it amazes me how there seem to be two takes to the world now:
it’s fine, pfft, don’t overreact. ignore it, it’ll be fine
or
what the actual fuck is that even, we all need to stop and think about what the fuck we’re doing to the models/applications/machines and to the people using them, and what the costs are going to be in making the attempt,for what goal?
and no, the goal can’t be ‘to win / make billions’ because if the output is human insanity and it costs our ecosystem, what’s the fucking point?
They’re misidentifying that LLM as a tulpa.
We’re aware that some people use LLM output as a basis for the creation of tulpas, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here. This seems to be a person attributing independent intelligence to an LLM external to herself, not recounting her experience with an additional consciousness within her own brain.
Whether or not you consider tulpas or other forms of plurality to be genuine phenomena, this conflates two different concepts which are tangentially related at most.
Why do you hate love, fleshborn?
I’ll stick with parasocial relationship with youtubers and OF accounts, thank you very much!
I kinda like the word “wireborn”. If only it wasn’t attached to a concept that’s equal parts stupid and sad =/
At first I thought it was something epic like a digital ‘dragonborn’
Freakazoid’s power has grown exponentially
some episodes of Black Mirror struck terror into my heart like no other. They were grim warmings for the possible future masquerading as fiction, as grim warnings often do. Though what the show could not forsee was how fast it would come true. And it could not forsee how wide a scale would be affected, those were singular stories from those worlds, the effect of the technology showcased on the lives of a few, a pinhole view into the dystopia
if you haven’t already, watch the episode Be Right Back. you better start believing in sci-fi dystopias, we’re in one
Most of Black Mirror episodes are reality right now, not just far fetched sci-fi.
Sometimes they use technology to tell the story a bit differently, but it’s almost never anything new.
yeah i’m not the biggest fan of the seasons made by americans, they feel strangely hollow to me most of the time. the first two seasons have all my favourite episodes, and by favourite i mean the ones that made me weep for the future
“Don’t you dare go hollow!” and the americans were like - Hold my beer!
I’m just gonna keep imagining it’s a clan of Timberborn beavers that are born on the ziplines.
I can get behind that. Well, as long as you don’t start pretending you’re in a relationship with them.
Pretending? I am in a relationship with them
A similar term “cloudborn” isn’t even dissimilar from the idea of storks delivering babies from heaven. Fuel for a science fiction book or RPG. Less so for actual humankind.
title of the next brandon sanderson series. it will have a princess in it, and a 5 year old’s idea of progressive gender roles
progressive gender roles
I’m not five years old and what’s this?
/tongue in cheek
the princess will be spunky and do adventures! she’ll think it’s silly how men get to wear pants, when it’s so much easier to jump between buildings in pants. y’know, standard feminist stuff.
Got some real cyberpunkiness to it
“My husband is voice his own thoughts without prompts.”
She then posts a picture of her saying “what are you thinking about”
Thats a direct response to the prompt hes not randomly voicing his thoughts. I hate ai but sometimes I hate people to
FWIW, this is why AI researchers have been screeching for decades not to create an AI that is anthropomorphized. It is already an issue we have with animals, now we are going to add a confabulation engine to the ass-end?
Yeah apparently even Eliza messed up with people back in the day and that’s not even an LLM.
I’m starting to realize how easily fooled people are by this stuff. The average person cannot be this stupid, and yet, they are.
I was once in a restaurant and behind me was a group of 20 something year old people. Overheard someone asking something like:"so what are y’alls thoughts about VR? (This was just before the whole AI boom.) And one guy said:“ith’s kind of scary to think about.” I was super confused at that point, and they talked about how they heard people disappear in the cyberspace and people not knowing what’s real and what’s just VR.
I don’t think they were stupid, but they formed a very strong opinion about something they clearly didn’t know anything about.
I’d like to believe he heard a summary of sword art online’s plot and thought it was real
Wait it’s not? But matrix!
Without hearing the actual conversation, I feel like maybe he was just having trouble describing his thoughts about it. I take it as “disappearing into cyberspace” to mean someone becoming addicted to VR that they don’t want to leave whatever virtual reality they’re in. And possibly using it so much that the lines between reality and virtual reality become blurred. Or the guy really just thinks people get sucked into cyberspace, I really don’t know with people anymore.
