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9rx 2 days ago

People want the feelings associated with love. They don't care how they get it.

The advantage of "real" love, health wise, is that the other person acts as a moderator. When things start to get out of hand they will back away. Alternatives, like drugs, tend to spiral of out of control when an individual's self-control is the only limiting factor. GPT on the surface seems more like being on the drug end of the spectrum, ready to love bomb you until you can't take it anymore, but the above suggests that it will also back away, so perhaps its love is actually more like another person than it may originally seem.

cubefox 2 days ago | parent [-]

> People want the feelings associated with love. They don't care how they get it.

Most people want to be loved, not just believe they are. They don't want to be unknowingly deceived. For the same reason they don't want to be unknowingly cheated on. If someone tells them their partner is a cheater, or an unconscious android, they wouldn't be mad about the person who gives them this information, but about their partner.

That's the classic argument against psychological hedonism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine

scotty79 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Most people want to be loved, not just believe they are.

Many people who are genuinely loved don't feel loved. So people really are more after the feeling than the fact.

9rx 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> For the same reason they don't want to be unknowingly cheated on.

That's the thing, though, there is nothing about being a cheater that equates to loss of love (or never having loved). In fact, it is telling that you shifted gears to the topic of deceit rather than love.

It is true that feelings of love are often lost when one has been cheated on. So, yes, it is a fair point that for many those feelings of love aren't made available if one does not also have trust. There is a association there, so your gear change is understood. I expect you are absolutely right that if those aforementioned women dating GPT-4o found out that it wasn't an AI bot, but actually some guy typing away at a keyboard, they would lose their feelings even if the guy on the other side did actually love them!

Look at how many people get creeped out when they find out that a person they are disinterested in loves them. Clearly being loved isn't what most people seek. They want to feel the feelings associated with love. All your comment tells, surprising nobody, is that the feelings of love are not like a tap you can simply turn on (well, maybe in the case of drugs). The feelings require a special environment where everything has to be just right, and trust is often a necessary part of that environment. Introduce deceit and so goes the feelings.