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elmer2 15 hours ago [-]
"The logic is that free, user-built companions inside mass-market general-purpose apps are impossible to moderate at scale."
I think they misspelled censor.
watwut 6 hours ago [-]
Not really. They are censored easily and successfully.
However, moderation is hard and the companies are motivated to moderate them toward maximum outrage with some plausible deniality on top of it.
g42gregory 13 hours ago [-]
It begs the conclusion that these 3 are similar Governments in the way they govern.
jhbadger 2 hours ago [-]
Eh, this hysteria reminds me a lot of the early 1980s when people seriously believed that role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were bad for mental health - one of Tom Hanks' early roles was in "Mazes & Monsters", a 1982 TV movie that supposedly exposed the sanity-destroying nature of RPGs. Now it looks just silly. Maybe, just as we now get that people can enjoy pretending to be an elf wizard without going insane, others enjoy pretending that a chatbot is their boyfriend and girlfriend and still be well adjusted members of society.
krapp 1 hours ago [-]
Few if any of the people playing D&D actually thought they were elf wizards, or that they were doing magic, or communing with eldritch gods.
Meanwhile many if not most of the people who have chatbots as their significant other actually have that relationship, and believe it to be as real as a relationship with a human being.
The former are playing a game for entertainment, and suspending their disbelief, the latter are using a machine to satisfy emotional and psychological needs in ways that anyone would consider harmful, and having their beliefs altered by proprietary commercial software sometimes past the point of psychosis.
jhbadger 46 minutes ago [-]
I think there needs actual statistical evidence (rather than sensationalist hysteria) that very many people think their chatbot lover is real. Before chatbots, there were (and still are as far as I know) phone sex lines where people paid to talk dirty to an actual person. There isn't any reason to believe that most users of sexy chatbots see them as any different from those.
Not to say D&D hasn't surely been linked to a few deaths as well... get a large enough sample and you'll see just about anything.
jhbadger 52 minutes ago [-]
The plural of anecdote is not data - and it was exactly these sort of anecdotes that led to the anti-D&D hysteria as well. Often something else was going on - for instance "Mazes & Monsters itself was very loosely based on an incident where a child prodigy who was known to be an avid D&D player commited suicide. The media was quick to blame D&D, but further investigation revealed he was suffering depression because he realized he was gay and didn't know how to tell his conservative religious parents.
mikelgan 22 hours ago [-]
The governments of China, California and New York agree on three harmful aspects of companion AI chatbots.
Havoc 5 hours ago [-]
I liked this article. Does a good job of framing some of the concerns around this in clear language.
e.g.
> Attachment Economy, which is an extractive business model that uses AI to lure people into forming emotional attachments to chatbots
chews 15 hours ago [-]
With respect to GDP the #2, #4, and #8 all agree that artificial companionship is probably bad for humans should tell you something.
I think they misspelled censor.
However, moderation is hard and the companies are motivated to moderate them toward maximum outrage with some plausible deniality on top of it.
Meanwhile many if not most of the people who have chatbots as their significant other actually have that relationship, and believe it to be as real as a relationship with a human being.
The former are playing a game for entertainment, and suspending their disbelief, the latter are using a machine to satisfy emotional and psychological needs in ways that anyone would consider harmful, and having their beliefs altered by proprietary commercial software sometimes past the point of psychosis.
Not to say D&D hasn't surely been linked to a few deaths as well... get a large enough sample and you'll see just about anything.
e.g.
> Attachment Economy, which is an extractive business model that uses AI to lure people into forming emotional attachments to chatbots