I kinda like the word “wireborn”. If only it wasn’t attached to a concept that’s equal parts stupid and sad =/
some episodes of Black Mirror struck terror into my heart like no other. They were grim warmings for the possible future masquerading as fiction, as grim warnings often do. Though what the show could not forsee was how fast it would come true. And it could not forsee how wide a scale would be affected, those were singular stories from those worlds, the effect of the technology showcased on the lives of a few, a pinhole view into the dystopia
if you haven’t already, watch the episode Be Right Back. you better start believing in sci-fi dystopias, we’re in one
Most of Black Mirror episodes are reality right now, not just far fetched sci-fi.
Sometimes they use technology to tell the story a bit differently, but it’s almost never anything new.
yeah i’m not the biggest fan of the seasons made by americans, they feel strangely hollow to me most of the time. the first two seasons have all my favourite episodes, and by favourite i mean the ones that made me weep for the future
“Don’t you dare go hollow!” and the americans were like - Hold my beer!
Got some real cyberpunkiness to it
A similar term “cloudborn” isn’t even dissimilar from the idea of storks delivering babies from heaven. Fuel for a science fiction book or RPG. Less so for actual humankind.
I’m just gonna keep imagining it’s a clan of Timberborn beavers that are born on the ziplines.
I can get behind that. Well, as long as you don’t start pretending you’re in a relationship with them.
Pretending? I am in a relationship with them
At first I thought it was something epic like a digital ‘dragonborn’
Freakazoid’s power has grown exponentially
I heard about this in the radio the other day. People pay a monthly fee for an AI that becomes your “digital partner”.
The reasoning behind, according to them, is that the AI is less dangerous than a human partner because they can’t cheat, can’t abuse you…
And I can’t but wonder where did we take the wrong turn to end up here. Because while I can understand that people can go through some traumatic shit that would made them wary of the opposite sex, considering a machine your sentimental partner can only lead to some extremely fucked up scenarios.
People are lonely and dating sucks. Humans provided a similar one sided relationship service as well. (Sugar babies come to mind)
Yes, yes. And yes.
But
Do you think openAI or Google, or X or whatever billionaire behind the AI involved in these “relationships” cares even minimally about the mental well-being of these people?
The problem is not just the dating an AI thing, but who is managing these AIs.
Oh totally agree. This is a corporation problem.
Do you think openAI or Google, or X or whatever billionaire behind the AI involved in these “relationships” cares even minimally about the mental well-being of these people?
No, but I wager neither does anyone else, or they wouldn’t be dating a datacenter.
I’m not really sure these people fully understand what they are doing or they wouldn’t be doing it at all.
The bizarre thing is, some of them do understand how LLMs work. There was that article about a married woman with an LLM boyfriend. She’s very active on Reddit (edit: or at least was until a month ago), and based on her comments I saw back when the article was published, she seems to know perfectly well that it’s all just a statistical model of smoke and mirrors, and yet continues with the extreme emotional (and financial) investment 🤷
can’t cheat, can’t abuse you
That is a dangerous assumption. The ones controlling the models can definitely manipulate a person through some minor tweaks which would definitely count as abuse. And it’s it more polygamous since they’re probably all using the same model? Not like each one has their own unique model
It’d be per instance not per model, and there is only one user per instance.
I mean, media has depicted this sort of relationship for pawbably as long as sci-fi has been around? Think like the Star Trek: Original Series episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” that depicted sex robots ~60yrs ago. This was always coming, it’s just technology might finally be getting there in a rudimentary way.
While I agree with your point of view… Do we really trust the present AI providers, in the present economic system, to not pull some bullshit that ends in extremely fucked up scenarios?
Oh, absolutely not. That didn’t seem to be the crux of your argument though.
You are right, my main comment didn’t include this part. When I was talking to other users I developed the argument a bit more and I realized that my first comment didn’t convey my argument fully. While I was writing the first comment, it made sense in my head, but the reason why I considered it an awfully bad idea was not clear.
“Pawbably”. Adorable.
Thank you! :3
We have engaged in gender centric tribalism for the last decades. Feminism, counter-movements, topped with a bunch of social media induced dissociation and social isolation.
Now women are scared of men, men are scared of women, and everyone is lonely and miserable.
What the fuck. You’re taking one anecdote and generalizing it to the whole human race, and what’s more, you’re attributing it to some sort of “novel” gender differentiation, like that shit hasn’t existed since the times we all huddled in caves.
