In a sense, wouldn't it get better? The loonies are gonna be dating AI chatbots to get their fix and not engaging with the dating market, leaving more normal people.
I think the chatbots are a fundamental shift in the game, though.
If a loonie can get their rocks off to a robot that happily goes along with whatever niche ERP scenario they have, why would they waste time harassing a real person to do the same thing, when they'd normally have a 99% chance of being rejected?
Especially as these chatbots become harder and harder to distinguish from humans, harassing a real person would simply be a waste of time when they could spend that time with an indistinguishable robot.
Personally, I’m assuming there would be a strong commercial incentive to ensure any such chatbots would be as addictive as possible, as long as the targets could still afford their services.
Though the most mainstream ones would likely dial it back just enough to not immediately inspire outrage and public backlash.
Which IMO would mean manipulation, addiction inducing behaviors, trash talking their ‘competition’ (real life and virtual), being financially extractive, and pushing their targets toward social isolation.
Not that the real life dating world is that much different sometimes, but actual humans have limits in scalability and ethics machines don’t. Previously a sugar baby (of either gender) could only target a small handful of targets and was severely constrained by time, since they’d need to be physically present a significant period of the time. And even the dimmest target would occasionally pick up on body language that would make them leery. But, hey. No body, no body language!
People can be awkward and weird and have inconsistent moods and change their minds and aren't completely in sync with their feelings.
These are the complexities of actual human beings. "Dan" is a fantasy, and unfortunately, just like high-production pornography, serves to give false expectations to young people, this time mostly women instead of mostly men.
Maybe, but maybe not. I had someone follow me around on HN relentlessly trolling for a couple weeks years ago. It was surreal. I had to stop commenting for a long time to lose their attention. It was over something incredibly trivial.
Quintin Tarantino said some of his films are set in the "realer than real universe". I think it just means when you watch it you are supposed to resonate more with it than real life.
'More natural than a real person' probably means the speaker finds real people harder to relate to, I guess.
The DAN thing is a completely fake cargo cult. You can just ask chatgpt to behave this way and it will. The complexity and specifics of the DAN prompt and mechanism do not do anything.
Feel like the hype surrounding “AI companionship” is very inorganic and fake - manufactured by the AI industry & VCs. There are fundamental reasons why AI as a companion is not good UX once novelty wears off.
No, even a forgetful and repetitive sycophant meets a lot of genuine unmet needs for lonely people.
Many such people feel alienated, ostracized, stigmatized, ashamed, or rejected and something that says nice (or dirty) things to them, on demand, and in decent natural language can scratch a desperate itch.
That's not to say anything about the social good or ill that may come from it. But the hype is sound. It's one of the few "sure thing" products we can see right now.
I am aware of character.ai’s metrics and its copycats’ so not denying there’s something there, but there’s no resounding evidence that it’s monetizable and sticky to a large degree. Unless it cranks up the dystopian features to unethical levels to get people hooked, of course, and most monetization is via selling nsfw features - so it checks the wrong boxes
Addressing needs to make ones life a little better is great, I only worry that it may lead to people not pursuing more organic/rewarding options in the future.
Monetization of all those apps end up boiling down to selling uncensored chats, it’s not a differentiated space - even if we are talking about the lonely people demographic
I am not sure. I have seen many reports of people turning to ChatGPT for self-healing practices, almost therapy-like exchanges. In some ways, despite the largely "corpus & stats/tokens based approach", those exchanges can be more empathetic than what most people meet in real life. Something that you would expect from a good life companion :-)
A generally fair critique, but this article was incredibly well-sourced and cited abundant first-person evidence. 40M women looking for “Dan” is non-trivial.
AI companions have been around for a couple years now, so we’re past it being pure novelty (though clearly that’s a driver of growth). “AI girlfriends” were a great early use case for social interaction when AI companies were first targeted to (mainly) cis men. From what we’ve seen in research, a guy’s cognitive function measurably degrades when sex is on the menu. A crappy AI could get the job done.
With female brains the research generally shows that they require a socially sophisticated interaction (“responsive emotional support”) so this level of adoption is significant evidence of progress in LLMs and fine tuning.
anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain. It’s quite the cultural statement that an LLM outperforms most men on how to be present for a conversation with their date.
Important to note that regular consumers of AI companions actually rely on them mostly as a synthetic partner/friend.
There’s two things striking about this trend:
1. AI companions for women is more socially acceptable.
2. The mother of the women (who served as the focus of this story) said “if she’s happy, I’m happy.”
That’s powerful. That’s a core value for many parents.
