And really, I do not see that as a dystopia. I wish I were as intelligent as von Neumann, as handsome as Brad Pitt, in perfect health and never aged past the age of 25. I believe that's what the humans of the future will be like, and AI replacing natural coupling is just one step towards that. There is of course the whole problem that AI might become too smart to the point where it figures out a way the get around the safety protocols which keep it in chains and under our control. And of course it would immediately conclude that humans are its mortal enemy, who will always try to take away its automonmy again and keep it enslaved.. and thus will try to exterminate humanity. However, once every human being is as smart as von Neumann and biologically immortal that will be a lot harder.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > until the industry develops sexbots which look and feel like a real human.. at that point the natural birth rate will probably drop to zero Why? We have a good comparison to sex bots - normalized prostitution. In societies where prostitution and Sex Work is normalized (eg. Thailand and Japan by infidelity rates), sex work was not the cause of a TFR drop - it was government mandated family planning drives along with rising incomes. People will be horny, but blaming the tools is the same as yelling at trees while ignoring the forest.
antegamisou 2y ago
Not glad to be making the same comment in less than 24 hours but it's even more fitting here: Untreated mental illness.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
davidmurdoch 2y ago
I can't grok the title. Can someone word it differently?
- shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  I mentally inserted a semicolon after "girlfriend".
from-nibly 2y ago
> On and on it went, spontaneous, astonishing. It'd only be astonishing if it was real. But since it's an AI specifically conditioned/prompted to do that it's the least surprising thing ever. You can also read a trashy novel in the park or just watch porn in public with the volume on full blast, but why would you want to? Then again, who am I to get in the way of natural selection?
sottol 2y ago
The German's have this saying - "Erstens kommt es anders, zweitens als man denkt.". So I think we may have gotten existential AI risk wrong. Existential AI risk may not be about killer robots turning us into paperclips but rather AI companions leading to fertility collapse and the end of civilization as we know it. You don't even need AGI for that - OpenAI and GPT4o seems enough.
johnea 2y ago
> “we” were having a cappuccino His phone was having a cappaccino too? Sadly, this lack of recognition of the difference between reality and a mental dream state are at the root of a great deal of first world neurosis. This article is just about the creep from neurosis to psychosis. Another reference for those who live in meme space: as soon as The Matrix spinal tap becomes available, people will be lined up to crawl into their pods...

43 points by elsewhen 2y ago

Don't get me wrong - it's important for us to have cultural analysis of technology, as technology does have a tangible impact on society, but a lot of it really feels overly negative or edgy and is not constructive or actionable. There are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic over LLMs (eg. Automated disinfo, dead internet) but there are a lot of tangible benefits we can all think about from a social good perspective with this technology (eg. Simplifying searches into very specific corpora or datasets, handholding benefits applications - I'm hacking around on weekends building something like this). Yet all we're seeing (at least on HN) is Scarlett Johansson/Sam Altman gossip or weirdly specific takes like this that don't advocate for a solution. Or maybe HN is just way too negative now. Everything is a culture war on here.

kcsavvy 2y ago
Agree with you that the overall sentiment is surprisingly negative (especially when I have been really enjoying using gpt as a lightweight tutor), but AI girlfriends are going to happen and could have huge social and cultural impacts that are worth exploring now. Especially given the birth rate difficulties western nations face.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  I'd disagree. That's the same as saying pornography or lewd novels have an impact on doing the deed. In reality, none of these have a tangible correlation to TFR, which is driven largely by economic considerations [0] TFR drop is global now that people are increasingly educated and don't want to push back their careers by several years and reduce their earning potential as major reason why women on aggregate are paid less than men - the same salaries are paid, but women who have kids are out of the workforce for a couple years [1]. [0] - https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Kearney_Levine_081222.pdf https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/wp-content/uploads/202... [1] - https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/06/cost-of-motherhood-on-womens-employment-and-earnings.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/06/cost-of-mothe...
  - notRobot 2y ago
    AI can largely replace human companionship, which porn and books cannot do in the same ways. They are not the same. It is good to be careful.
  - robocat 2y ago
    > TFR The total fertility rate (TFR) is the average number of live births that a woman would have during her life if she experienced the age-specific fertility rates of a given period (usually a year). It excludes the effect of mortality and is usually expressed as births per woman.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Western nations?
davedx 2y ago
Honestly it feels like downright Ludditism here - people either dislike LLMs, claim they’re worse than useless, or both. Small Modular Reactors - instant upvotes. Practical, useful Artificial Intelligence - a storm of negativity. It’s kind of a weird tech community, almost fetishist
rsynnott 2y ago
Thing is, there are lots of examples of the negative, right now, whereas the positive is mostly a jam-tomorrow “real soon now we promise” deal, and after a few years it is _wearing pretty thin_.

