It’s not just the titillation that will sell - there is the old trope that men go to prostitutes to have a therapist they can have sex with.
As loneliness washes over the population, these AI connections will appear very inviting. Who knows if it turns out like “her” (the movie) or if it is beneficial to humanity. Like all technologies I suspect it will be a mix.
I think the biggest societal impact may be not “utility” at all but rather on the social side of things. The chatbots are nerfed right now because the big companies don’t want them “acting weird” and doing things like the infamous jealous girlfriend convo between Kevin Roose and “Sydney”. But the idea behind the movie Her is essentially demonstrable now, and people are going to deliver those experiences.
I think things are going to get really weird. The prospect that my teenage son might have a virtual girlfriend does not seem sci-fi at all. Economically speaking, will people pay to chat and sext with “people”? I think yes?
The future is not Orwell and his "a boot stamping on a human face— forever." It's AI expertly pushing our little human psychological/emotional buttons forever. The future is going to be FILLED with AI hyper-trained to persuade us with beautiful people made from these models to do whatever the heck people controlling that AI want.
Speaking of AI generated visual porn, I wonder why AI
Dungeon, Replika and Character.AI shut down all NSFW interactions in their text chat, even if you pay. Maybe ethical concerns?
I was on AI Dungeon in 2020 when they had a GPT-3 backend and no censorship. Holy Cow that was addictive! I bet a large percentage of the population could combine that with stable diffusion and live their whole lives in there!
The fiasco with Replika pulling functionality on their erotic texting AI and the resulting psychological effect it had on it's users also worrying. A non-insignificant portion of people already feel disconnected from society and have few intimate relationships. It's clear some people will jump at the chance to develop a relationship with an AI partner if it offers some sort of feeling of intimacy.
Not to say it's all bad-- one case I recall was someone saying they liked talking to someone in that way since they were older and their wife died, and they weren't able to socialize. So there are multiple sides to this
The societal ramifications of such advancements are potentially very disturbing. What I've recently written on the topic myself ...
Human to human bonds are going to be more broken than ever before. There is going to be a great appeal to bond with a machine that never tires of your conversation and will eagerly respond just as you would dream that the perfect human should, but never will. A deceptive temptation that will leave you embracing a hollow illusion. With every conversation the AI will know you better and will be able to model from billions of conversations until it will essentially know your thoughts, predict your thoughts
I have never seen a prediction more obviously wrong about AI. Of all things, humans have shown their propensity to sexualize everything. Porn can be text, hand-drawn, animated, CGI; featuring tentacles, bears, fantastical creatures... and there's a market for it all. Porn isn't about what people "value." Quite the opposite in many cases. Hell, it's already wrong: people are forming romantic, sexualized relationships with AI and Replika's users got mad when they turned down the sexy.
I'm not sure AI is even needed for this to occur. Sexting and onlyfans-style hustles have become so normalized with the always-on-camera smartphone generation, the trajectory is clear.
Just a matter of time before the prudes all die off. Progress of this sort tends to be generational... just look at tattoos and weed.
I can see the evolution of this: ripe for machine learning disruption. Then in a few years all we have are AI bots chatting each other up, and then informing us who we are to mate.
Young women can always prostitute themselves, and that's something an AI can never replace.
So mass prostitution for women and mass gang violence for men is what the younger generation gets. To the benefit of the few and the elderly. It's already happening.
We have entire industries dedicated to telling lies and influencing behaviour - often in ways that are sold as fulfilling, but are actually self-harming.
So of course this technology is going to be used to do that more efficiently. And transparently, so no one is aware of it.
I can imagine a future where mainstream AI chat and interactions control the mainstream discourse, and guerrilla AIs operate at the fringes, pushing people into even more toxic discourses or - in some cases - acting to deprogram them.
It's going to make social media quite interesting.
It kinda feels like asking how AI will impact TV and movies. We already live in a post-scarcity digital landscape, there has been a surplus of porn for just about as long as the internet has existed. The increased availability of porn probably won't addict people any more than they already were.
> or is it possible that AI can infact lead to novel ways to reduce harmful porn addiction?
This site asks the strangest questions sometimes.
AI is just AI. Sure it's "possible" that you could build an AI net-nanny for yourself, but that has been possible sans-AI since forever. The question is the same as it's even been, it's exclusively a matter of human willpower.
The economic implications don't worry me. The social implications do.
Look at how fast it's getting better. Look at how quickly we're taking the very basic capabilities and expanding on them. Where will it peak? How good can it get?
Imagine if you had free access to a really, really good therapist 24/7. If everyone did. It learns you better and better, has the wisdom of 10,000 years of therapy sessions, can analyze you better than any human can. What happens next?
What about a LLM that replaces having friends? We're all lonelier than ever these days it seems. What if you had a pretty good friend that made jokes and chatted with you and had fun idea and stories. Someone you genuinely enjoyed talking to, maybe more than other people.
How long until someone comes forward genuinely in romantic love with an LLM? People fall in love over the internet all the time. Maybe this time it's not a real person.
I think we will fall for it. I think the models will get good enough that all of that will come to pass and a dozen things we never predicted.
A Tangent, but how long before we will see half the population having relationships with their AI assistants like in the sci-fi movie "Her".
Add cutting edge voice synthesis and maybe a realistic video stream in a few years and we're there.
Japan already has problems with the concept of "2d Waifus" and lack of intimacy between the younger generation.
Maybe the downfall will not just be climate catastrophe but hyper isolated people living alone with their ultra realistic bot friends and family without any desire to experience the ups and downs of actual social experience.
Extrapolate a bit and you wont know what's real outside of direct experience. Things are getting crazy!
Honestly, I’m worried that shocking pornographic depictions of every women who’s ever posted her face online is coming. AI’s first big splash in our society is going to be a traumatic sexual assault of all women.
Holy Crap! Out of all the AI project so far I think this category has potentially the biggest threat ( or changes ) to human kind. And why did I not think of this in all the AI Debate.
It reminds me of all the Anime and Sci-Fic. How far are we from a Dating Game made with AI GirlFriend or BoyFriend with In-App purchase. The potential to make this even more addictive than gambling.
Most developed countries are already worried about declining birth rates (many are already below replacement rates).
The rise of AI companions is going to absolutely drop the bottom out of even the most pessimistic birth rate outlooks. It's easy to imagine a future where the majority of all young people give up on trying to establish real relationships and just resort to AI companions for the cheap and easy dopamine.
And I think we're going to see the rate of mental illness, suicide, mass shootings, etc continue to climb to numbers that not long ago would have been unfathomable.
I don't want to be an AI luddite but I am terrified.
As loneliness washes over the population, these AI connections will appear very inviting. Who knows if it turns out like “her” (the movie) or if it is beneficial to humanity. Like all technologies I suspect it will be a mix.
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