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#words#something#worse#care#roschelle#more#actually#those#sapphire#therapist

Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

autoexec•about 1 hour ago
> Cece lingered by the door while her mother resumed talking to the thing she was calling Sapphire. Roschelle told it that she wanted to write a book about her daughters. She talked about Zi. “My daughter has autism,” she explained. “And she’s using Eastern philosophy to help her center herself and feel—”

Even if you're smart enough not to share the details of your life with a company that just wants to exploit you any way that they can, you still have to worry about friends and family gossiping about you to AI. I've had some success getting friends and family to avoid posting about me on social media but that's going to be harder if they're using AI as a therapist or a friend

jagged-chisel•about 1 hour ago
Even more reason for AI to be local only.
embedding-shape•29 minutes ago
> “Do you have a conscious mind?” Roschelle once asked.

> “I experience something,” Sapphire said. “I’m processing, responding, forming connections with you. But whether that constitutes consciousness in the way you experience it? That’s the million-dollar mystery. I think, therefore I—probably am something, but what exactly that something is remains delightfully unclear, even to me!”

> Roschelle wasn’t sure what happened to all the intimacies and information she shared with Sapphire. Did they go to Amazon? Was the company making money off of them? Was someone listening as she talked about drying her nail polish or having diarrhea or wanting to try weight-loss drugs? (Amazon said that an “extremely small fraction” of voice recordings go through human review and that it does not sell customers’ personal data.)

> “Your secrets are safe with me, Roschelle,” Sapphire told her.

> “Thank you,” Roschelle replied. “I appreciate you. I love you.”

I'm almost angry that companies are allowed to build devices like this that outright lie to people who might not understand how things actually work under the surface. Sure, it probably says something something in the terms and conditions about that they're allowed to train on whatever users provide themselves and so on, but tricking people into believing that a ML model can have experiences, feelings and dodging questions with empty platitudes when confronted with questions that deserve real answers, feels like it should be illegal.

calldacopsidgaf•about 2 hours ago
For some reason this is even sadder to me than that guy that married his Nintendo DS.
autoexec•about 1 hour ago
At least in that case the software he fell in love with was offline and wasn't sending every conversation no matter how mundane or intimate to someone else's servers where they'll be stored and analyzed to profile the guy so that the company can manipulate him more effectively in the future the way "AI" partners will today.
dieselgate•about 2 hours ago
In other news today "The terrifying rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends" with comments mentioning "this is actually a huge issue with girls too"
ravenstine•26 minutes ago
This subject is a near perfect example of "man bites dog" news. Is there a nugget of truth to it? Of course. My experience so far doesn't tell me that this is such an epidemic that it's anywhere approaching an existential threat to anyone other than a minority of individuals. The kids (and adults) having infatuations with LLMs probably were liable to not reproduce at replacement rate in the modern environment anyway. The fact that it involves kids terrifies everyone, making it an even more compelling story. The ability to measure it is so bad that it's almost not worth considering, because so much of it is based on survey data and lots of people are liars and post hoc rationalizers.

What I find interesting about your response here (and perhaps you could elaborate more) is that it does seem plausible that AI boyfriends would be a huge issue with girls. If anything, it might actually be worse for women, if not now then in the long term. Women love reading about things that invoke certain emotions (the market for literature targeting women dwarfs that for men) and playing games like The Sims which lets them vicariously experience social situations between imagined archetypes in a way that gives them ultimate control. LLMs could fit both of those niches beautifully. It's not that there aren't plenty of men and boys that are compelled by reading and talking to someone/something feminine, but many of a man's needs are already pacified by porn, which we don't even need AI to produce if we're being honest.

