| ▲ | stego-tech 3 days ago | |
This bit stuck out to me: > To be clear: I'm not trying to defend the people using AI models as companions or therapists, but I can understand why they are doing what they are doing. This is horrifying and I hate that I understand their logic...As someone that has been that desperate for human contact: yeah, I get it. If you've never been that desperate for human contact before, you won't understand until you experience it. The author hits the nail on the head. As someone who has been there, to the point of literally eating out at Applebees just so I'd have some chosen human contact that wasn't obligatory (like work), it's...it's indescribable. It's pitiful, it's shameful, it's humiliating and depressing and it leaves you feeling like this husk of an entity, a spectator to existence itself where the only path forward is either this sad excuse for "socializing" and "contact" or... Yeah. It sucks. These people promoting these tools for human contact make me sick, because they're either negligently exploiting or deliberately preying upon one of the most vulnerable mindstates of human existence in the midst of a global crisis of it. Human loneliness aside, I also appreciate Xe's ability to put things into a more human context than I do with my own posts. At present, these are things we cannot own. They must be rented to be enjoyed at the experience we demand of them, and that inevitably places total control over their abilities, data, and output in the hands of profiteers. We're willfully ceding reality into the hands of for-profit companies and VC investors, and I don't think most people appreciate a fraction of the implications of such a transaction. That is what keeps me up at night, not some hypothetical singularity or AGI-developed bioweapons exterminating humanity. The real Black Mirror episode is happening now, and it's heartbreaking and terrifying in equal measure to those of us who have lived it before the advent of AI and managed to escape its clutches. | ||
| ▲ | asymmetric 3 days ago | parent [-] | |
You write really well. Also, your comment made me think of this ACX post, specifically of “the man who is not” https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-t... | ||