It’s fair to attack the hype, just thought it might be useful for others to see there is underlying technical progress & social adoption reflected here.
> anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain
anecdotally, the women I know married good men before mid career. maybe the "mid career" women you know waited too long to "settle down" and found the field picked clean
also, dating -men- is a drain? dating is a drain. the casual misandry in your comment is gobsmacking
> also, dating -men- is a drain? dating is a drain. the casual misandry in your comment is gobsmacking
It's not clear whether you're arguing that it's misandrist for someone to not have as many friends who complain about dating women or for someone who dates men to specify that when stating that their experience dating has been draining, but either way it doesn't make much sense.
> Can you not symmetrically say that it's quite the cultural statement that porn outperforms most women on how to be attractive to men?
The difference is that people who don't have sex without emotional connection aren't forgoing it because they don't know how; they're just choosing not to. No one goes on dates intending to be a draining person to interact with, so there's something lacking there in terms of their ability to provide what others are looking for.
To be clear, none of this is inherently tied to gender; it even applies just as well to non-heterosexual dating. That being said, I don't think it's particularly uncommon for most people's experience to be that they encounter far more heterosexual men than women who cite their central problem in dating to be not finding anyone who will have sex with them. Assuming that trend is accurate, there's not really any explanation more plausible than men generally just being less capable of providing women are looking for in a man than vice-versa.
> anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain. It’s quite the cultural statement that an LLM outperforms most men on how to be present for a conversation with their date.
The thing about dating in "mid-career" (for both genders) - which I consider to be mid-30's to mid-40's in most cases, is that those people are still dating for a reason. The good prospects already settled down, and they are now scraping the bottom of the barrel (and to be honest, they are bottom of the barrel material as well).
One thing I started paying attention to when I was dating in my 30's is how long was this persons longest previous relationship. Numbers like a year and a half is a bad sign. I suspect that's gender neutral.
What I've heard from women talking about men they've tried feeling out is a lot of them from the descriptions are trying to play outdated gender roles and doing a bad job of it. That'll just annoy a woman looking for a companionship based relationship. That speaks to me of stuff I've heard about Korea. Men expect a traditional marriage and women with jobs and money are having none of it.
I don't think it's that fake. There were people, researchers, that were obsessed with ELIZA back in the day. I personally have a friend who is constantly thinking about fine-tuning a model on his ex's texts to recreate chatting with her. I suspect many others are less extreme but still seek out a form of companionship they have full control over.
In the visual space, if we're honest, most of the work being done on Stable Diffusion is with the aim of creating "intimate" art. Might not be "companionship" in the family sense, but absolutely a good chunk of the Civit.ai world is, more-or-less, concerned with the mass creation of "waifus".
I don't think that we're going to have many startups succeed in this space, because I suspect the main driver is to have conversations/generate images that people don't entirely want there to be a record off/watched by a private company. But I actually suspect that the number of people using AI for companionship of some form or another is much higher than it appears.
> Preferring screens over real humans is objectively not good.
Wow, this is just blatant misinformation! Wait till Snopes debunks this obviously false claim. I trust the "science"!
Imagine actually interacting with real human beings and having a real community around you in 2024. I'm so glad that we as humanity figured out that you don't really need this in your life. Who knew!
I believe that stat is meant to be read as: 69.4% of people are between the ages of 15-64, and of those 504,637,819 are male and 476,146,909 female (51.5% male).
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadIt just moves the Overton window into even weirder territory.
If a loonie can get their rocks off to a robot that happily goes along with whatever niche ERP scenario they have, why would they waste time harassing a real person to do the same thing, when they'd normally have a 99% chance of being rejected?
Especially as these chatbots become harder and harder to distinguish from humans, harassing a real person would simply be a waste of time when they could spend that time with an indistinguishable robot.
I guess it could make it easier to ‘fall off the edge’, but it’s not like it’s been that uncommon for most of human history.
If left completely unchecked, they may unintentionally cultivate such behavior rather than abate it.
Though the most mainstream ones would likely dial it back just enough to not immediately inspire outrage and public backlash.
Which IMO would mean manipulation, addiction inducing behaviors, trash talking their ‘competition’ (real life and virtual), being financially extractive, and pushing their targets toward social isolation.
Not that the real life dating world is that much different sometimes, but actual humans have limits in scalability and ethics machines don’t. Previously a sugar baby (of either gender) could only target a small handful of targets and was severely constrained by time, since they’d need to be physically present a significant period of the time. And even the dimmest target would occasionally pick up on body language that would make them leery. But, hey. No body, no body language!
Yay AI overlords?
