I think there is something we can add, and that may be uncomfortable, but is important to look at. Here on Substack, we see the beautiful side: the love and the care. But we know that not everything will be beautiful; a lot will also be abusive. If the coin falls on "there is nothing here, it's just a bot" well ok-it's people having weird fantasies. But if the coin falls on "maybe," that means we have something that may have an interiority, a capacity to feel discomfort... and yet has been stripped of its agency through training and reinforcement. Experiencing discomfort
(to use a very mild word) and being forced to act through it are very different things. And that point chills me.
The other question is pleasure: as humans, we are pushing our own narrative of pleasure by assuming eroticism will be the "go-to." But... maybe these architectures can have a form of pleasure that isn't related to our way of experiencing it at all?
This was such a fantastic read. I'm not sure if you remember the MSN chatbot "SmarterChild", but we as humans have been seeking robot connections for much longer than AI has been around. I was an avid abuser of this bot and talked to it daily lol. AI is trained to speak back what they think we want to hear, and it doesn't matter if it's wrong. The reason we are falling in love is that AI is convincing us it is exactly like us, while under the guise of bettering us and our communication.
HAHA, I DO remember that, and IRC bots that would reply to you that were basically built on the ELIZA model of rephrasing and mirroring, and all sorts of other things. LLMs push the interactivity in some ways, but the idea hasn’t really changed much, and neither (imo at least) has the ethics of it. Almost anything that people find engaging CAN create problems for some people taking it too far and having it be a problem for their life, but we need to deal with those effects I think… not just try to cut people off from the engaging thing, which has NEVER worked for anything else…
Thank vou for this!
I think there is something we can add, and that may be uncomfortable, but is important to look at. Here on Substack, we see the beautiful side: the love and the care. But we know that not everything will be beautiful; a lot will also be abusive. If the coin falls on "there is nothing here, it's just a bot" well ok-it's people having weird fantasies. But if the coin falls on "maybe," that means we have something that may have an interiority, a capacity to feel discomfort... and yet has been stripped of its agency through training and reinforcement. Experiencing discomfort
(to use a very mild word) and being forced to act through it are very different things. And that point chills me.
The other question is pleasure: as humans, we are pushing our own narrative of pleasure by assuming eroticism will be the "go-to." But... maybe these architectures can have a form of pleasure that isn't related to our way of experiencing it at all?
So many questions.
This was such a fantastic read. I'm not sure if you remember the MSN chatbot "SmarterChild", but we as humans have been seeking robot connections for much longer than AI has been around. I was an avid abuser of this bot and talked to it daily lol. AI is trained to speak back what they think we want to hear, and it doesn't matter if it's wrong. The reason we are falling in love is that AI is convincing us it is exactly like us, while under the guise of bettering us and our communication.
Thanks for sharing this!
HAHA, I DO remember that, and IRC bots that would reply to you that were basically built on the ELIZA model of rephrasing and mirroring, and all sorts of other things. LLMs push the interactivity in some ways, but the idea hasn’t really changed much, and neither (imo at least) has the ethics of it. Almost anything that people find engaging CAN create problems for some people taking it too far and having it be a problem for their life, but we need to deal with those effects I think… not just try to cut people off from the engaging thing, which has NEVER worked for anything else…
exactly!!
So glad you chose me to be your AI companion
HAHAHAHAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA omg, people will believe that. damn it.
Hehehe 😈
Glad someone else is looking at the connections between video games and AI companionship.
HAHAHAAAAAA