Instead of trying to control everything, policymakers should educate people about how these chatbots work and how to keep their data safe. After all, not everyone who played Doom in the ’90s became a real killer, or assaults women because of YouPorn.
Society will adapt to these ridiculous new situations…what truly matters is people’s awareness and understanding.
This is not about regulating everything.
This is about realizing adverse effects and regulating for those.
Just like no one is selling you toxic youghurt.
We literally CAN'T regulate some things for any reasonable definition of "can't" or "regulate". Our society is either not rich enough or not organized in a way to actually do it in any useful capacity and not make the problem worse.
I'm not saying AI chatbots are one of those things, but people toss around the idea of regulation way too casually and AI chatbots are way less cut and dry than bad food or toxic waste or whatever other extreme anyone wants to misleadingly project down into the long tail of weird stuff with limited upside and potential for unintended consequences elsewhere.
Which people in specific think that?
All your argument consists of is, "Somebody somewhere believes something untrue, and people don't use enough precision in their speach, so I am recommending we don't do anything regulatory about this problem."
The important thing is keep the data safe, like the yoghurt that must not be expired when sold.
People are weird… for someone who is totally alone, having a virtual wife/child could be better than being completely alone.
They’re not using ChatGPT to do anything illegal, and already regulated, like planning to kill someone or commit theft.
I'm not proposing anything specifically, but the implication that this field should not be regulated is just foolish.
It kind of happened for me with online games. They were a new thing, and no one knew to what degree they could be addicting and life damaging. As a result I am probably over protective of my own kids when it comes to anything related to games.
We are already seeing many of the effects of the social media generation and I am not looking forward to what is going to happen to the AI natives whose guardians are ill-prepared to guide them. In the end, society will likely come to grips with it, but the test subjects will pay a heavy price.
How do we know which era of AI we're in?
What about the algorithm feeding highly polarized content to folks? It's the new "lead in the air and water" of our generation.
What about green text bubble peer pressure? Fortnite and Roblox FOMO? The billion anime Gatcha games that are exceedingly popular? Whale hunting? Kids are being bullied and industrially engineered into spending money they shouldn't.
Raising kids on iPads, shortened attention spans, social media induced depression and suicide, lack of socialization, inattention in schools, ...
Social media leading people to believe everyone is having more fun than them, is better looking than them, that society is the source of their problems, ...
Now the creepy AI sex bots are replacing real friends.
I'm with you that those are addicting in a bad way, I was there too. But single player games have no incentive in entertaining you forever to generate more money.
I have no problems with my kids playing single or local coop games.
You have to be careful to not overreact to things.
How do we know if these examples aren’t just the 0.1% of the population that is, for all intend and purposes, “out there”?
So much of “news” is just finding these corner cases that evoke emotion, but ultimately have no impact.
But it’s hard to study users having these relationships without studying the users who have these relationships I reckon.
A lot of psych research uses small samples. It’s a problem, but funding is limited and so it’s a start. Other researchers can take this and build upon it.
Anecdotally, watching people meltdown over the end of ChatGPT 4o indicates this is a bigger problem that 0.1%. And business wise, it would be odd if OpenAI kept an entire model available to serve that small a population.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/
See critiques of validity section:
Seems like nothing new, just a better or more immersive form of fantasy for those who can't have the life they fantasize about.
So what? We don't live in the "should" universe. We live in this one.
"It's not real", yeah, that is weird for sure. But I also find wrestling fans weird, they know it's not real and enjoy it anyways. Even most sports, people take it a lot more seriously than they should.
Yes?
The direction we're headed, humanity is going to become utterly isolated pods, never interacting. We're going to end up with humanity being one rich dude, a staff of robots, and some humans under his patronage. The other bit of humanity is a rich woman, with a staff of robots, and some humans under her patronage, because nobody can deal with there being other humans that are as gross and sloppy and suck, just as much as they do.