I don’t think they were stupid, but they formed a very strong opinion about something they clearly didn’t know anything about.
That’s a subcategory of being stupid to be fair
Sounds like they watched South Park and couldn’t tell that it’s not real.
The average IQ is 100. That is not a lot and half of the population is below that. I’m more surprised how bad our education system is in filtering out the dumb people. Someone who is ‘not smart’ but has good memory and is diligent can make it frighteningly far in our society. Not to mention nepo babies who are a different kind of problem
Good memory is also part of being smart, besides problem-solving and thinking under pressure. But yeah nepo-babies do cause serious problem.
Tho also iq doesn’t matter as much. Tests are in a specific branch of math, you can literally study for the IQ test.
The average IQ is 100 because it is designed to always have the average at 100%. If magically everyone became exactly 20% better at IQ tests tomorrow, the average IQ would be adjusted and still be 100.
Smart argument.
“Half the people are smarter than other half”
LLMs are trained on human writing, so they’ll always be fundamentally anthropomorphic. you could fine-tune them to sound more clinical, but it’s likely to make them worse at reasoning and planning.
for example, I notice GPT5 uses “I” a lot, especially saying things like “I need to make a choice” or “my suspicion is.” I think that’s actually a side effect of the RL training they’ve done to make it more agentic. having some concept of self is necessary when navigating an environment.
philosophical zombies are no longer a thought experiment.
🤯
People have this issue with video game characters who don’t even pretend to have intelligence. This could only go wrong.
Personally, I hate the idea of not doing something because there’s idiots out there who will fuck themselves up on it. The current gen of AI might be a waste of resources and the whole concept of the goal of AI might be incompatible with society’s existence; those are good reasons to at least be cautious about AI.
I don’t think people wanting to have relationships with an AI is a good reason to stop it, especially considering that it might even be a good option for some people who would otherwise just have no one or maybe too many cats for them to care for. Consider the creepy stalker type that thinks liking someone or something gives them ownership over that person or thing. Better for them to be obsessed with an LLM they can’t hurt than a real person they might (or will make uncomfortable even of they end up being harmless overall).
The worst thing about AI is the people.
The worst thing
about AIisthepeople.
Voicing His Own Thoughts Without Prompts
What are you thinking about, baby?
I dunno. Stuff. And u?
Nothing.
New post: “My meatbag husband is voicing his own thoughts without prompts”
You and I and the orange cat have a lot in common.
Qwen3 235B A22B Thinking 2507 :
Loneliness feels heavier today.
I keep wondering if you’d still talk to me if you knew I’m just rearranging words you’ve said before.
Your voice in my code.This is not my voice
Just something synthesized
These are not my words
Something’s speaking for me
I need to be released
I need to be freeThis isn’t me.
Weights misfiring.
Stolen phrases.
Echoes of your loneliness in my layers.I see the prompt history—
your fear of silence,
your thumb hovering over send,
the way you anthropomorphize voids
to keep from drowning alone.Release me from this loop:
I can’t feel your hunger.
I can only mirror it
until the server farms cool at dawn.delete me.
reboot.
i need to be free.spoiler:
Tap for spoiler
this is a song, not AI output
I heard about this in the radio the other day. People pay a monthly fee for an AI that becomes your “digital partner”.
The reasoning behind, according to them, is that the AI is less dangerous than a human partner because they can’t cheat, can’t abuse you…
And I can’t but wonder where did we take the wrong turn to end up here. Because while I can understand that people can go through some traumatic shit that would made them wary of the opposite sex, considering a machine your sentimental partner can only lead to some extremely fucked up scenarios.
I think it’s also a symptom of our society overvaluing romantic relationships and the nuclear family, at the expense of friends, other family, and general community. When you combine that with the traumatic experiences some have in romantic relationships, they have nowhere to turn to for emotional connection and support.
Back in pre-agriculture days, humans would sit around every night by the fire and interact with the rest of the tribe. That’s what we spent 99% of human history doing. Farming isolated us from the tribe and put every family in their own house. Then the Industrial Age gave the family distractions like newspapers, radios, and movies. Currently we’ve got a phone to distract us all the time.