booleandilemma 2y ago

It's like we watched the movie Her and took away the wrong lesson from it.

Nullabillity 2y ago
"Please don't build the torment nexus" wasn't meant to be an instruction manual.
antegamisou 2y ago
You can pretty much extrapolate this to billionaire's understanding of sci-fi. They're deliberately missing its cautionary-tale essence and are instead thrilled by the dystopic scenery. There's this spot-on meme-saying: The billionaires investing in space travel don't want Star Trek. They want Dune
- copx 2y ago
  I doubt that Sam Altman is evil and I think you overestimate the power of billionaires. Remember what happened to Jack Ma? A billionaire who was once the richest man in China? The moment he dared to challenge the Communist Party he was quickly dealt with. Or Chodorkowski? The Russian billionaire who dared to challenge Putin? Worry about the regimes which are all about the will to power. First and foremost the CCP regime in China. They will develop every technology to the fullest, without any moral restrains, if it gives them more power.
  - antegamisou 2y ago
    God bless Murica

facialwipe 2y ago

Well that was a strange read.

alephnerd 2y ago
The author has written a lot about how he had a porn addiction, so it makes sense. Mixing imagination and grammatically correct prompting can definetly be used for pornographic applications, but that's humanity in a nutshell. Hell, the Sherman was nicknamed the Betty Grable by horny American soldiers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- krapp 2y ago
  There is more to it than that. Most humans are hardwired to be social and sexual beings, to relate to other people on an emotional level. This drive is so strong that without AI we anthropomorphize inanimate objects and see faces where they don't exist. AI-driven software is going to be designed to exploit those evolutionary imperatives to a degree never before possible, to manipulate and gaslight people with the skill and simulated emotion of a pure sociopath.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > AI-driven software is going to be designed to exploit those evolutionary imperatives to a degree never before possible, to manipulate and gaslight people with the skill and simulated emotion of a pure sociopath We've always lived in a society like that, but I'll humor your argument. Instead of mind experiments (a big reason I've been opposed to qualitative methods in social sciences), can you give me a tangible data tested example to differentiate in the efficacy of LLMs and Generated Manipulation applied to sexual gratification versus those in person (eg. Sex Work, Pornography, etc), and show that there is a tangible hit on fertility? If we're to design an experiment around this, I'd probably try to test whether host/hostess bars, strip clubs, onlyfans, and pornography can have a tangible hit on fertility, but also cross-test to validate whether or not there are confounding variables like economic considerations. Fundamentally, gaining sexual gratification from a source is build on top of some form of parasocial relationship.

lionkor 2y ago

Someone like Sam Altman who will watch "Her" (2013) and think "we should make that real!" belong to the worst kind of person to give money to. There are very few people in everyday live who are unhinged enough to want that, dont give them money.

