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Adam Chambers's avatar

Agree with your take here! I would think that a relationship with an AI would be very hollow for a person in any kind of non-extreme life situation. I can maybe get why people in some unusual situations might like it: people with some mental disabilities/conditions (Down’s Syndrome for example) have to be very careful about getting into relationships as they can become exploitative. Maybe people living in remote and isolated situations. But if you have access to an internet-generated LLM, you could also be chatting with a real human online.

You can’t trade stories with a chatbot because it hasn’t experienced anything. You could only talk at it. You’d know it’s just coded to reply as it does. I’d imagine it wouldn’t surprise you much. I don’t get where the sense of shared purpose and support would come in at all. It wouldn’t work for me at all.

This Vice article you’ve linked is really something. 80% of men would do this? Holy crap. I wonder what percent of women would do this. I would think you’d have to be a pretty messed up person to create an AI replicant of your ex and then carry out a meaningful relationship with it. If that’s true, men have some real work to do…

That said, I did read an article from a substack I like called DrPsychMom in which she has found in her practice that nearly all married men report that they would much rather read a passionate love letter from their wife in which she expresses genuine desire for her husband, or that they’d rather passionately French kiss her than have the wildest sex with her when she isn’t into it. Supposedly most women are surprised to learn this. That would suggest that a lot of men do care about something like genuine feeling from an actual human woman.

And you gotta wonder who these dudes are. You can’t introduce an AI to your friends and family. You can’t have kids with it. You can’t go to brunch with it. I don’t get it. I can’t picture locker room talk about how you nailed your AI girlfriend. I don’t get it.

The internet is a way to connect with many things and is just a tool, but I think we all have to get out of our heads a bit more and back into our bodies.

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Leslie's avatar

I don't think it's the phone or media, though their use is omnipresent. I think we're lonely because of how we think, haphazardly and without a philosophical keystone to help us overcome inevitable difficulties, which weakens us emotionally. To my mind this is reflected most obviously in the messages blared out by media hubris: "You must love everyone; you must fear everyone." Meanwhile, the message school children get is: "You are the most important person, except when you're not." Every engagement, especially among those who come from different backgrounds, is fraught with potential pain and isolation. No wonder people want to hibernate.

Perhaps the best example of what I'm trying to get at is the difference in how Abigail Shrier and Jonathan Haidt think about depression among teens and adolescents. Haidt believes that technology is the primary culprit, while Shrier thinks it relates to our schools' unhealthy fixation on mental health, getting children to dwell on their differences/problems rather than learn to cope with adversity: the unwelcome first cousin of *change*. I find Haidt compelling but see the underlying problem as expressed by Shrier, which I liken to my personal philosophy about getting to the root of a problem: It's always the people, never the tool.

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