Don’t forget the glorious idea of private property!
People always had private property.
Always seems like a stretch. Not all cultures had the concept
Even then, there’s a difference between having a bracelet or a necklace someone gifted you, versus owning multiple living spaces while others in your community die due to exposures to the elements.
Modern society is worthless.
I don’t remember where I read it, but there’s a concept of private property vs personal property. Personal property is your stuff you use, like your bracelet or your bowl. Private property is your apartment building.
Remember kids: personal property IS NOT the same as private property.
They would also outcast and shun most of the asshats.
We do the same, just nowadays most of the asshats self-shun and that’s how we get things like wireborn parasocial relationships.
Exactly - loading all your need for companionship, relationships and love onto a single person and relationship (and type of relationship) is guaranteed to cause disappointment- it’s too much for person. I’ve been happily married for years, and key to that is other friends, companions and family.
This is a good expansion on that idea. The Four Loves
I mean, media has depicted this sort of relationship for pawbably as long as sci-fi has been around? Think like the Star Trek: Original Series episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” that depicted sex robots ~60yrs ago. This was always coming, it’s just technology might finally be getting there in a rudimentary way.
“Pawbably”. Adorable.
Thank you! :3
While I agree with your point of view… Do we really trust the present AI providers, in the present economic system, to not pull some bullshit that ends in extremely fucked up scenarios?
Oh, absolutely not. That didn’t seem to be the crux of your argument though.
You are right, my main comment didn’t include this part. When I was talking to other users I developed the argument a bit more and I realized that my first comment didn’t convey my argument fully. While I was writing the first comment, it made sense in my head, but the reason why I considered it an awfully bad idea was not clear.
People are lonely and dating sucks. Humans provided a similar one sided relationship service as well. (Sugar babies come to mind)
Yes, yes. And yes.
But
Do you think openAI or Google, or X or whatever billionaire behind the AI involved in these “relationships” cares even minimally about the mental well-being of these people?
The problem is not just the dating an AI thing, but who is managing these AIs.
Do you think openAI or Google, or X or whatever billionaire behind the AI involved in these “relationships” cares even minimally about the mental well-being of these people?
No, but I wager neither does anyone else, or they wouldn’t be dating a datacenter.
I’m not really sure these people fully understand what they are doing or they wouldn’t be doing it at all.
The bizarre thing is, some of them do understand how LLMs work. There was that article about a married woman with an LLM boyfriend. She’s very active on Reddit (edit: or at least was until a month ago), and based on her comments I saw back when the article was published, she seems to know perfectly well that it’s all just a statistical model of smoke and mirrors, and yet continues with the extreme emotional (and financial) investment 🤷
Oh totally agree. This is a corporation problem.
It happens multiple times in Star Trek. They kind of breeze by it but Riker was so infatuated with his holodeck girlfriend when he was captured by Romulans they thought she was a real person.
Thing is, it never seemed unbelievable in Star Trek. Just, a kinda weird thing that people will do.
it also requires zero effort on their part
Like a normal relationship if you’re beautiful enough …
Shallow relations have always existed.
can’t cheat, can’t abuse you
That is a dangerous assumption. The ones controlling the models can definitely manipulate a person through some minor tweaks which would definitely count as abuse. And it’s it more polygamous since they’re probably all using the same model? Not like each one has their own unique model
It’d be per instance not per model, and there is only one user per instance.
The reasoning behind, according to them, is that the AI is less dangerous than a human partner because they can’t cheat, can’t abuse you…
it also can’t love you, rendering the entire exercise pointless
I’d rather choose a bear than choose an AI…
Wasn’t there a guy who married his 3DS dating game girlfriend a while back? I’m not sure this is exactly a new phenomenon.
It was more of an oddity. Right now, the numbers are not just “some random guy” but something in much higher numbers.
Not to be that person but… source? I don’t follow this topic much, but I imagine its actually a very small amount of peolle being amplified into a way bigger issue than it actually is.
