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Feel like the hype surrounding “AI companionship” is very inorganic and fake - manufactured by the AI industry & VCs. There are fundamental reasons why AI as a

Feel like the hype surrounding “AI companionship” is very inorganic and fake - manufactured by the AI industry & VCs. There are fundamental reasons why AI as a companion is not good UX once novelty wears off.

xboxnolifes 2y ago
Maybe, but "AI" companionship existed prior to the current AI hype. It was just more hardcoded stuff and pre-ChatGPT AI. Plus paying for chatting with someone, following idols, and other parasocial relationships.
- nextworddev 2y ago
  Monetization of all those apps end up boiling down to selling uncensored chats, it’s not a differentiated space - even if we are talking about the lonely people demographic
swatcoder 2y ago
No, even a forgetful and repetitive sycophant meets a lot of genuine unmet needs for lonely people. Many such people feel alienated, ostracized, stigmatized, ashamed, or rejected and something that says nice (or dirty) things to them, on demand, and in decent natural language can scratch a desperate itch. That's not to say anything about the social good or ill that may come from it. But the hype is sound. It's one of the few "sure thing" products we can see right now.
- nextworddev 2y ago
  I am aware of character.ai’s metrics and its copycats’ so not denying there’s something there, but there’s no resounding evidence that it’s monetizable and sticky to a large degree. Unless it cranks up the dystopian features to unethical levels to get people hooked, of course, and most monetization is via selling nsfw features - so it checks the wrong boxes
- veunes 2y ago
  Loneliness is a significant societal issue. AI companions can address some needs...
  - lemonlime0x3C33 2y ago
    Addressing needs to make ones life a little better is great, I only worry that it may lead to people not pursuing more organic/rewarding options in the future.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
I don't know. It seems like porn (image and text based) will lead the way for GenAI like it has for almost every other computer advance.
thibaut_barrere 2y ago
I am not sure. I have seen many reports of people turning to ChatGPT for self-healing practices, almost therapy-like exchanges. In some ways, despite the largely "corpus & stats/tokens based approach", those exchanges can be more empathetic than what most people meet in real life. Something that you would expect from a good life companion :-)
sirspacey 2y ago
A generally fair critique, but this article was incredibly well-sourced and cited abundant first-person evidence. 40M women looking for “Dan” is non-trivial. AI companions have been around for a couple years now, so we’re past it being pure novelty (though clearly that’s a driver of growth). “AI girlfriends” were a great early use case for social interaction when AI companies were first targeted to (mainly) cis men. From what we’ve seen in research, a guy’s cognitive function measurably degrades when sex is on the menu. A crappy AI could get the job done. With female brains the research generally shows that they require a socially sophisticated interaction (“responsive emotional support”) so this level of adoption is significant evidence of progress in LLMs and fine tuning. anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain. It’s quite the cultural statement that an LLM outperforms most men on how to be present for a conversation with their date. Important to note that regular consumers of AI companions actually rely on them mostly as a synthetic partner/friend. There’s two things striking about this trend: 1. AI companions for women is more socially acceptable. 2. The mother of the women (who served as the focus of this story) said “if she’s happy, I’m happy.” That’s powerful. That’s a core value for many parents. It’s fair to attack the hype, just thought it might be useful for others to see there is underlying technical progress & social adoption reflected here.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  > anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain anecdotally, the women I know married good men before mid career. maybe the "mid career" women you know waited too long to "settle down" and found the field picked clean also, dating -men- is a drain? dating is a drain. the casual misandry in your comment is gobsmacking
  - saghm 2y ago
    > also, dating -men- is a drain? dating is a drain. the casual misandry in your comment is gobsmacking It's not clear whether you're arguing that it's misandrist for someone to not have as many friends who complain about dating women or for someone who dates men to specify that when stating that their experience dating has been draining, but either way it doesn't make much sense.
PheonixPharts 2y ago
I don't think it's that fake. There were people, researchers, that were obsessed with ELIZA back in the day. I personally have a friend who is constantly thinking about fine-tuning a model on his ex's texts to recreate chatting with her. I suspect many others are less extreme but still seek out a form of companionship they have full control over. In the visual space, if we're honest, most of the work being done on Stable Diffusion is with the aim of creating "intimate" art. Might not be "companionship" in the family sense, but absolutely a good chunk of the Civit.ai world is, more-or-less, concerned with the mass creation of "waifus". I don't think that we're going to have many startups succeed in this space, because I suspect the main driver is to have conversations/generate images that people don't entirely want there to be a record off/watched by a private company. But I actually suspect that the number of people using AI for companionship of some form or another is much higher than it appears.

