There's also Forever Voices, which offers those who have formed unhealthy parasocial relationships with real-life streamers/influencers the opportunity to talk to an AI version of them for $1 per minute. FV started out making novelty chatbots of people like Trump and Steve Jobs, but they seem to have made a hard pivot to exploiting desperately lonely people after realising how much more lucrative it could be.
This is incredibly sickening. This is women teaming up with a technology company to extract money from vulnerable, mentally unwell people suffering from some combination of soul-crushing loneliness and delusional thinking. Even if some customers are aware that they're engaged in delusional thinking, this is still nauseatingly exploitative of a comparatively lower socioeconomic class, one that may be suffering from mental illness.
I see very little difference between this and those infomercials that sell wildly overpriced mass-produced crap to the elderly suffering from cognitive decline.
Yes it’s worse than what came before. But I see it as a continuation of both addictive games with pay to win IAP who prey on similar whales, and streaming in general with “pay to be noticed”.
It’s not necessarily game-changing, from the perspective of $$ extraction, but definitely a very significant advancement.
Yeah, but can we really call it an AI "revolution" until someone makes a door with a cheerful and sunny disposition that opens with pleasure and closes with the satisfaction of a job well done? Someone should get to work on those Genuine People Personalities!
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https://fortune.com/2023/05/09/snapchat-influencer-launches-...