A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

Or potentially do anything. I'd be a little scared of having folks like this convinced I am the personal arbiter gatekeeping their access to their 'lover,' that I 'took them away.'

When Replika.ai restricted erotic chat from their product, the apoplectic anguish on their subreddit was unlike any emotional reaction I've ever witnessed from a group of people about a consumer technology. And their anguish was genuine - there are Replika users who truly consider themselves married to their AI companion.

And frankly, the Replika AI is not even that smart. After watching that unfold, I am convinced that these tools don't need to be much more sophisticated for many people to start forming what they feel to be deep and genuine emotional connections with them.

Edit: Brings to mind the Nature paper[0] posted this week about how the CASA theory seems obsolete today, that we are less prone to personify computing systems now.

> A recent study investigated whether we could be friends with a social computer, in which participants were asked to converse with a chatbot over a period of three weeks and constantly rate their relationship. The results showed that initially participants were enthusiastic and engaging with their chatbot friend, but quickly this diminished, with scores for intimacy, believability, and likability decreasing with each interaction

It would seem this definitely does not apply for everyone, like our user in Sweden.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-46527-9

In OP case's, this worked perfectly: he built a working product quickly and easily, and... discovered that it was a product he didn't want to work on regardless of token cost, cut his losses, did the post-mortem, and moved on with his life.

Imagine if he had wasted a year & a ton of money building his own LLM "because I'll need to economize on tokens and have to build a custom LLM" before he could even launch!

These broad strokes are always the result of poor reporting extrapolated to all humans. See also: escalation of porn use.

In all of these "___ makes people ___," there are a minority of people for which it's true. The media just presents it backward, as though most people are this way.

The question then becomes, do we care. Let a maladjusted 12-year old boy play with a sexbot for the next few years and they will come to some deeply-flawed conclusions about how sexual interactions and healthy human relationships work. If he's distracted and banging away at a flashlight, that's one less competitor for me on the dating market.

Where does that end though? What happens when he wakes up, realizes he's been duped, and goes looking for retribution against someone? It won't be PornHub; they're an ephemeral concept. It won't be me either; I never did him wrong or denied him anything. The victim is more likely to be our wives and daughters-- the objects of his envy.

Entertainment is supposed to be a distraction-- maybe you drag out the sexbot after an unsuccessful night of trying to hook up. But that's not how these things get used. People clearly spend 8-12 hours at a time with these things and form parasocial relationships with them instead of forging actual human connections. Most of us don't need the handholding to be told this isn't going to end well, but some people do, and these are the ones who slip through the cracks and become the 40-year-old creeps following your wife to the car or trying to solicit your kids on Roblox.

I suspect sexbots (and porn) are particularly exploitative of the autistic. They're an easy trap to fall into when you have to work 3x as hard to connect with people. You get the benefits of sexual release without any of the effort. There's no incentive to go the hard route and learn to work around your issues when you can just engage with a bot you can rape to death once offended. You don't learn any skills that transfer to useful human interactions this way.

Feeling lonely has negative consequences, there's a famous study comparing it to smoking cigarettes. Lonely people can get fixated on that feeling. Mitigating it may help people look for other hobbies, that they kept putting off because they were so focused on their need of a girlfriend.

Hell, a realistic enough "woman AI" (not "girlfriend AI") could make you lose the fear of flirting, be useful as practice, to have more confidence when you have a real date.

> the most profitable way to run such a product is not to help, it's to eat up as much user time as possible

If you charge per-month (like OP), it's more profitable is to eat up less time.