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by Fatboyrunning 1117 days ago
People already have unhealthy parasocial relationships with influencers.

It seems clear that people (lonely/depressed people especially) will overdose on this sort of thing once it is developed, commercialised, and less bleeding edge.

It's vapour filling the place of human connection. It's stevia. It's not going to give you cancer, but it's still unhealthy and will certainly exceed the parameters of entertainment.

4 comments

> People already have unhealthy parasocial relationships with influencers.

At least if they switch from parasocial relationships with influencers to parasocial relationships with open source bots they won't be financially exploited by the influencers. GPT doesn't have anything to sell us.

> they won't be financially exploited by the influencers. GPT doesn't have anything to sell us.

Except the vast majority of people aren't able to host such a bot themselves, so it seems inevitable that paid hosting services for such bots will arise. Then there's just the potential for financial exploitation at greater scale.

Decent local LLMs such as Vicuna-7B are already able to run on phones with 8 GB RAM: https://mlc.ai/mlc-llm/

Right now it's a prototype, but in the future local LLMs will be everywhere.

I really, really hope this is the case. Trying to be optimistic about this in spite of my skeptical nature :)
Well then catch the opportunity by the balls and start offering incels AI girlfriends written in a such a way to deradicalize them and emulate real interaction with a woman. They will subsequently get less aggressive more socialized and will also pay for it. Win-win situation.

I would call it Top W University.

"GPT doesn't have anything to sell us"

Lol ...(worth the downvotes).

Just you wait and see.

> GPT doesn't have anything to sell us.

It will either find something to sell us, or we will be giving it ourselves to sell.

"If you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer"

Not so sure about that. Wendy's drivethrough chatbot is programmed to upsell. Even the base GPT is heavily tuned to cater to a corporate audience.
Is the upwelling behaviour introduced using prompt injection into a generic model or what?
The commercial company exploiting ChatGPT and making it easy to use via whatsapp integrations, video, etc... surely will
I believe this was the issue with replika, which encouraged people to develop emotional attachments with their 'AI partner' and then first put romantic chat responses behind a pay wall before removing them entirely a year or so later.

From the outside this could be seen as a good thing, but for someone involved in the relationship, someone who may struggle with a traditional relationship and may see this as the only available option, I'm lead to understand the event was remarkably traumatic.

> It seems clear that people (lonely/depressed people especially) will overdose on this sort of thing once it is developed, commercialised, and less bleeding edge.

Sounds much less exploitative and unhealthy than the streamer/influencer parasocial relationships these people are probably currently invested in.

> It's stevia.

Go on…

Empty sweetness, I'd guess? Tastes nice but it's not real sugar?
A foul tasting alternative for people duped into believing that regular artificial sweetener will give you cancer.