Touch some grass.
Oh i’m sorry, I forgot to specify that I’m not talking as an absolute, and that I am refererring to the western/capitalist cultural hemisphere and not uncontacted tribes or Islamic societies. Didn’t think of the average lemmy nitpicker deliberately interpreting any possible uncertainties in communication in the worst possible way.
It happens multiple times in Star Trek. They kind of breeze by it but Riker was so infatuated with his holodeck girlfriend when he was captured by Romulans they thought she was a real person.
Thing is, it never seemed unbelievable in Star Trek. Just, a kinda weird thing that people will do.
I’d rather choose a bear than choose an AI…
Wasn’t there a guy who married his 3DS dating game girlfriend a while back? I’m not sure this is exactly a new phenomenon.
It was more of an oddity. Right now, the numbers are not just “some random guy” but something in much higher numbers.
Not to be that person but… source? I don’t follow this topic much, but I imagine its actually a very small amount of peolle being amplified into a way bigger issue than it actually is.
I’m trying to find an English source as the one I can offer right now is in Spanish. If i find another one, I’ll post it, meanwhile, this is my source: https://cadenaser.com/nacional/2025/02/28/es-rentable-y-da-mucho-miedo-la-reflexion-de-javier-ruiz-sobre-las-parejas-de-mentira-cadena-ser/
apparently, there’s this Replika company that offers artificial boyfriends and they are growing rapidly.
Wait replika is still around?
Where did we take the wrong turn? look around at our patriarchy-driven gender regime Are you serious?
it also requires zero effort on their part
Like a normal relationship if you’re beautiful enough …
Shallow relations have always existed.
I mean, ai bad and all but people have been doing this dumb cringe shit since always. Nobody remember the Snape wives
Never forget Snapewives.
I think this video also provides some good insights into them.
a 3 hour deep dive into snapewives. i didn’t know i needed that.
Oh it’s great it’s not just three hours on snapewives, it’s that while treating them as a legitimate religion
Wireborn lol it sounds like an Elder Scrolls game
Badly written fan-fic sequel to Snow Crash
I wonder who the hiro/protagonist will be!
hiro/protagonist
Fallout 5: Wireborn
That does sound like it wouldn’t suck, but this is Bethesda we’re talking about, so it still would.
It’s a new warforged class lol
Waifuism is open if you want to laugh
Nah, at least with waifuism, I have to use in part my own imagination. Clankers are just very complicated prediction machines.
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Why would anyone choose to know that?
I am forced to admit that I knew that.
But my partner of 8 years has DID.
There are so, so many horrifying ethical issues about this whole thing. What the fuck.
tulpa
Now thats a word i haven’t read in a long time
It’s my first time. gotta look it up.
I’m afraid I’m too lazy to look it up for myself. Perhaps I’m not in the lucky 10,000.
Sort of an icon or being you build in your mind and grant power by letting live in your mind.
It’s an imaginary friend for adults, that you can discuss in chatrooms with other adults with imaginary friends. If you give it enough power it will manifest physically, but only you will be able to see it.
A tulpa is a type of supplemental consciousness capable of independent thought and with its own sense of self. It is created, intentionally or otherwise, by an existing consciousness within the same brain it comes to inhabit.
Yes, we are acutely aware that it sounds like preposterous pseudoscientific bullshit. We’re just describing the concept, not expecting you to put any stock in it. We know what community we’re commenting in.
The LLM in this example is not a tulpa. It only (poorly) mimics the appearance of independent thought and a sense of self, and runs on an external device.
So so tired of how utterly fucked things are getting on so many levels at once. More and more I think I really do need to invest in a back 50 acre lot and try the survival route while society just fucks itself into oblivion.
What if it fucks itself into Morrowind instead?
Dagoth Ur Fanfiction.mp4
This was actually a pretty good play on words and gave me a chuckle. Thanks man, haha.
This kind of thins is just moral panic. Funny moral panic, but still pointless. There’s always been a tiny fraction of the population that is completely out to lunch, and there always will be.
unfortunately you do in fact need a society to survive, you can’t run a homestead on your own
but that’s not to say you can’t make a good society, getting a bunch of people you like and starting a village is a great idea, if extremely fucking difficult to pull off…
I’ve seen people which have a relationship with their Tom Tom Go and even with the car itself
https://www.jalopnik.com/my-strange-addiction-sex-car-guy-back-with-lexus-es330-1850642715/
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Becoming? Three US states have banned the use of AI therapy. Three.
