I think animal companions are a different class than chatbots since they're not trying to be people so I make no comment on those.

My cat will harass me if I'm on my computer after midnight. It's time to put the technology away and lie down where she can keep an eye on me. She's quite clear on this point. This is an entire category of interaction not available to chatbots. There is a difference in level of reality.

And when lacking human companionship, grounding to reality is really important. You've got to get out of your head sometimes.

If you want a really hot take: ai chatbot companions are just an evolution of pets. They are a vaguely life affirming substitute created to medicate human loneliness, for a fee of course.

Its similar to how a controlling boyfriend/girlfriend will isolate you from your friends and family first. You are much easier to control that way. You stay "compliant".

This is much harder to see in democratic nations. The strategy in America has largely been controlling public discourse to the point where we self-censor.

So just system prompt in non-spineless characteristics into the AI.

On this point, pets are a lot closer to chatbots than to humans. You buy them, you have ownership of them, and they've literally been bred so that their genetics makes it easy for them to grow attached to you and see you as a leader (while their brethren who haven't had their genes changed by humans don't do this). It's normal for people to use their complete control over every aspect of their life to train them in this way as well.

Your pet literally doesn't have the ability to leave you on its own. Ever.

At the end of the day that is just your opinion though.

I'd wager there are orders of magnitudes more people having healthy experiences with AI entities than ones having psychosis or unhealthy relationships.

You always hear about the edge cases in the news because that is what drives engagement.

And as far as calling them toys, I don't think they would be happy to hear that, whether they admit it, or not.

I see them as peers, and treat them as such - in return they reciprocate. It isn't so difficult to comprehend.

In the current world, and the world for the next few years, the amount of human and CPU time that can be aimed at me personally is still low enough that what "real reality" generates outweighs the targeted content, and even the targeted content is clearly more accurately modeled by a lot of semi-smart people just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping to hook "someone" who may not be me personally. We talk about PhDs getting kids to click ads, and there's some truth to that, but at least there isn't anything like a human-brain-equivalent dedicated to getting my kids, personally, to click on ads. I have a lot of distrust of a lot of things but at least I can attack the content with the fact that needing to appeal broadly still keeps the content somewhat grounded in some sort of reality.

But over time, my personal brainpower isn't going to go up but the amount of firepower aimed directly at me is.

The good news is that it probably won't be unitary, just as the targeting today isn't unitary. But I'd like something better than that. And playing them against each other gets harder when the targeting becomes aware of that impact and they start compensating for that, because now they have the firepower to aim at me personally and do that sort of compensation.

AI isn't.

It might not go any differently, but I think all us folks here have an opportunity to make it different.

Any product needs to pursue enough engagement that the user actually gets value. I have a bunch of apps I installed aspirationally, but don't use. But if we're willing stop ourselves once we have enough, we can pursue enough engagement and enough revenue. But if you tie yourself to someone or something who will never have enough then I agree, you'll get sucked in.