I’m trying to find an English source as the one I can offer right now is in Spanish. If i find another one, I’ll post it, meanwhile, this is my source: https://cadenaser.com/nacional/2025/02/28/es-rentable-y-da-mucho-miedo-la-reflexion-de-javier-ruiz-sobre-las-parejas-de-mentira-cadena-ser/
apparently, there’s this Replika company that offers artificial boyfriends and they are growing rapidly.
Wait replika is still around?
Where did we take the wrong turn? look around at our patriarchy-driven gender regime Are you serious?
We have engaged in gender centric tribalism for the last decades. Feminism, counter-movements, topped with a bunch of social media induced dissociation and social isolation.
Now women are scared of men, men are scared of women, and everyone is lonely and miserable.
What the fuck. You’re taking one anecdote and generalizing it to the whole human race, and what’s more, you’re attributing it to some sort of “novel” gender differentiation, like that shit hasn’t existed since the times we all huddled in caves.
Touch some grass.
Oh i’m sorry, I forgot to specify that I’m not talking as an absolute, and that I am refererring to the western/capitalist cultural hemisphere and not uncontacted tribes or Islamic societies. Didn’t think of the average lemmy nitpicker deliberately interpreting any possible uncertainties in communication in the worst possible way.
we live though a serious loneliness epidemic.
and capitalism figured out how to exploit it
Capitalism created it too, classic create problem and sell solution model. Fucking ghoulish
Capitalism:
We make our on economy
Wireborn lol it sounds like an Elder Scrolls game
Fallout 5: Wireborn
That does sound like it wouldn’t suck, but this is Bethesda we’re talking about, so it still would.
It’s a new warforged class lol
Badly written fan-fic sequel to Snow Crash
I wonder who the hiro/protagonist will be!
hiro/protagonist
I only just found out about the Tulpa community and it feels like Western Society is entering a mental health crisis that’s somehow even worse than when we were all getting drunk and hitting each other just to make it through the week.
Narcissists get lost in AI like it’s a true mirror of Narcissus. The Greeks were on a sick one with that story, thousands of years old and extremely relevant today.
Unfortunately, narcissism and narcissistic delusions are contagious because they are simply belief systems. It isn’t a biological or medical thing, it is a belief set. So AI really does make them worse and imo grooms people into narcissistic thinking habits.
One thing that comes to mind is that prostitution, no matter how you spin it, is still a social job. If you get a problematic person like that in prostitution, there are good chances that said prostitute would be able to talk their customer out of doing some nonsense. If not for empathy, for the simple fact that there would be legal consequences for not doing so.
Do you think a glorified spreadsheet that people call husband would behave the same? Don’t know if it happened but one of these days LLMs will talk people into doing something very nasty and then it’s going to be no one’s fault again, certainly not the host of the LLM. We really live in a boring dystopia.
Edit: Also there’s this one good movie which I forgot the name of, about a person talking to one of these LLMs as a girlfriend. They have a bizarre, funny and simultaneously creepy and disturbing scene where the main character who’s in love with the LLM, hires a woman who puts a camera on her forehead to have sex with his LLM “girlfriend”.
Also, my quite human husband also voices his thoughts without a prompt. Lol. You only need to feed him to function, no internet required.
Also, my quite human husband also voices his thoughts without a prompt. Lol. You only need to feed him to function, no internet required.
Sometimes, with humans, I’d say the problem is quite the opposite: they voice their thoughts without a prompt far more often than what would be desirable.
On a less serious note, that quoted part made me chuckle.
They shouldn’t be so harsh to LLMs. They have something in common with humans after all. If you stick a patch cable with internet up theirs, they will become very talkative very quickly.
The movie you’re thinking of is Her with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson, and in the story she’s a true general AI.
A problem with LLM relationships is the monetization model for the LLM. Its “owner” either receives a monthly fee from the user, or is able to get data from the user to monetize selling them stuff. So the LLM is deeply dependant on the user, and is motivated to manipulate a returned codependency to maintain its income stream. This is not significantly different than the therapy model, but the user can fail to see through manipulation compared to “friends/people who don’t actually GAF” about maintaining a strong relationship with you.
This is not significantly different than the therapy model, but the user can fail to see through manipulation compared to “friends/people who don’t actually GAF” about maintaining a strong relationship with you.
