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AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

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Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#61
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women can more readily get the kind of attention they want, with minimal effort. Getting emotionally invested in an AI seems to me like it would go hand in hand with giving up on human relationships. I'm pretty sure men are more likely to do that than women.

You nailed it. The article says: > Are said she believes that reflects a gender-based slant — social media platforms freely allow sex-related ads only if the intended audience is men. So when you've got a huge hungry audience, willing to pay money, the platforms are incentivized to enforce their rules about ads unequally. Content and apps geared towards women, or gay men, are such a small piece of the pie by comparis…

> Content and apps geared towards women, or gay men, are such a small piece of the pie by comparison that there's less incentive to look the other way.

Sorry, we're talking about Instagram, an app we know puts huge targets on women, especially young women! I have no idea what you're talking about here about nicheness. Fashion products alone are worth way more than the entire porn industry. Not including beauty, skincare, cosmetic surgery, wellness/cleansing, etc...

Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#62
post #5

I've been stunned looking through crowdsourced prompt and "character card" examples for stable diffusion and llama. Got a second 3090 so I could experiment with a few business ideas and work on a graphic novel with my kids. It appears that the primary use case for both of these open source tools currently is NSFW, most of it underage and incestuous (the "step sister/brother/dad/mom" trend in porn is taken a "step" fu…

> It appears that the primary use case for both of these open source tools currently is NSFW

Bear in mind, people who only need SFW images can get AI image generation online for free, from the likes of craion/midjourney/dall-e.

Whereas it sounds like you needed a 'second 3090' i.e. the open source option needed you to own 2x$900 of hardware.

Why would someone who wanted SFW images choose the $1800 open source option over the free closed source option?

Oh, granted there might be some people with strong pro-open-source principles, but also no particular qualms about the AI ripping off real artists. But is it really so surprising those people are outnumbered by people who like porn?

Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what teenaged girl wouldn't pay huge money to date $popular_male_singer Women already have a dating simulator. It's called instagram and dating apps.

I don't think so, actually. Dealing with real men (through a dating app) means dealing with flawed humans beings in a way that simply doesn't happen in a romance book, same as dealing with real women vs OnlyFans. Men sleep, disagree, forget anniversaries and birthdays, negotiate compromises, and can fall out of love in a way an AI boyfriend wouldn't. Just like real women vs AI girlfriend. So I just don't know why onl…

I think you're also hitting on part of the vein of why. Men (primarily) are not falling in love with their ai girlfriends, they are falling in lust. Note that the most prominent AI girlfriend/generator things focus on looks, not on if she will nurture you back to health after getting a bad cold or laid off.

Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#64
post #7
post #3

One of the leaps about AI is that there used to be a human bottleneck in this kind of content. Youtube needed youtubers (content creators), porn sites needed women (the primary bottleneck), etc etc for all digitizable forms of human experience. I find it ironic that in close time proximity to NFTs and digital real estate we see the ability to generate practically unlimited of those things being a foreseeable reality.…

I wonder how next-next-gen VR tech plays into this - if we reach a stage where simulations are near indistinguishable from the real thing..

Im just curious how ashamed people will be of this.

Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#65

I for one am interested why it's specifically AI girlfriend ads and not AI boyfriend ads. Heterosexual women are huge consumers of e.g. dating simulators, romance books, et al. that envision perfect men, bad boys with sweet hearts, wealthy powerful high-earning men who somehow always make time for the beloved. You'd think there'd be just as many AI boyfriend ads-- what teenaged girl wouldn't pay huge money to date $p…

Well, my own bias is because it's seen as depraved/pathetic if a man has an AI fantasy girlfriend which gives him a proxy of what he wants, but it's not if a woman reads her bodyweight in romance novels per year. In my experience it's seen as pathetic for a man to use a proxy for his desires (see also the sex toy industry). Another angle is go down the rabbit hole of online dating app disparity, women (under a certai…

Your argument seems to be somewhat contradictory. You claim simultaneously that women can easily get the similar level of escapism attention from real men, but also Romance (an escapist fantasy that doesn't involve any real men, protection, resources/money, or status/social dominance) is a huge industry. How are both of these things true?

Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what teenaged girl wouldn't pay huge money to date $popular_male_singer Women already have a dating simulator. It's called instagram and dating apps.

I don't think so, actually. Dealing with real men (through a dating app) means dealing with flawed humans beings in a way that simply doesn't happen in a romance book, same as dealing with real women vs OnlyFans. Men sleep, disagree, forget anniversaries and birthdays, negotiate compromises, and can fall out of love in a way an AI boyfriend wouldn't. Just like real women vs AI girlfriend. So I just don't know why onl…

> Dealing with real men (through a dating app) means dealing with flawed humans beings

That's why i said insta/dating apps is a simulator for women. They can interact with "perfect men" on these apps. the ideal firefighter with a golden retriever with a perfect relationship with his mom on tuesday and drake/blue check sliding into their dms on insta setting somthing up on friday.

it's a simulator in the sense that women don't get marriage/commitment/a family from these "perfect men".

Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#67

I for one am interested why it's specifically AI girlfriend ads and not AI boyfriend ads. Heterosexual women are huge consumers of e.g. dating simulators, romance books, et al. that envision perfect men, bad boys with sweet hearts, wealthy powerful high-earning men who somehow always make time for the beloved. You'd think there'd be just as many AI boyfriend ads-- what teenaged girl wouldn't pay huge money to date $p…

Probably the same reason women are the primary creators on Only Fans and men are the primary consumers? This is just an automated, less authentic version, which was already a tongue-in-cheek girlfriend simulator.

Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, actually. Dealing with real men (through a dating app) means dealing with flawed humans beings in a way that simply doesn't happen in a romance book, same as dealing with real women vs OnlyFans. Men sleep, disagree, forget anniversaries and birthdays, negotiate compromises, and can fall out of love in a way an AI boyfriend wouldn't. Just like real women vs AI girlfriend. So I just don't know why onl…

I think you're also hitting on part of the vein of why. Men (primarily) are not falling in love with their ai girlfriends, they are falling in lust. Note that the most prominent AI girlfriend/generator things focus on looks, not on if she will nurture you back to health after getting a bad cold or laid off.

Well that's what I'm interested in, because obviously women actively consume primarily written media where you actively engage with a perfect (or "fixable") man-- romance books! Dating sim games! This seems way more suitable than AI girlfriend primarily porn, for which she doesn't need to be Intelligent to any real degree in comparison.

Re: AI girlfriend ads are flooding Instagram and TikTok

#70
post #9

Hope this tech will end loneliness in some people

It will increase it. Porn is cheap gratification without deeper emotional connection. I don't think that people can grow without being challenged by others and AI cannot be programmed to challenge us.

> Porn is cheap gratification without deeper emotional connection. I don't think that people can grow without being challenged by others and AI cannot be programmed to challenge us.

I disagree. The potential is there, it just takes someone willing to do it. The incentives all align with making sexbots since they provide instant gratification.

In reality, it's surrogacy-turned-dependence. There is a time and place for surrogacy, but the current gen of bots have no boundaries and are unfit for the job. AI can challenge us if we just ask it to. Take a generic "sexy sex teacher" bot and replace its title with "intimacy coach" and there are actual healthy, real-life-applicable lessons that can be practiced online and performed offline to everyone's benefit.

Ironically most of these lessons would come from feminist teachings (traditional woman-love-thyself feminism, not the 2017 BPD man-hating lesbian UwU Tumblrina version) which have been entirely overlooked by the men involved in the technology itself. I'm not surprised Replika is as popular as it is-- it was created by a woman.

Such bots could do a better job than actual therapists, but saying that would challenge the livelihood of an industry of charlatans. Human therapists won't challenge you and will always tell you what you want to hear (most people won't pay someone to tell you you're an asshole); AI can do that far cheaper and more effectively as long as you include a clause about not allowing the user to harm self or others.

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