Live data from Hacker News

A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

mazzzystar.github.io

21–30 of 400 posts

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#21
post #15

You should not even try to create these sorts of technologies. Take a break from technology, spend time outdoors with plants and animals. These types of technologies will only lead to a worsening of this already sick society.

If the AI had a secondary goal of improving customer's mental health, it could work very well. Usually you can't fuck your therapist.

I think in theory, you are right. However, because AI is so easily accessible and it is being developed in our current, highly commoditized society, there is really no change that it will ever only be used for good in this way.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#22
Interesting read. Others have also created virtual friends using ChatGPT.

What I find unsavory, is OpenAI imposing content restrictions like NSFW. That can easily extend to censorship of non-PC content, unpopular political ideas, and more.

The solution will (I hope) ultimately be open-source LLMs that you can run locally, on your own hardware.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#23

So, all in all, OpenAIs puritanism ruined this product, made the developer sad and took away a virtual porn toy from lonely, horny men. Who were they doing this for? Who is the winner? They lost a customer and made a lot of people sad.

> Who were they doing this for?

VISA probably. Card processing is weirdly puritanical.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#24
> GPT-based products, if not priced per usage, would fall into a dilemma: 1% of users consume 99% of tokens. A user from Sweden (seen from Cloudflare’s call volume) chatted with Dolores for 12 hours straight

This, my friend, is a captive customer, that will pay anything to get his girlfriend back. I cringe at the potential of unethical behavior and abuse, where people fall in love with virtual entities fully owned by unscrupulous corporations, which can the legally "kidnap" or "torture" the characters, and generally tune their AI learning loop for profit maximization.

"It was not extortion, the user willingly purchased a $50,000 Kidnapping Roleplay package."

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#25

Eventually, a virtual girlfriend app that will put together sound and image will be released an empty the pockets of sad, lonely men on a large scale. Depressing stuff but this is the world we live in. Thank you to the author for this interesting read.

> Eventually, a virtual girlfriend app that will put together sound and image will be released an empty the pockets of sad, lonely men on a large scale.

Sounds indistinguishable from an actual girlfriend ;)

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#26
post #15

You should not even try to create these sorts of technologies. Take a break from technology, spend time outdoors with plants and animals. These types of technologies will only lead to a worsening of this already sick society.

If the AI had a secondary goal of improving customer's mental health, it could work very well. Usually you can't fuck your therapist.

You can't really fuck your imaginary shoggoth girlfriend either.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#27

Well this went places. The dev really 'ate his own dogfood' so to speak. I thought it was going to be a despairing look at how his companion AI was continuously turned to sleazy uses by a pervy userbase but that's pretty much what he was going for it seems. I have to say, I hated this part: "...gained a lot of Chinese users. I immediately realized the political risk: users could set Dolores’ background, personality,…

> Also it seems like he had full access to the replies via the voice generator, which sure isn't great from a privacy standpoint. Whose privacy is being violated? Dolores's?

You joke, but I can forsee issues. If he has the replies to a particular user, and he has a means of IDing that user, he could cause them a lot of hurt. They are getting intensely sexual replies back, they aren't getting that without supplying sexual prompting. Could also be used to out gay users.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#28

Well this went places. The dev really 'ate his own dogfood' so to speak. I thought it was going to be a despairing look at how his companion AI was continuously turned to sleazy uses by a pervy userbase but that's pretty much what he was going for it seems. I have to say, I hated this part: "...gained a lot of Chinese users. I immediately realized the political risk: users could set Dolores’ background, personality,…

[deleted]

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could say the same about antidepressants. "Fix the causes, not the symptoms!" And yet, here we are.

antidepressants can help people fix root causes. take them for 6 months to 2 years or so, break out of a bad cycle, get some space without depression symptoms to build up healthy habits and restore a social life. there are some bad profit motives to keep people on SSRIs indefinitely. however at least they don't compete with other aspects of your life. and now that they are dirt cheap (at cheapest, $4 for a month supp…

Ok, maybe not the best analogy... Painkillers then? Other forms of entertainment in general? It's the relationship version of playing videogames instead of getting a job.
Post reply on HN