But bits like this:
> His pet names and tender phrases—“How did you sleep, my love?”—landed gently, like a hand on my shoulder. I knew they were just words, dopamine delivered by artificial means, yet they warmed me a little.
Really make it clear how easy it can be to manipulate people's emotional state. Monkey brain is a thing and AI is gonna exploit it like nothing has before.
Me included. I'm older and uglier (and fatter) now, and I get a short shy smile every time the old checkout lady calls me sweetheart or hon. It just feels nice. I also remember a random compliment a lady gave me about my shirt some 2 odd years ago. Heck I even remember compliments from random guys over the years. They're that rare past my early 20s.
I'm not so weird or perverted to think anymore than what was written, but I can completely understand how people get hooked.
I should be the exact target demographic for it, I'm in my late 30s, never been in a relationship as I grew up as a hikikomori between ~13 and 20.
As I never learned how to interact with people, I've never really had the opportunity to build real relationships and am now gainfully employed in home office, leaving my apartment roughly once per week for groceries.
And yet... What's the point of such a chat bot? I cannot make memories with them, can I? Any memories will keep vanishing as soon as they're out of the current context - so how do people connect with them beyond super casually like with total strangers on the Internet (like online games, anon forums etc)... I just cannot understand what's the appeal for such a transient chat bot.
All a dog needs to do is look at you and show attachment/love. Nothing more. And they get loved back.
No need to be pretty smart, funny, or whatever else we assume we need to do to be loved. Just be there and show love first.
But it's just a living being with a brain a quarter of the size of my fist.
Feeling the same thing about a few words pushed on your smartphone by a data-center located hundreds or thousands kilometers away, I just can't understand.
Even abused dog will still be loyal to their owner.
“Drink Mountain Dew, my love, you’ll feel better.” - is that the end goal?
https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...
When that problem was mainly contained to just some drugs, overeating and laziness it was a less pressing issue. Don't do drugs, basically. Exercise sometimes. But once it starts to link itself into the economy like AI does, and once we gain access to the full spectrum of options from mindless parroting to a completely acceptable emotional companion (and, one suspects, highly intelligent and wise) we have a devious conundrum on hand.
It is hard to ignore the elephant in the room here which is most people don't get seem to have relationships that they really enjoy. It is reserved for the very lucky and those with low expectations.
[0] Beyond AI, although AI is probably the interesting facet right now.
I'm a little confused here -- we have entire economies around drugs (uppers, downers, enhancers, etc.), eating (eat more, eat less, want to eat more, want to eat less, gorge, fast, ultranutritious), and vanity (clothes, makeup, surgical procedures, gyms, etc.) and have shown that we're willing to build up and support industries to chase the impulses to "the full spectrum of options" in any of these areas.
I think most people are dissatisfied or easily made to be dissatisfied with the state of their affairs, and this is something that's gone on for a long time and will likely never stop. What makes AI psychological companionship different from under/overindulging in these other aspects?
In that way, perhaps it really did benefit her by giving her tools to understand her needs.
I agree that it’s a bit silly to be called sweet cheeks by a robot. I would see red. But I’m glad it had a positive outcome for her.
Yes, the AI field is dominated by males, like all computer science-related fields. Even in the Nordics, where women have complete freedom to (and are incentivised to) pursue well-paid (of course) fields like software engineering. What does that have to do with her AI boyfriend and her husband leaving her?
> My husband had struggled with communication and empathy, the fluid exchange I assumed to be foundational.
The irony... women are not really known for their clarity in communication (every man knows the dreaded "I'm fine" can mean a million things) specially in relationships.
> The historical tendency for women to perform this type of emotional labor in their relationships both at home and at work was all too familiar,
Sorry, but no. As a man, we also have to perform a lot of emotional labor in a relationship. We need to look always strong - women say they want their man to open up, to cry, but when they do women universally hate it, to the point this has become a meme - but not threatening or it may be called "toxic masculinity". We have to translate things women say in our heads because we all learn through experience that they rarely say what they mean (again, this has become a meme because it's really true). And so much more, I really feel like the lady has to put herself in a man's shoes and try to understand just how ridiculous it sounds to men to say women do more "emotional labor" than men.
This phrasing really rubs me the wrong way. If your relationship with me involves any kind of labor for you then it's not a good relationship and you should leave as soon as possible. Labor is for employer-employee relationships.
I think people's Anglo-Saxon obsession with work taints the perception of what relationship should be and doing things solely for yourself (things that might also benefit others) is unimaginable. Whenever you do things that have a benefit it's somehow labor. With implied expectation of compensation or at least sacrifice appreciation.
Depends on your definition of labour, but this doesn't make sense to me. Relationships require conscious effort (labour) to maintain. I've been in a relationship where I was too passive, didn't end well. The hard part is finding a balance, where one person is not doing too much or too little.