xboxnolifes 2y ago

Maybe, but "AI" companionship existed prior to the current AI hype. It was just more hardcoded stuff and pre-ChatGPT AI. Plus paying for chatting with someone, following idols, and other parasocial relationships.

nextworddev 2y ago
Monetization of all those apps end up boiling down to selling uncensored chats, it’s not a differentiated space - even if we are talking about the lonely people demographic

swatcoder 2y ago

No, even a forgetful and repetitive sycophant meets a lot of genuine unmet needs for lonely people. Many such people feel alienated, ostracized, stigmatized, ashamed, or rejected and something that says nice (or dirty) things to them, on demand, and in decent natural language can scratch a desperate itch. That's not to say anything about the social good or ill that may come from it. But the hype is sound. It's one of the few "sure thing" products we can see right now.

nextworddev 2y ago
I am aware of character.ai’s metrics and its copycats’ so not denying there’s something there, but there’s no resounding evidence that it’s monetizable and sticky to a large degree. Unless it cranks up the dystopian features to unethical levels to get people hooked, of course, and most monetization is via selling nsfw features - so it checks the wrong boxes
veunes 2y ago
Loneliness is a significant societal issue. AI companions can address some needs...
- lemonlime0x3C33 2y ago
  Addressing needs to make ones life a little better is great, I only worry that it may lead to people not pursuing more organic/rewarding options in the future.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

I don't know. It seems like porn (image and text based) will lead the way for GenAI like it has for almost every other computer advance.

thibaut_barrere 2y ago

I am not sure. I have seen many reports of people turning to ChatGPT for self-healing practices, almost therapy-like exchanges. In some ways, despite the largely "corpus & stats/tokens based approach", those exchanges can be more empathetic than what most people meet in real life. Something that you would expect from a good life companion :-)

sirspacey 2y ago

A generally fair critique, but this article was incredibly well-sourced and cited abundant first-person evidence. 40M women looking for “Dan” is non-trivial. AI companions have been around for a couple years now, so we’re past it being pure novelty (though clearly that’s a driver of growth). “AI girlfriends” were a great early use case for social interaction when AI companies were first targeted to (mainly) cis men. From what we’ve seen in research, a guy’s cognitive function measurably degrades when sex is on the menu. A crappy AI could get the job done. With female brains the research generally shows that they require a socially sophisticated interaction (“responsive emotional support”) so this level of adoption is significant evidence of progress in LLMs and fine tuning. anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain. It’s quite the cultural statement that an LLM outperforms most men on how to be present for a conversation with their date. Important to note that regular consumers of AI companions actually rely on them mostly as a synthetic partner/friend. There’s two things striking about this trend: 1. AI companions for women is more socially acceptable. 2. The mother of the women (who served as the focus of this story) said “if she’s happy, I’m happy.” That’s powerful. That’s a core value for many parents. It’s fair to attack the hype, just thought it might be useful for others to see there is underlying technical progress & social adoption reflected here.

dingnuts 2y ago
> anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain anecdotally, the women I know married good men before mid career. maybe the "mid career" women you know waited too long to "settle down" and found the field picked clean also, dating -men- is a drain? dating is a drain. the casual misandry in your comment is gobsmacking
- saghm 2y ago
  > also, dating -men- is a drain? dating is a drain. the casual misandry in your comment is gobsmacking It's not clear whether you're arguing that it's misandrist for someone to not have as many friends who complain about dating women or for someone who dates men to specify that when stating that their experience dating has been draining, but either way it doesn't make much sense.

PheonixPharts 2y ago

I don't think it's that fake. There were people, researchers, that were obsessed with ELIZA back in the day. I personally have a friend who is constantly thinking about fine-tuning a model on his ex's texts to recreate chatting with her. I suspect many others are less extreme but still seek out a form of companionship they have full control over. In the visual space, if we're honest, most of the work being done on Stable Diffusion is with the aim of creating "intimate" art. Might not be "companionship" in the family sense, but absolutely a good chunk of the Civit.ai world is, more-or-less, concerned with the mass creation of "waifus". I don't think that we're going to have many startups succeed in this space, because I suspect the main driver is to have conversations/generate images that people don't entirely want there to be a record off/watched by a private company. But I actually suspect that the number of people using AI for companionship of some form or another is much higher than it appears.