[gspencley]

> It matters a lot to me because the whole point of commenting here (or anywhere) is to talk to other humans, not just to talk to myself.

That's fair, but one of my points was that even prior to ChatGPT the ability existed for you to be "sucked into" a relationship with another under false pretenses. LLMs might make it easier to put this sort of thing on "autopilot", but if what you seek is a guarantee of talking to other humans then I don't see how, in a post-LLM-world, that can't be done. I have no doubt that online forums and communities will come up with methods to "prove" that people are "real" (though I fear this will hurt anonymity online a bit more), but also try going out and meeting people in the real world more.

It's funny, I've been an ultra tech savvy computer nerd since I was a little kid. I owe a lot to the Internet. I was working from home for 20 years before the pandemic, running my own business. Grocery delivery services have been a godsend for me, because I find grocery shopping to be one of the most stressful activities in life. But as I enter middle age I'm becoming less and less enthusiastic about tech and "online existence" in general. The number of things that I would miss if the Internet just went away entirely gets fewer and fewer every year. Working remotely and grocery delivery services are probably the only two things that I couldn't live without. Everything else ... meh. Maybe I'm just getting burned out on tech and hype trains ... but "talking to real people" is something I start to value doing offline more and more when social interaction is what I seek.

[JohnFen]

> one of my points was that even prior to ChatGPT the ability existed for you to be "sucked into" a relationship with another under false pretenses

That's true, of course, but it's still interacting with a real human being. An adverse interaction, but at least a human.

> I don't see how, in a post-LLM-world, that can't be done.

I don't see how it can be done without losing much of the value of online interactions.

> also try going out and meeting people in the real world more.

I go out and meet real people plenty, thank you very much. But we're talking about online interactions here. There should be room for people online, too.

[gspencley]

> That's true, of course, but it's still interacting with a real human being. An adverse interaction, but at least a human.

Actually, not entirely. Some of the stories that really made me raise an eyebrow were people who claimed that they were video-chatting with "the girl." An important piece of context is that these men reached out to me because they found pictures of the woman they believed they were in a relationship with on my website. They wanted to know if the woman was employed by me or if we could verify certain details about her to try and make sense of what they had gone through.

Of course there were people driving this interaction. But a video chat? Obviously it was faked. What I think that AI advancement is going to allow these scammers to do in the future is possibly have extremely convincing voice chats, because when I probed about these video chat claims often times the scammers would have excuses about the microphone not working etc. so they were clearly just feeding pre-recorded video.

Anyway I've gotten the sense by your reply that you are under the impression that we are having some sort of debate or argument. I'm just making conversation and sharing my point of view and experiences. In my opinion I'm not sure the Internet "should" be anything in particular.

[JohnFen]

> Anyway I've gotten the sense by your reply that you are under the impression that we are having some sort of debate or argument. I'm just making conversation and sharing my point of view and experiences. In my opinion I'm not sure the Internet "should" be anything in particular.

Oh, no, I didn't think that at all. I'm sorry that I gave that impression. I'm just doing the same as you, sharing worldviews. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. Just having interesting conversation.