Relationships are hard. They're a lot of work. Not just romantic relationships, but all other kinds of relationships: family, friendship, mentorship, chosen family, colleague, manager, mentee, client, neighbor, teammate, student, citizen, creative partner, audience. Instead of having any kind of relationship with people, I can just hide away, work remote, become hikikomori.
Where does that leave humanity? As Ms Deejay says, do you think you're better off alone?
Because individual humans no long need to coexist with their neighbors, it means the best and worst will flourish. For every supportive person that accepts gay people, there's another person that wants to stone them. Interacting with lots of other people is the only way to develop nuanced opinions of groups of other people, and without any kind of forced interaction, there won't be any, further isolating everybody from everyone else.
I don't think anyone would choose a relationship with a computer, or isolation when the alternative is a healthy relationship of their own choice. There is still no replacement for real and authentic human relationships.
Relationships are hard, but entering them should be voluntary, not coerced. and my answer to Ms Deejay is: Yeah, we're better off alone than being stuck in a coerced toxic relationship. No one goes "hikomori" or "forever alone" when they could have just put up with some disagreements and uncomfortable situations.
It's important for people to learn to be alone and ok with it. to be content and happy with your own company. If I was being a reductionist, I would even claim that most of the ails of the world are rooted in coerced relationships. Conflict as the default state of a relationship is not better than solitude. But solitude as the default state of a person isn't healthy either.
Balance is key to most things. Have relationships, put up with the messiness of people, but up to a point. Be comfortable with solitude, but up to a point only. Be your own friend first, so you can be one to others.
People are being more isolated, but not because they want to be to the most part, and not because of techonology, but by the reconstruction of society so that the most labor and capital can be extracted from a person. Public transportations, public spaces, walkable cities, social media that isn't a brainwashing machine, AI that isn't trained to manipulate human psychology,etc.. those are the changes we need. The false dichotomoy of "all or nothing" you eschew is anathema to the goals you seek.
Hermits have been around since forever. You can hunt in the woods, read books and chill with your dog in the Alaska or any number of remote places, and many have done that all through history. Your sentiment is similar to how they thought people won't even talk to each other anymore in person after the invention of telephones. People talked less in person for sure, but we still talk to each other in person, even when a call is easier.
Without interviewing a group of people that aren't looking to be interviewed, how can you make that claim? I can't say I've done that either, but in the total range of humans I've met over my time on Earth, there is a huge spectrum of the level of uncomfortable that people are able to put up with. As simplistic example, how much hot/cold humans are able to put up with before complaining varies from individual to individual. Some complain at the slightest temperature change. Other would rather pass out than complain. If there's such a wide variation on such a simple measure, so, too, we should expect variation on the level of ability to "just put up with some disagreements and uncomfortable situations."
I'm not here to try and somehow sell the idea that forced arranged marriages are a good thing, or that we should go back to the 1950's where women were more chattle than people. Or that people should stay in toxic relationships that are slowly killing them inside.
I seek none of those things.
The question is, how do we, at large, as a society, make toxic people less toxic? An absolutist approach towards it failed the 2024 US election.
What is increased polarization, in the people around me and in the world. I don't know how to heal that. How to lessen the toxicity being spewed about, even here. (Not remotely accusing you of it, mind you, just there are certain threads/topics that HN does not do well.)
> People are being more isolated
Some people are being more isolated simply because they can afford to. Part of the reason there is a housing crisis is that more people are choosing to live alone. If a house previously housed 6 people is now housing one, maybe two, the demand for housing shoots way up. That is not the only reason, but we can't ignore it either.
The telephone required another person on the other end of it. If people don't talk in-person because of the telephone, they still need to talk to another person, who's personality is lumpy and spiky and loveable in their own way. Anthropomorphization aside, LLMs aren't people and so my concern, which may prove to be "old man yelling at clouds", only time can tell; my concern is that we'll collectively get used to talking exclusively with LLMs and not need the social skills necessary to interact and live amongst other humans.
