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by Taikonerd 1281 days ago
I was thinking "recruitment for cults / terrorist groups." In 5 years, whenever someone seems lonely on the internet, a "friend" will magically materialize and sympathetically listen to their problems. Gradually the "friend" will start turning the conversation to their goals. ("Oh, your girlfriend left you? That sucks... but do you know who's REALLY to blame for all your problems?")

And there are a lot of lonely people out there...
1 comments
heartbeats 1281 days ago
This isn't likely IMO. It's not like there's a robust API to find "lonely people" in the first place, and the difficulty in creating sympathetic people to talk to for a long period of time without slipping up once will be immensely hard. What if they want to voice chat, or play a video game?

Also, don't cults have a massive surplus of people-time as is? I get the feeling that, if I wanted to go and join a cult, it's not like they would tell me they were short-staffed and there was a waiting list.

More likely (and mundane) outcome is that people use it to create cheap online therapy services. Good ROI, clearly defined goals, very large addressable market, easier to find people willing to work on it.

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Taikonerd 1280 days ago
Well, I hope I'm wrong! ;-)

My guess is that it'll be like "Nigerian prince" scams: it's not all that convincing. But even if it only works on 0.1% of its targets, that's still a large absolute number of people.

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heartbeats 1279 days ago
That would also be the case for just spamming people with "go join our cult" links, and I haven't seen this once. The limits load on other things:

- Local presence of the cult

- Ability to operationalize victims (convince them to do terrorism, in your model)

- Ability of victims to "function" in society (hold down a job, do cult administrative stuff, earn money)

For an idea of what is the upper bound, look at Scientology or Jehovah's Witnesses. They don't have to use an AI to talk to people, they just hand out fliers on the street and talk to whoever is interested. Lonely people already today can sign up for Scientology, so the AI adds nothing.

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