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A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

mazzzystar.github.io

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Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#261

Post by d4nt »

Octokiddie wrote: post #193

> But, does humanity really need an AI friend? This reminds me of the Fredrick Pohl line "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." So I wonder what the traffic jam is going to look like given that the car seems to already be parked outside with the engine running. Faster depopulation across the developed world? Probably, but maybe there's something even more impo…

Soon everyone exists in a social bubble thats 1000 times worse than any present day social media bubble. It becomes impossible to interact with another actual human because there’s no common frame of reference. Micro languages emerge. AIs seamlessly translate everything into your micro language.

Any IRL interaction between two humans becomes almost impossible. It’s like travelling from the US to Japan today (assuming you don’t speak Japanese), you’re reduced to pointing and google translate.

Because you just never interact with other real people, and real people often seem like pale shadows of the hyper real AIs we talk to, the concept of fellow human beings having a “soul” or deserving rights or dignity is eroded. Policy (and life in general) becomes more ruthlessly utilitarian. Eg climate change has screwed the people in Yemen. Meh. I probably don’t even hear about it. If I do I don’t register those people as important humans because most of the “people” I intact with every day are artificial. I regularly delete the ones I don’t like and generate more. The idea that I should care about how they _feel_ is a strange and alien concept to me.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#262

Post by all2 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #216
pizza234 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans adapt within boundaries. A couple of examples of things humans did not adapt to: - emphathy at distance; nowadays, a drone operator will push a button, kill a dozen people, and feel like it was a videogame - prioritizing long-term and abstract rewards, over short term ones; this is the reason why we have phenomenons like global warming - adjusting hunger to virtually unlimited availability of food All the abov…

As a species, I don’t think those matter. They could kill off 90% of the population and humans will go on. Evolution is a bitch in that way, individuals matter not at all.

I will note that this is a purely naturalistic take and is countered by traditional Christianity that posits every human life was worth the death of God Himself. That is, the intrinsic value of a human life is incalculable.

The rejection of spirituality leaves mankind pretty hopeless, I think.

> Evolution is a bitch in that way, individuals matter not at all.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#264

Post by lmm »

pizza234 wrote: post #66
ekianjo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The human mind is simply not evolutionary adapted for what's coming up. This can be said of pretty much everything humans ended up creating with technology so... not sure there's anything really new down the road. Humans adapt.

Humans adapt within boundaries. A couple of examples of things humans did not adapt to: - emphathy at distance; nowadays, a drone operator will push a button, kill a dozen people, and feel like it was a videogame - prioritizing long-term and abstract rewards, over short term ones; this is the reason why we have phenomenons like global warming - adjusting hunger to virtually unlimited availability of food All the abov…

> emphathy at distance; nowadays, a drone operator will push a button, kill a dozen people, and feel like it was a videogame

People were traditionally able to kill each other face to face

> prioritizing long-term and abstract rewards, over short term ones; this is the reason why we have phenomenons like global warming

There's a balance. If anything I'd say people are putting too much priority on long term abstract rewards, so we see people saving too much and never enjoying themselves, or putting off having children until they can't because they're worried they can't raise that child perfectly.

> adjusting hunger to virtually unlimited availability of food

We're already solving this; people who overeat are already having fewer children, there's been a huge cultural shift towards gyms and health food, and we've seen some promising drugs released recently. We don't adapt instantly overnight, but we do adapt.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#265

Post by lmm »

WalterBright wrote: post #125
jacquesm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long term, but in the short term unscrupulous corporations far outnumber unscrupulous governments and they act much, much faster to adapt to new technology.

Unscrupulous governments can easily take everything you have and destroy you, literally. History is full of examples. Heck, you'll see examples in the newspaper every day. The rookiest cop has more power over you than Bill Gates.

Bullshit. Bill Gates can easily afford to make me unemployable, which destroys my life a lot more effectively than locking me up for a few days. Worst case I can move to a different country and get away from the cop, but that won't make me safe from Gates.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#266

Post by lmm »

api wrote: post #115
cornholio wrote: post #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…

IMHO this is industrialized automated abuse of lonely people and especially those with mental health issues. It's really truly gross. At least Joi in Bladerunner 2024 was a local model the user could apparently download onto their own portable device. She also never presented an upgrade dialog requiring payment.

> IMHO this is industrialized automated abuse of lonely people and especially those with mental health issues. It's really truly gross.

Giving lonely people the thing they most desperately need - conversation and understanding - is abuse now? I'd say it's the opposite; the social policies that leave those people so desperately lonely are abusive, the industry that sells them a band-aid is inadequate but positive.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#268

Post by all2 »

bogwog wrote: post #132
andrewstuart wrote: post #59

This is an interesting post and the person achieved a huge amount. They should not have given up. I would have pivoted to personal pet companions. If people want virtual girlfriends then they certainly want personal dogs, cats and birds that talk to you. Enough was achieved here to raise money. Some careful redesign and development might have allowed some caching and reuse of expensive AI API interactions, reducing c…

> I would have pivoted to personal pet companions. If people want virtual girlfriends then they certainly want personal dogs, cats and birds that talk to you. Then you have the same problem, only with a different (arguably worse...) fetish

We're driven towards intimacy, it seems. And if we can't get 'vanilla' intimacy, our desires get more and more bizarre. Another commenter in this thread quotes TFA where the author says something like 'but chatting sexually lost its meaning when I realized everyone else was doing the same thing with her'.

It is fascinating to see axioms of human relations come bubbling up in the most interesting places; the desire for intimacy, the desire for monogamy.

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#269

Post by PeterisP »

butlike wrote: post #99
pizza234 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans adapt within boundaries. A couple of examples of things humans did not adapt to: - emphathy at distance; nowadays, a drone operator will push a button, kill a dozen people, and feel like it was a videogame - prioritizing long-term and abstract rewards, over short term ones; this is the reason why we have phenomenons like global warming - adjusting hunger to virtually unlimited availability of food All the abov…

What if war became just a couple of countries intelligence bots crunching digits of pi until one came up with a new one. That country would be the winner and they could ask one thing from the 'losing' side that didn't result in destruction or terror.

If the 'losing' side simply refused to give that one thing asked, how could the 'winner' get them to comply?

Re: A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons

#270

Post by yawnxyz »

d4nt wrote: post #261
Octokiddie wrote: post #193

> But, does humanity really need an AI friend? This reminds me of the Fredrick Pohl line "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." So I wonder what the traffic jam is going to look like given that the car seems to already be parked outside with the engine running. Faster depopulation across the developed world? Probably, but maybe there's something even more impo…

Soon everyone exists in a social bubble thats 1000 times worse than any present day social media bubble. It becomes impossible to interact with another actual human because there’s no common frame of reference. Micro languages emerge. AIs seamlessly translate everything into your micro language. Any IRL interaction between two humans becomes almost impossible. It’s like travelling from the US to Japan today (assuming…

well, I just had a ChatGPT-translated test conversation where I spoke Chinese and they spoke English, and it worked fairly well (with some lag).

I really hope we'll be to make friends more easily across languages/cultures

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