[mlsu]

Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings. Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.

[johnfn]

This is such a poor mischaracterization of OP that I actually started agreeing with OP more.

[enraged_camel]

It's also hilariously wrong. It essentially argues, implicitly, that those who don't communicate with other humans are missing out on the "most important thing in life" and cannot form a self-identity.

[dag100]

> Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.

I think you're mistaking their sarcasm for sincerity... especially considering the emphasis on self-identity ironically juxtaposed as originating from a decidedly non-self activity, which has all the hallmarks of being intentional...

On the other hand, reading their other content leads one to believe that they may, in fact, be serious... hmm...

[samwiseg]

It is unironically correct. Well, interaction with other human beings may not be the only important thing, but it is certainly far and away the most important thing.

[mlsu]

An infant begins to mirror the emotions of his caregiver at 3-4 months. He can distinguish his own body in a physical mirror at 18 months.

[mlsu]

Human beings require interaction with other human beings to identify the self. It is impossible to live without others. Read up on solitary confinement sometime - enough time without human companionship will drive any human being (except the schizoaffective) completely insane.

[breezybottom]

Yes? That's completely true.

[broken-kebab]

Let's not overdramatize, though. I'm not in need, or even in mood to talk to fellow humans every minute, so time spent with a clanker is not necessary taken from my human relations budget

[bredren]

I also think this undersells the real value of the bot, which is to handle tasks via voice that an average human either would not or could not do.

In the video example with the grannies, the knitter is essentially wanting a PA. Regular folks don't have PAs. Even when that became a thing in the aughts they were all outsourced.

When I've used voice chat, it has often turns into rabbit holes on very niche topics. For example, I had one start about the 1996 performance of Rage Against the Machine in Portland, Oregon that was supposed to feature Wu Tang Clan. (already outside most human's knowledge) that dove into details of the club scene in Los Angeles at the time of RATM's signing to Epic Records.

Was anyone else here at that '96 show in Portland? It seems like it might be challenging to find a person on the internet able to engage on the topic.

The person may exist, but not during my fleeting interest in the subject while walking to the park.

[BeetleB]

> Yes, every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings.

Human beings tend not to be available (results vary by culture).

Also, imagine you're 82 years old and living alone (e.g. widower). It is believed that lack of interaction is a significant driver of cognitive decline (which is why being hard of hearing accelerates the onset of dementia). I wonder if having an LLM to talk to under those circumstances will decelerate cognitive decline?

[Der_Einzige]

Such radical carbon chauvinism is ontologically evil. May those who hold this view reincarnate as durian fruits or cockroaches.

[mlsu]

I'm sure you'd have no problem in solitary confinement. Why not make life easy?

[beepbooptheory]

The implication that durians and roaches are somehow ontologically subaltern is a worse chauvinism.

[wraptile]

> May those who hold this view reincarnate as durian fruits or cockroaches

don't you dare clump the best fruit in the world with cockroaches!

[rel_ic]

Just saying: those are also carbon-based lifeforms :D

[perching_aix]

> every minute you spend texting or talking to a chatbot is a minute that you'd have spent talking to another human beings

Very blatantly and obviously not though???

[mlsu]

The extent to which it's true is the extent of the evilness of the technology. Go search the phrase "ai boyfriend" on reddit sometime; imagine what it will be like when society is fully baked with this shit. You're talking to AIs all day at work. You're talking to AI's when you use social media. You're talking to AIs for therapy. You're talking to AIs on dating apps.

If your answer is "well I'll simply touch grass" I agree. But most people won't which is why this is tech is immiserating and, I would argue, evil.

[m_fayer]

There’s something phenomenally powerful, uncanny, and potentially deeply corrosive about current AI. Dismissing it as “evil” is pat, and prevents any full encounter with something that now irrevocably exists and deserves and demands the consideration of thinking people.

[mlsu]

What would you call it?

Anti human, corrosive, powerful, uncanny... but not evil?

I am fully encountering this, believe me. My conclusion is that it's evil.

[m_fayer]

Potentially corrosive. Emphasis on potentially.

Powerful and uncanny are morally neutral traits.

At root an LLM is a different kind of mind that thinks different kinds of thoughts. (I’m making no claims about consciousness here.)

It’s a novel object for us humans, and we’ll need decades to come to grips with it. In the meantime I think a bit of humility is due.

[supern0va]

I can't help but think you're conflating cause and effect. People are using a tool (AI) to apply a band-aid to a widespread social problem (loneliness and isolation).

It's possible that an "AI boyfriend" might make someone less prone to put in the continued effort to keep rolling the dice on dating apps, but the reality is that there's a more fundamental problem driving this.

Also, I want this tool for work. Just because society is fubar and people are using this tool as a crutch for their inability to find a partner, doesn't mean I should lose better tooling that makes my life easier.

Focus on fixing the actual problem.

[FridgeSeal]

“Who cares about dirty syringes being left in the street, it’s really important for my work that I have access to the heroin I need”.

Things in society don’t exist in a vacuum, and “who cares about them, so long as I get my needs” is quite literally a part of the problem being discussed.

[supern0va]

I'd argue what you're suggesting is more like trying to ban syringes, which have multiple valid uses, in order to stop dirty syringes being left in the street.