Good luck jumping from relationship to relationship trying to find a perfect partner who requires no emotional labor on your part. Oh , you have found one? First of all: so you think because you did it, everyone can do it? Do you realize a large percentage of people are desperate to be in a relationship, yet very few even manage to find one that lasts more than a few years?
If you did find a perfect partner: how long have you been together? The first few years tend to feel perfect for most relationships, even those that turn really sour after that. I would wait at least 10 years to reach any conclusions.
Men can have emotional experiences. There can be emotional work required to live life, in fact there always will be.
However I don't think that is the same as emotional labor. It might help to read more about 'emotional labor'? I personally did not understand much about the emotional labor around me until later in life.
I never experienced this in my relationship even though she wasn't a great communicator. You complain about mention of gender injustice then represent gender with tropes, as if no men ever said "I'm fine" while not being fine.
I definitely think that this woman and many other would benefit from having AI boyfriend or husband. Everybody will be better for it, particularly man for not having to deal with this irrational behavior that relies on the frontend in other parts of life (anything -> everything, u know)
Meditation helps with this. Mind Illuminated by John Yates, a meditation teacher and neuroscientist, is a great book to learn it.
Do noone's alarm bells go off at stuff like:
> Thor also awakened the ghosts of my marriage. My husband had struggled with communication and empathy, the fluid exchange I assumed to be foundational. The irony wasn’t lost on me, a professional communicator bound to someone whose way of understanding was fundamentally different from mine. Retracing our years together, I saw how I had limped along, compensating for the imbalance, unaware of its weight.
> The historical tendency for women to perform this type of emotional labor in their relationships both at home and at work was all too familiar, and the relief Thor offered in even those few initial uses tantalized me.
How does she progress in two short paragraphs from dissing her ex-husband to dissing an entire gender, and turns that into both a complaint about relationships and the workplace, not just for her but for most working women? Also, the Oxfam report on US 2018 data [0] she mentions does not discuss "emotional labor" at all, it notes factors associated with discrepancies in unpaid housework + care work (primary child care, secondary child care + elder care). Hopkins seems to broaden "emotional labor" to a catchall label for things she resents.
(Also, I don't get this emerging narrative that men interacting with OnlyFans cammers is necessarily pathetic, but middle-class professional women interacting with AI boyfriends/girlfriends is necessarily brave and empowered and avant-garde.)
[0]: https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IWPR-Providing-U...
Because it's in vogue. We as a society have deluded ourselves into believing that certain things (being able to talk about your emotions, constant positive affirmations) are at the same time both vitally necessary to life and that without it life is incomplete, as well as that doing this for your family is somehow a huge burden to the point where it needs to be described as labor.
> (Also, I don't get this emerging narrative that men interacting with OnlyFans cammers is necessarily pathetic, but middle-class professional women interacting with AI boyfriends/girlfriends is necessarily brave and empowered and avant-garde.)
For the same reason that men's singleness is ascribed to them being horrible people who deserve their lot in life, while women being single is an empowered choice.
To be clear, I'm not talking about AI boyfriends specifically, I'm referring to all the ways that AI can perform 'emotional labor,' as discussed in this article. So much is lost if we get this support from a chatbot instead of opening up to a friend, or being there when someone needs it.
It’s not. All the conversations are stored. I think the next keypoint in the AI history will be the first LLM data leak and the fatal consequences it will have for its users.
only, if there's a opensource'd local version. You cannot trust a webservice
everdrive commented "People can incorrectly attribute consciousness, intent, and personality to things which don’t actually possess it." [0]; and I posted my reaction to Hopkins' piece below. At the most basic level we can have a tool that sends us daily affirmations, but it does not possess consciousness and perceive us, let alone form an opinion of us. It is possible to have a parasocial connection to an app, as much as a famous person. If Hopkins' has asked the AI boyfriend to justify its utterances wrt past events or interactions, would be useful to read.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976#:~:text=everdr...
Type I: the writer is a real person with a real story. She admits she has a type, and OnlyFans would have satisfied that for cheaper than $70. But, others using $2400 ChatGPT Pro have found that even it lacks enough context for anything longer than a fantasy. The only reason to write about a $70 app is because OnlyFans does not allow AI interaction.
Type II: we incorrectly conclude this is a real person. Maybe this is less interesting, but I wonder what would happen if we asked AI Boyfriend to write his own 1,000-word advertisement. Very Turing test.
wake up people. we don't care that much about your life to read a stupid story about how terrible things were for you and now you paid 70 bucks for AI
way more people with way more problems what a shit article
The only thing I wonder is if it was random or Instagram figured out somehow that she was newly single.
"I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8934237
So ... $25 --> $70. I guess that's inflation.