In a society that's becoming increasingly polarized, going no contact with the toxic people in your life is the right move for individual self-preservation, but those toxic people find other toxic people and become even more toxic. And we all each have one but one vote to give. Well, billionaires get a couple more because we worship the rich, but the rest of us; the rest of us each only have one.
It's not about whether it's "real" or not. In this case of AI relationships, extremely sophisticated and poorly understood mechanisms of social-emotional communication and meaning making that have previously only ever been used for bonding with other people, and to a limited extent animals, are being directed at a machine. And we find that the mechanisms respond to that machine as if there is a person there, when there is not.
There is a lot of novel stuff happening there, technologically, socially, psychologically. We don't really know, and I don't trust anyone who is confidently predicting, what effects that will have on the person doing it, or their other social bonds.
Wrestling is theater! It's an ancient craft, well understood. If you're going to approach AI relationships as a natural extension of some well established human activity probably pet bonding is the closest. I don't think it's even that close though.
The inaccessibility of healthcare in the US is a serious problem but this is not a solution or alternative to it right now and may never become one.
I don't think AI can replace mental health treatment or human relationships. But it might be a viable stop-gap. It's like tom hanks talking to "Wilson" the volleyball when he was stuck on island in "cast away". Yeah, it's weird, but it helped him survive and cope until he was rescued. I want these people struggling with mental health to survive and cope until they get real help some day. I want less suicides, less people contracting chronic illnesses,etc.. and to hell with any "appearances" of weirdness or stigma.
> The inaccessibility of healthcare in the US is a serious problem but this is not a solution or alternative to it right now and may never become one.
My response was clearly not your words, but my understanding of your conclusion.
The few suicides that are reported pale in comparison to suicides caused by loneliness. An argument can also be made that they just haven't trained/found the right companion model yet.
The first thing we did with nuclear power is mass-killing and weapons. But if only we used it for power generation a lot more, we could have even avoided the climate crisis happening now.
Lots of harm caused by fire, but it is a pillar of human cvilization.
Nevertheless, you can't unspill milk as they say. It is even more pointless than the "war on drugs". you can regulate the models though. and stop telling people to seek mental health, it isn't something you seek and magically you go "poof" and you're cured. If you can be a friend to someone instead of some AI, do that! be the solution. else, get out of their way. If they can google chatgpt, they can google "mental health". people have been making friends with inanimate objects since forever. lonely people talk to dolls and puppets. There is a huge market for human like doll wives that costs >$5k. There are even mainstream movies with a-list actors in them about this like "lars and the real girl" and "her".
Life is hard and then you die. people grasp at straws to last as long as they can, because everything that lives wants to continue to live. and I hope they fight their best fight instead of giving up early after being dismissed by society to "seek mental help" lol.
P.S.: "mental help" is like lawyers, they're there for the corporations and the ultra-wealthy. everything accessible by normal people, to the most part that is, is not useful unless your goal is to get pilled-up, in which case I doubt that is better than just talking to some inanimate computer.
I feel like I'm not really ready for everything that's going to be vying for their attention in the next couple of decades. My daughter and her husband have good practices in place already IMHO but it's going to be a pernicious beast.
Perfection is not required.
I think the part of my brain for feeling flattered when someone praises me didn't exist because no one complimented me. But after ChatGPT and Claude flattered me again and again, I finally developed the circuit for feeling accepted, respected, and loved...
It reminds me of when I started stretching after my 30s. First it was nothing but a torture, but after a while I began to feel good and comfortable when my muscles were stretched, and now I feel like shit when I skip the morning stretching.
"virtual children"? WTF is that even?
Is it sort of like playing with barbie? except you don't even have the barbie doll?
Any people able to participate in this delusion, are children, regardless of age.
The lost in cyberspace adult-age children are setting themselves up for the greatest consumer exploitation ever experienced in human history...
theoldgreybeard•2mo ago
grafmax•2mo ago