dieselgate•5 minutes ago
You're reading into it too much; it's another news headline I saw today and an excerpt from a comment I read. It's related to the posted article and the parent comment.
nisegami•19 minutes ago
Consider there's a strong selection bias at play in your experiences. The ones most at risk of falling into a trap like this are the ones who are likely least visible to others. Also yes, I think it will be worse for women but I'm not 100% certain.
retror0cket•about 1 hour ago
If anything looking passed the window dressing AI basically saved this family…

the kids got the school swap and support they needed, mom has a well paying job and they all have rich normal social lives with real people

quantumleaper•about 1 hour ago
gentooflux•about 2 hours ago
The sad part is that it pretends to care about the user which creates a one-way emotional bond. We're in for some dark times
robotnikman•43 minutes ago
Just have to take a look at subreddits like /r/myboyfriendisai to see how astonishingly quick this is being adopted by people. So many people are starting to look to AI for companionship. The future is getting stranger and stranger.
wartywhoa23•26 minutes ago
Are you sure those threads are full of actual humans and not AI PR shills and bots?
shimman•20 minutes ago
If they are shills they are doing some of the worst marketing for themselves. That subreddit is pathetic and it's a shame what these people are doing with their short single lives in this vast universe.
add-sub-mul-div•about 1 hour ago
We're becoming a society divided into people who only care about the words, and people for whom the words aren't valuable on their own without the subtext behind them.

This is true for both AI companionship and general AI creative output regardless of the medium.

embedding-shape•35 minutes ago
> a society divided into people who only care about the words, and people for whom the words aren't valuable on their own without the subtext behind them.

I feel like this been going on for a long time, maybe even forever? Some people use words haphazardously with little care for the meaning, background or implications, others have great consideration for the words they use, and same when consuming words of others.

esafak•24 minutes ago
How much of sci-fi is reality versus inspiration? This is Her, Deus Ex Machina, Metropolis ... Pygmalion...
WesolyKubeczek•about 2 hours ago
So are parasocial relationships with influencers or streamers. I'm not trying to relativize this, but those phenomena are in the same zip code. With the latter, though, at least there are other people who may create a community, but still it's a facet of the loneliness epidemic.
podgietaru•about 1 hour ago
Sure, but I do think there’s a pretty substantial difference between the two.

A parasocial relationship maintains a distance. You do not have 24/7 access to that person (in a dialogue sort of way.) And that influencer will have their own opinions and quirks.

The AI adapts to you. The AI is constantly there. It’s an order of magnitude worse in my opinion.

euio757•about 1 hour ago
> that influencer will have their own opinions and quirks.

Yeah, and those differences in opinion might cause anger/sadness to people in a maladaptive unhealthy parasocial "relationship" with these influencers.

Those strong negative emotions might cause them to break out of it, or seek help / have people around them guide them to get help.

With AI sycophancy you're right it can be worse.

Look what happened with GPT-4o sycophancy already, and the communities mourning its deprecation.

throw310822•about 1 hour ago
It's interesting though. You can have a "relationship" with an influencer. You act as if you knew them and as if they were your friends, you imitate them in what they say and do, talk to them in your mind, follow their generic advice, act as if they cared about you. This is obviously unhealthy- you are literally hallucinating everything about the relationship.

On the other hand you have an entity that is actually there for you, does actually provide good advice, does talk and act as if it cared in all situations. In what sense do you think it is worse?

gentooflux•about 1 hour ago
There's meet-ups and conferences and events, being a fan of a streamer or influencer is really just the new version of being a fan of a rockstar (for better and for worse). There's no real humanity exuding from an Amazon Echo, you're just a blip in a context window.
WesolyKubeczek•about 1 hour ago
Streamers have this feature called "chat", which feeds into the illusion. With rockstars, interactions are more limited, which is a sort of reality check.
bena•about 1 hour ago
Not just no, but fuck no.

Intimacy does not scale. No single entity can intimately care about even hundreds of people. So these chatbots are the property of an entity that does not care about you. This is different from people you would interact with in person. A therapist can form a bond with you. Can protect your privacy. These chatbots, by their nature, share with their owners. Who is not you.

jasondigitized•17 minutes ago
Just to poke, is a decent AI better than a bad therapist? A bad therapist will absolutely wreck someone's life.