If you get a massage from massage machine is it also a mirage? If you use a vibrator is it also a mirage? Why it suddenly becomes an unhealthy mirage if you need words to tickle yourself?

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cubefox 2 days ago | parent [-]

A vibrator still works as intended if you believe it doesn't love you. GPT-4o stops working as intended if you believe it doesn't love you. The latter relies on an illusion, the former doesn't.

(More precisely, a vibrator still relies on an illusion in the evolutionary sense: it doesn't create offspring, so over time phenotypes who like vibrators get replaced by those who don't.)

	▲	scotty79 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's simply not true. Vibrators don't really work that well if you somehow suppress the fantasies during use. Same way that GPT-4o works better if you fantasize briefly that it might love you when it says what it does. Almost all people who use it in this manner are fully aware of its limitations. While they are phrasing it as "I lost my love" their complaints are really of the kind of "my toy broke". And they find similar mitigation strategies for the problem, finding another toy, giving each other tips on how to use what's available. As for the evolutionary perspective, evolution is not that simple. Gay people typically have way less offspring than vibrator users and somehow they are still around and plentiful. Brains are messy hodgepodge of various subsystems. Clever primates found multitude of way how to mess with them to make life more bearable. So far the species continuous regardless.