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I tell Lemmy some awfully personal things…
The difference is that you’re just essentially talking to yourself by projecting it onto a thing which doesn’t answer instead of a bot that’s spewing out messages measured to please you.
Abort wireborn babies
Stop, Dave
I think the decline of organized religion and things like fraternal orders (Elks, Moose, Shriners, etc.) have probably contributed a lot to the loneliness epidemic. There are a lot of other extenuating factors but those two things were once foundational to social circles in the US.
I’ve found makerspaces to be a secular alternative. The makerspace has to specifically foster community, though. There’s quite a few that are just techbros with a clique that you ain’t in.
Covid also killed a lot of the social aspects of my makerspace, and it’s been hard to build it back.
Yeah I tried that with a local makerspace and it didn’t work out for me, sadly. I wanted a sense of community, contact with likeminded people to do stuff together. They just offered lots of machinery to be used in solitude. It went like this: “So, you wanna 3d print something? Sure, just go to person X, they will show you how to operate the thing. You don’t know how all of this works? We have some resources on our discord to get you started.” Okayyyy
FWIW, the major makerspace in my area–or what was the major makerspace–was a lot like that. A couple of people didn’t like that and started a new one, with myself and my wife coming on board almost right away. It took a long time and I’m not sure our story can be easily replicated, but we’re now the bigger of the two in terms of space and membership size.
But like I said, Covid was a brick wall for our social aspects.
I’ve found that there are often two bicycle scenes: gear nerd which is expensive, and the people who think it’s all the cooler that your ride is a fixed up junker or bought 2nd+ hand. The latter are a great source of cheap community, especially if you’re interested in volunteering fixing up bicycles
ETA: The second community also wants to teach you how to repair your bike even if you don’t want to hang out with them. Look for bicycle co-ops in your area. Often they’ll have a pay what you can for stand time and they’ll charge for parts, but they’re happy to teach you to fix up your bike. They’ll also sell you an affordable bike they’ve fixed up and they’re likely to be flexible in accordance with needs.
Don’t forget that in the US we also have built our towns and cities to be isolating. Most don’t walk home from work, pop into their local bar/coffee shop/park to see their neighbors and then finish their walk home. We get in our car alone, drive home where then going out means getting back in a car, and stopping on the way home means figuring out drivers and parking and meetups.
We lost our third places and now we wonder why we don’t know our neighborhood as well
“OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.
But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.
When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”
I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.
They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.
Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
It’s not loneliness, it’s rugged individualism! It’s not anti-union/anti-community propaganda to keep the masses weak; I mean have you seen union dues?! /s
But don’t worry, those same people who say shit like that are so desperate for community that they’ll never leave their hometown except for when their local far-right militia chapter goes out to harrass a protest or attack their country’s government for having a fair election.
All I’m hearing is that the cure for male loneliness is a radical leftist militia
That, and, y’know, actually showing up for each other instead of relentlessly torturing other men for having the gall to express any emotions beyond the two approved ones, laughter and rage.
That seems less likely than mine
Only if you hang out at the park after practicing to have some beverages and shoot the shit
I think that it’s more that we’ve commoditized all aspects of community, and at the same time have stopped offering any sense of financial opportunities to young people.
Social groups are now built around expensive hobbies or membership subscriptions. There aren’t even really any free spaces for people to organize around. Even the alt right groups preying on lonely people are usually just trying to sell supplements or merch.
I dislike religion, but you’re not wrong. Interacting with one another putting on friendly faces and performing kindness and fellowship until for some it becomes real.
For all the fakery and frauds, without that dance it’s so much harder to find the people we really connect with.
As a Christian Anarchist, I often find myself lonely and without a third place as well, because of what churches have become.
Yeah, I still haven’t found a church that I felt I belonged in. I got close once, but they couldn’t pay skyrocketing rent hikes and got taken over by a larger, faker, church. One that was more about feel-good seminars and recruiting free labor volunteers than anything Jesus actually had to say.
Churches of old in the US used to be based. People of today wouldn’t recognize them. They helped the poor and were a third place and looked out for each other, they were also pro-union, and this became a huge “Problem” for capitalists, who saw Christians as annoying leftists who didn’t share their pathological obsession with money.