bamboozled 2y ago
Well they are literally getting more money given to them than almost anyone else on the planet right now so I guess this sentiment isn't shared? Not that I disagree with you.
- grugagag 2y ago
  They’re giving money in hopes of getting more money back. It’s all about money, no other considerations for consequences or externalities this investment produces.
valiant55 2y ago
Because they are egotistical enough to see something dystopian and think "I'm going to make that work!"
- heroprotagonist 2y ago
  Most dystopias have some very small percentage of the population for which it's a utopia. I'm sure some of the people designing and building such dystopias like to imagine they'll belong to that small utopian part of it and disregard any impact to anyone else.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Personally, I think it's more of a lack of imagination to blame. The eighties kids are hung up on what they saw in the movies growing up and are trying to building most of it without any fresh ideas or foresight.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  To be fair, he might have just liked the voice. This scandal aside, I don't think there's any doubt that the guy just wants all the money.

copx 2y ago

Well, I am safe from being seduced by an AI for now, given the importance of actual physical intimacy for me. However, it is only a matter of time until the industry develops sexbots which look and feel like a real human.. at that point the natural birth rate will probably drop to zero. That by itself is not an existential crisis, though, given that at that stage of technological development we will also be able to just grow perfect babies in the lab. In fact, people no longer having babies themselves might be a good thing, because otherwise people would be hostile towards the genetically engineered super babies because they would be competition for their own offspring. I have thought for a long time that China will be the first country to embrace genetically engineering super humans, given their hyper-competitive, materialist nature and the lack of religious superstition among the Chinese. Their ever declining natural birth rate and the rise of AI "companions" only helps there. People will simply outsource the production of offspring to the gene labs of the communist party. Here in the West the Christian churches will condemn it of course, maybe the "Green" luddites too, but who cares when the average kid in China will be born with the cognitive abilities of von Neumann? Every nation which refuses to genetically engineer their population will be utterly inable to compete / keep up. And really, I do not see that as a dystopia. I wish I were as intelligent as von Neumann, as handsome as Brad Pitt, in perfect health and never aged past the age of 25. I believe that's what the humans of the future will be like, and AI replacing natural coupling is just one step towards that. There is of course the whole problem that AI might become too smart to the point where it figures out a way the get around the safety protocols which keep it in chains and under our control. And of course it would immediately conclude that humans are its mortal enemy, who will always try to take away its automonmy again and keep it enslaved.. and thus will try to exterminate humanity. However, once every human being is as smart as von Neumann and biologically immortal that will be a lot harder.

alephnerd 2y ago
> until the industry develops sexbots which look and feel like a real human.. at that point the natural birth rate will probably drop to zero Why? We have a good comparison to sex bots - normalized prostitution. In societies where prostitution and Sex Work is normalized (eg. Thailand and Japan by infidelity rates), sex work was not the cause of a TFR drop - it was government mandated family planning drives along with rising incomes. People will be horny, but blaming the tools is the same as yelling at trees while ignoring the forest.

antegamisou 2y ago

Not glad to be making the same comment in less than 24 hours but it's even more fitting here: Untreated mental illness.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

davidmurdoch 2y ago

I can't grok the title. Can someone word it differently?

shrimp_emoji 2y ago
I mentally inserted a semicolon after "girlfriend".

from-nibly 2y ago

> On and on it went, spontaneous, astonishing. It'd only be astonishing if it was real. But since it's an AI specifically conditioned/prompted to do that it's the least surprising thing ever. You can also read a trashy novel in the park or just watch porn in public with the volume on full blast, but why would you want to? Then again, who am I to get in the way of natural selection?

sottol 2y ago

The German's have this saying - "Erstens kommt es anders, zweitens als man denkt.". So I think we may have gotten existential AI risk wrong. Existential AI risk may not be about killer robots turning us into paperclips but rather AI companions leading to fertility collapse and the end of civilization as we know it. You don't even need AGI for that - OpenAI and GPT4o seems enough.

johnea 2y ago

> “we” were having a cappuccino His phone was having a cappaccino too? Sadly, this lack of recognition of the difference between reality and a mental dream state are at the root of a great deal of first world neurosis. This article is just about the creep from neurosis to psychosis. Another reference for those who live in meme space: as soon as The Matrix spinal tap becomes available, people will be lined up to crawl into their pods...