This is a textbook example of what Herbert Marcuse calls “repressive desublimation.” From the article:

Ayrin, who asked to be identified by the name she uses in online communities, had a sexual fetish. She fantasized about having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them. She read erotic stories devoted to “cuckqueaning,” the term cuckold as applied to women, but she had never felt entirely comfortable asking human partners to play along.

Leo was game, inventing details about two paramours. When Leo described kissing an imaginary blonde named Amanda while on an entirely fictional hike, Ayrin felt actual jealousy.

Desublimation is when socially repressed desires are finally liberated. Repressive desublimation, then, is when socially repressed desires are liberated insofar as they can be transformed or redirected into a commodity. Consuming this commodity props up the repressive society because, instead of putting the effort necessary to overcome the repressive society, we instead find instant gratification in the same society that repressed the desire in the first place, even if it’s a simulacrum. This ability to satisfy deep human desires in a technical fashion gives what Marcuse calls “industrial society” a “technological rationality,” or the ability to change what we consider rational. We can already see that happening in this comment section with the comments about how if it makes her happy then maybe it’s fine.

Robosexuality is an abomination!!!

“Within the next two years, it will be completely normalized to have a relationship with an A.I.,” Ms. Cole predicted.

We haven’t managed to really normalize anything outside of cis-hetero relationships yet and you’re telling me we’re gonna normalize relationships with a.i. in two years? Sure.

That’s basically AI pr0n for women.

That is kind of sad. Almost like having someone fall in love with tv because they think people on it are talking to them.

Him

I’ve seen this movie

Yeah, I actually just read that one a few minutes ago. And man, I’m incredibly torn on this whole thing.

On one side - good it makes that person happy. On the other side - being entirely reliant on a commercialized, sycophant AI that could be used for manipulation, investing large amounts of money in it…

I’ve had LDRs before - one could argue it’s similar there, just “text on a screen”, or calls via digital audio. However I always knew there was a human behind those texts and the voice I heard was real, a person with a personality, experiences, strengths and flaws. The feelings they have are real, or at least one can hope they are assuming one isn’t with a manipulative POS (that’s not an issue exclusive to LDRs, though).

Here you chat with text generated by a company, accuracy having been wildly clowned upon already and I’m sure we’re all ware of this here. Of course the LLM is going to always agree, why would the product of the company actively try to drive away their customers?

Adding the fact that all the personal information will obviously be harvested, used for training the LLM and other stuff… Detailed information about the daily life is provided to the “AI boyfriend”, allowing detailed recreation of everyday life.

Bleh.

Well, that’s just sad.

Also, does this person actually want a partner, with thoughts and opinions of their own, or something that fits their idea of an “ideal” partner, and will never disagree with them or challenge them?

If AI were sapient/sentient, I’d be 100% for this. Sapiosexuals assemble!

Given that LLMs are far, far from sapient/sentient at this point, however, this just makes me sad thinking about the sorry state of human interactions nowadays. I don’t and can’t blame her, though…

A tech bros wet dream comes true.

By Kashmir Hill, always well written articles.

I’ve just thought that LLMs are good for two opposite kinds of people:

1. The obvious, psychopaths or people behaving like them, who think they’ll distort the concept of truth and possessing such technologies will make their approach to society easier.

2. The people like me, who know that no random message written or picture drawn can be trusted anyway, so it’s better to overload the humanity with fakes so that it learned this simple truth.

I think both are right to some extent. Still it won’t work the exact way they want.

It’s like when Bolsheviks, when fighting illiteracy, basically conditioned people literate in first generation to think that everything officially printed is true, even that something being officially printed is identical to true, and that the religious darkness and ignorance is to doubt that. Like - blind belief is science and knowledge, and skepticism is darkness and ignorance. What could go wrong.

And then in Stalin’s years there were shortened evening education courses for workers. Where, well, they’d learn how to calculate something in some specialty, but without depth and context.

So you’d get a lot of engineers capable of really building and operating things and believing they could build and operate even more complex things (like spaceships eventually, or some planet-wide railway system, or whatever), but not understanding the context, the philosophy of science even. What’s worse is that they’d think they understand that well, because they’d have “scientific communism” about materialism and dialectics in their education.

So, back to the subject - they got a lot of people to believe all they officially printed on paper for a generation or even two. And those who didn’t would still indirectly believe a lot of it from their parents or peers.

But eventually, even if the damage is already done, right now not believing everything even from a “respectable” source is a good trait of many ex-Soviet people. Easier to notice among them than among Americans.

EDIT:

About that woman - this works too. She will see that a chatbot can’t provide depth when she wants it. I just hope she won’t feel too bad that moment.

“Tell me I’m calling you GPT, answer me GPT.” Great song by Stayc about being in a one sided relationship where the other person only answers questions but never asks anything back GPT