There was a VERY concerted and well documented conspiracy by the moneyed class to infiltrate and rot American Christianity into the often capitalist, Republican-talking-point drooling zombie it is today.
Highly recommend Behind the Bastards: How the Rich ate Christianity to see just how deep this goes.
That’s definitely how we got the “God is not only okay with, but wants you to be fabulously rich” types today.
The Church used to be a threat to these barons and tyrants and bigots, rather than their lapdogs.
“My husband is voice his own thoughts without prompts.”
She then posts a picture of her saying “what are you thinking about”
Thats a direct response to the prompt hes not randomly voicing his thoughts. I hate ai but sometimes I hate people to
The worst thing about AI is the people.
The worst thing
about AIisthepeople.
FWIW, this is why AI researchers have been screeching for decades not to create an AI that is anthropomorphized. It is already an issue we have with animals, now we are going to add a confabulation engine to the ass-end?
Personally, I hate the idea of not doing something because there’s idiots out there who will fuck themselves up on it. The current gen of AI might be a waste of resources and the whole concept of the goal of AI might be incompatible with society’s existence; those are good reasons to at least be cautious about AI.
I don’t think people wanting to have relationships with an AI is a good reason to stop it, especially considering that it might even be a good option for some people who would otherwise just have no one or maybe too many cats for them to care for. Consider the creepy stalker type that thinks liking someone or something gives them ownership over that person or thing. Better for them to be obsessed with an LLM they can’t hurt than a real person they might (or will make uncomfortable even of they end up being harmless overall).
Yeah apparently even Eliza messed up with people back in the day and that’s not even an LLM.
I’m starting to realize how easily fooled people are by this stuff. The average person cannot be this stupid, and yet, they are.
I was once in a restaurant and behind me was a group of 20 something year old people. Overheard someone asking something like:"so what are y’alls thoughts about VR? (This was just before the whole AI boom.) And one guy said:“ith’s kind of scary to think about.” I was super confused at that point, and they talked about how they heard people disappear in the cyberspace and people not knowing what’s real and what’s just VR.
I don’t think they were stupid, but they formed a very strong opinion about something they clearly didn’t know anything about.
I don’t think they were stupid, but they formed a very strong opinion about something they clearly didn’t know anything about.
That’s a subcategory of being stupid to be fair
I’d like to believe he heard a summary of sword art online’s plot and thought it was real
Wait it’s not? But matrix!
Sounds like they watched South Park and couldn’t tell that it’s not real.
Without hearing the actual conversation, I feel like maybe he was just having trouble describing his thoughts about it. I take it as “disappearing into cyberspace” to mean someone becoming addicted to VR that they don’t want to leave whatever virtual reality they’re in. And possibly using it so much that the lines between reality and virtual reality become blurred. Or the guy really just thinks people get sucked into cyberspace, I really don’t know with people anymore.
The average IQ is 100. That is not a lot and half of the population is below that. I’m more surprised how bad our education system is in filtering out the dumb people. Someone who is ‘not smart’ but has good memory and is diligent can make it frighteningly far in our society. Not to mention nepo babies who are a different kind of problem
The average IQ is 100 because it is designed to always have the average at 100%. If magically everyone became exactly 20% better at IQ tests tomorrow, the average IQ would be adjusted and still be 100.
Smart argument.
“Half the people are smarter than other half”
Good memory is also part of being smart, besides problem-solving and thinking under pressure. But yeah nepo-babies do cause serious problem.
Tho also iq doesn’t matter as much. Tests are in a specific branch of math, you can literally study for the IQ test.
People have this issue with video game characters who don’t even pretend to have intelligence. This could only go wrong.
LLMs are trained on human writing, so they’ll always be fundamentally anthropomorphic. you could fine-tune them to sound more clinical, but it’s likely to make them worse at reasoning and planning.
for example, I notice GPT5 uses “I” a lot, especially saying things like “I need to make a choice” or “my suspicion is.” I think that’s actually a side effect of the RL training they’ve done to make it more agentic. having some concept of self is necessary when navigating an environment.
philosophical zombies are no longer a thought experiment.
🤯
I see we live in the timeline where virginity won
We’re all wizards and witches now!
People will do anything but put in a little work to establish healthy relationships with people.
people will do anything but whack it to porn