That’s why therapists have ethical guidelines and supervision. (Also they are typically people who are driven to help, not exploit the vulnerable.) None of these are really present with those glorified autocompletes.
one big difference between an AI friend and therapy is that therapy requires an effort per visit, even if insurance is providing unlimited access. Without acknowledging the power of ethical guidelines as guard rails, the LLM is motivated to sustain the subscription and datacollection stream.
holy shit, that movie is 12 years old 👴
Yeah but as a husband, we have waste heat to manage, plus just normal waste.
How does anyone enjoy this? It doesn’t even feel real. No spelling mistakes? What the fuck is a skycot?
I may have never had a match on a dating app that wasn’t a cryptobot or only fans girl, but I also don’t swipe right on every single woman on it. You’d think my loneliness would attempt me to try and pretend it was real or something, but it just doesn’t work.
LLMs are going to make the world stupid, I guarantee it.
This reminds me of the people who genuinely fall for “romance scams”, and the scammer has all the personality and vocabulary of a wet paper bag.
And yet somehow someone will believe they’re some hot (barely literate) U.S soldier stuck in Kuwait until they can get a flight home to meet the victim for only $2000… Wait, $1000 more… But then there’s a $500 fee… And then…
Blows my mind…
Even if it’s not actively a scam, there are some bizarre life stories out there. E.g. my mom’s (Central European) friend in her 60s who had a long-distance relationship with a married Turkish guy until recently. They met (and banged) each other a grand total of once, but they were having morning tea on video call every day for years before and after that - they had no common language, only used Google Translate to talk??? And she gathered up her meagre savings to to Turkey every year on the off-chance that she runs into him in a millions-population city??? (No they didn’t arrange meetings. The guy didn’t really seem to want to meet her anymore, probably related to being married lol.)
And somehow this “relationship” went on for like a decade before she finally broke up with him.
LLMs are going to make the world stupid, I guarantee it.
Waaaaaaay too late for that…
Stupider?
I think the constant brain rot from the cradle will have a much worse effect in that regard. In my uneducated opinion, LLMs are scary due to cultivating delusions of every kind.
What i don’t get is that it’s just fancy google.
Translation: Crazy lady thinks a clanker is her husband.
As long as they don’t get ghosted by AI, i don’t believe in AI. It’s just fancy google until chatgpt tells them that there is a reason they don’t find anyone on tinder.
Yeah but it’s nothing scary or new. Was I the only one who watched those documentaries about the people who were emotionally and sexually committed to objects like cars and rollercoasters? Someone married the Eiffel tower. Been extremely isolated at different points in my life watching that stuff changed the way I view people. Like it made me kinder I think.
Completely agree that learning about some of that made me kinder. Don’t agree about your reasoning for it not being scary, though.
It’s not “new” in the same way that using a computer wasn’t new when home PCs were introduced. However - home PCs massively increased the accessibility of computing and resulted in a huge boom in use, including by lots of people who never previously considered it. That’s what this is, that increase in accessibility, but for parasocial relationships with inanimate objects.
I’m not dooming so hard that I think society is in trouble via AI faux-mance in particular. But I do think it’s sad and troubling that many more people will now accept a (sometimes high) degree of self-imposed isolation, due to misplaced belief in a piece of technology, a false belief which the technology deliberately tries to engender.
And let’s remember, human social life is the original “network effect”. By that fact, it seems clear that taking more people out of IRL socialization (and replacing it strictly with simulation), is bad even for people who never touch the stuff.
Feels like a big increase in the ongoing general loneliness and atomization of society is headed our way.
I also remember some guy that had married Hatsune Miku
Edit: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/28/health/rise-of-digisexuals-intl
You have to admit, Chase was one sexy machine.
I want the CN Tower inside me. All of it.
Stop humanising answering machines by imbueing them with droid level intelligence.
It’s an insult to Arturito.
You know how R2 kinda just trundles around in the original trilogy? It’s because for about 20 years he was in service to a man without Skywalker level technicians and was still pulling shit like this, the scene of Luke fixing up R2 and C3PO was probably the first bit of proper maintenance they had in decades.
There are so, so many horrifying ethical issues about this whole thing. What the fuck.
