When A.I. is a member of the family

I agree with you on this! However, it's deeply concerning[1] if this young population is accelerating this trend of what I'd call psychological degeneration.

If we take the cohort who's under 25 now, consider that within about 15 years of today, almost no women older than this cohort is even capable of reproducing[2]. So if a significant number of today's kids and teens and college-aged kids decide they'd rather opt out of human companionship, birth rates will plunge even more catastrophically than the current projections have them, with even more devastating effects due to the very bad ratio of retirees to workers. So this kind of thing actually does strike me as very concerning.

[1] I know there are many nihilists out there who think humans are a cancer, and that the best thing that could happen (morally? To nature? Opinions vary.) is for human population to be reduced by 90%+, if not exterminated. I am just not one of those people though, so I want to see humanity live and thrive.

[2] sure, it's not unheard of at 40+ but it's risky and often expensive, so we really shouldn't count on a sudden surge of very old first-time-moms to materially change the math here. Also culturally, looking at 25-year-old people on social media none of them say they're waiting for 40 to have kids, they say they don't want them.

I also object to the idea that model intelligence is the main reason why this has improved, either; to me it seems abundantly clear that the models, absent any effort to align them, can go pretty much any way you want them to go. They don't really have a "personality". Why would they? Even if we grant that next token predictors somehow gain "reasoning" capabilities (and I am saying sure, let's accept that for the sake of this discussion) I don't think anyone is suggesting that model weights somehow develop or contain a true identity or self. Given how they are trained it would be weird if they did.

I think the more obvious answer is that more work has gone into alignment and safeguards since the early days. Sycophancy is legitimately one of the things that AI companies talk about and try to stymie. If not for that, humans would obviously continue to prefer sycophantic models, and training that isn't weary of this would continue to produce them.

Meanwhile, a YouTuber may not care about you personally, but it's a very different situation. For one thing, a YouTuber obviously doesn't care about all of their viewers individually the way a parasocial fan may perceive it to be, but on the other hand, many creators very much do genuinely like their fan base and have a sort of collective relationship with the community they've created, which sometimes plays into why people like them in the first place. For another, even for creators who intentionally foster parasocial relationships in an exploitative way, its still a much less powerful illusion. It isn't personal the way a chatbot is. (If it was, it wouldn't be parasocial, after all.) As much as you can explain to people up and down that an AI model is just merely a pile of weights that can not feel, humans can't help but personify. It is a much stronger illusion.

And the model vendors are intentionally not helping. Sometimes I will ask Gemini a question about a problem I am working on and it will say something like "I love working on problems like these." Yeah sorry but I don't like that. To me, the model is being trained to act like this to seem more pleasant. I get why you would train it to act that way, and yet I also find it irresponsible.

Being deluded about reality may never be good but I'd prefer someone thought a YouTuber was like their friend than someone thought ChatGPT had feelings and cared about them. I find the former mostly harmless if annoying, the latter potentially harmless but also potentially very volatile depending on who we're talking about and what mental state they're in.

Say "no I'm not conscious. I am a computer program that generates responses to your prompts based on what my training data tells me is most likely to be correct and sensible."