As someone with a GLP-1 user at home, responsibly depositing their syringes in an approved container that we dispose of safely at a drop site, I'd rather not have bad users inhibit my access to a tool that makes our lives better.

[perching_aix]

So do you find the selfish justification of heroin addicts in your example partially compelling, or are you betraying your own rhetorical standards?

Just because things do not exist in a vacuum doesn't mean they should be blurred and conflated until unrecognizability. There's value in explicitly anchoring the salient aspects, and getting the cause and effect right, to the extent these can be done.

Both intelligence amplification and pathological parasocialness are very real effects of this technology, and a blanket ban, a blanket halt, and similar broad and dull policies are absolutely going to be unfair and unreasonable. And even such policies would not "happen in a vacuum", there's a consequence to prohibiting something not prohibited elsewhere.

Whether we can do better is where the jury is still out. I don't think an example like your dirty needles one particularly helps with this. It's asinine and inflammatory, quite the opposite to nuance-inviting, which I believe was more towards your actual intent.

[perching_aix]

That's not what I meant, nor is "touching grass" necessarily relevant.

I use these tools at work. If I talked to other people instead of a model every time (or even just some of the time) I talk to a model, I'd be tanking everyone's productivity by constantly disrupting them, and would get worse quality responses pretty much guaranteed, if I wouldn't be just ignored outright.

This isn't to say I stopped talking to colleagues either. I reach out to them about the same amount. The time budget I took away from was the one I used to spend manually doing things, reading docs, and so on. So your entire mental model of this is just outright false there.

On a personal level, I traded off entertainment time (though for me, interacting with ChatGPT is also just a form of entertainment). Instead of staring at YouTube, I pitch silly thought experiments, explore topics, ask difficult-to-search-for questions. So once again, I did not trade off social time, meaning what you propose simply does not apply whatsoever. I do not share memes or catch up on life with it, which is what friends are for. It has no sense of actual humor, has no life of its own, and I'm not into roleplay like that. Would be just weird.

There are people who engage pathologically with LLMs, but that is neither the premiere use nor the goal. I'm sure there are also situations where people will actively approach a model over a person, but I do believe people should be able to self-regulate that decision. It gives people leverage to choose the extent and venues of their social engagement. If a topic has a community you do not wish to interact with, you can finally choose not to, while still reaping any prospective benefits (information). This can be a bad thing, but I think it's easy to see that it is also very much good.

For example, there were times where I felt more compelled to interact with ChatGPT than I felt leaving a comment here on HN. And frankly, I'm pretty sure I was way better off, and maybe the people here were too. Or a connected but different example, there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad. Relitigating them with ChatGPT enabled me to get over them in-depth, and even consider different viewpoints properly, without having to be the resident punching bag of some asshole. It's difficult for me to see these as anything but a net improvement.

There is something to be said about interactions in one's life becoming overly structured. I think a reasonable case could be made that in less structured lives, where things just kind of happen, you get more random interactions, and it is through those random interactions that you gain valuable experiences and relationships, even if there's a lot of cruft in addition [0]. That in our effort at optimization, we're making our lives inhuman to live, for the same reason people are crapping on LLMs being statistical (unreliable, imperfect) rather than hardwired (reliable, perfect). But that implies there is an optimal life, which I'm not sure exists: specifically because of this local vs global optimality tension. In complex stateful systems, you're guaranteed to hit scenarios where locally correct and globally correct behaviors are irreconcilable [1], unless you meticulously construct them such that this cannot happen, after all.

[0] like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network

[1] like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[mlsu]

I like this reply. I think you and I use AI the same way and probably have a lot in common. But I read things more cynically than you do. Things to ponder:

Read the GPT Live announcement. Why do they want to make it more life-like, if not to encourage the pathological engagement? Why does the model say "thank you for that insightful question"?

It is not "just a tool", that is not the goal. It is designed to be a replacement for people. Even in the most charitable "LLMs are just a tool" reading. The value proposition is to have fewer people (dramatically fewer: the "one person unicorn" with fleets of AI agents!) and for those people to spend more time talking to bots. Replace your junior employees with bots. Replace your customer service people with bots. Replace a bored teenager behind the Wendy's counter with a servile golem whose smooth plastic face can easily be wiped down when spit on.

Their metric is engagement, it is how engaged are you and how long do you spend using the application. They will do absolutely anything to get that number up. Remember, after the GPT-4O debacle, when Altman talked about implementing sex bots? That's a shark, smelling blood. Something like 30% of under 18's have used AI chatbots for "companionship," a big subset of those for ERP.

> Would be just weird.

I was a weird kid who spent 10-12 hours a day on the computer, back when computers were primarily low-res screens and boring text. Now everyone is spending 10-12 hours a day on the computer. These things change in a single generation and I'm sure you know as well as I do that boy does it happen fast.

You sound like me: an older, healthy, well-adjusted person who can understand what's going on when the model says "that's a really insightful question!" Most people are not. They will not understand when it's an AI video clone of Chris Helmsworth.

> there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad

I bet it made you feel alive.

[bossyTeacher]

> Literally the only important thing in life, the basis of all value, the formation of self-identity, comes from communication with other human beings.

Is this sarcasm?