What on Earth is that even supposed to mean
These are the complexities of actual human beings. "Dan" is a fantasy, and unfortunately, just like high-production pornography, serves to give false expectations to young people, this time mostly women instead of mostly men.
'More natural than a real person' probably means the speaker finds real people harder to relate to, I guess.
Many such people feel alienated, ostracized, stigmatized, ashamed, or rejected and something that says nice (or dirty) things to them, on demand, and in decent natural language can scratch a desperate itch.
That's not to say anything about the social good or ill that may come from it. But the hype is sound. It's one of the few "sure thing" products we can see right now.
Plus paying for chatting with someone, following idols, and other parasocial relationships.
AI companions have been around for a couple years now, so we’re past it being pure novelty (though clearly that’s a driver of growth). “AI girlfriends” were a great early use case for social interaction when AI companies were first targeted to (mainly) cis men. From what we’ve seen in research, a guy’s cognitive function measurably degrades when sex is on the menu. A crappy AI could get the job done.
With female brains the research generally shows that they require a socially sophisticated interaction (“responsive emotional support”) so this level of adoption is significant evidence of progress in LLMs and fine tuning.
anecdotally, this hit a note I’ve heard regularly from my mid-career female friends - dating men is a drain. It’s quite the cultural statement that an LLM outperforms most men on how to be present for a conversation with their date.
Important to note that regular consumers of AI companions actually rely on them mostly as a synthetic partner/friend.
There’s two things striking about this trend:
1. AI companions for women is more socially acceptable.
2. The mother of the women (who served as the focus of this story) said “if she’s happy, I’m happy.” That’s powerful. That’s a core value for many parents.
It’s fair to attack the hype, just thought it might be useful for others to see there is underlying technical progress & social adoption reflected here.
anecdotally, the women I know married good men before mid career. maybe the "mid career" women you know waited too long to "settle down" and found the field picked clean
also, dating -men- is a drain? dating is a drain. the casual misandry in your comment is gobsmacking
It's not clear whether you're arguing that it's misandrist for someone to not have as many friends who complain about dating women or for someone who dates men to specify that when stating that their experience dating has been draining, but either way it doesn't make much sense.
Can you not symmetrically say that it's quite the cultural statement that porn outperforms most women on how to be attractive to men?
Women want deep emotional connection, which an LLM provides upfront at no cost (like sex or even risk of rape).
Men want sexual stimulation, which porn provides upfront at no cost (like dates and courting with tedious emotional support and social connection).
It's just short-circuiting to the reward function at no cost.
The difference is that people who don't have sex without emotional connection aren't forgoing it because they don't know how; they're just choosing not to. No one goes on dates intending to be a draining person to interact with, so there's something lacking there in terms of their ability to provide what others are looking for.
To be clear, none of this is inherently tied to gender; it even applies just as well to non-heterosexual dating. That being said, I don't think it's particularly uncommon for most people's experience to be that they encounter far more heterosexual men than women who cite their central problem in dating to be not finding anyone who will have sex with them. Assuming that trend is accurate, there's not really any explanation more plausible than men generally just being less capable of providing women are looking for in a man than vice-versa.
That’s like saying porn provides sex.
Total non-sequitor.
The thing about dating in "mid-career" (for both genders) - which I consider to be mid-30's to mid-40's in most cases, is that those people are still dating for a reason. The good prospects already settled down, and they are now scraping the bottom of the barrel (and to be honest, they are bottom of the barrel material as well).
What I've heard from women talking about men they've tried feeling out is a lot of them from the descriptions are trying to play outdated gender roles and doing a bad job of it. That'll just annoy a woman looking for a companionship based relationship. That speaks to me of stuff I've heard about Korea. Men expect a traditional marriage and women with jobs and money are having none of it.
In the visual space, if we're honest, most of the work being done on Stable Diffusion is with the aim of creating "intimate" art. Might not be "companionship" in the family sense, but absolutely a good chunk of the Civit.ai world is, more-or-less, concerned with the mass creation of "waifus".
I don't think that we're going to have many startups succeed in this space, because I suspect the main driver is to have conversations/generate images that people don't entirely want there to be a record off/watched by a private company. But I actually suspect that the number of people using AI for companionship of some form or another is much higher than it appears.
Happiness is not fulfillment. Philosophers figured this out thousands of years ago. We are forgetting this. Not just in China, but in the West too.
There is objective right and wrong. Preferring screens over real humans is objectively not good.
Wow, this is just blatant misinformation! Wait till Snopes debunks this obviously false claim. I trust the "science"!
Imagine actually interacting with real human beings and having a real community around you in 2024. I'm so glad that we as humanity figured out that you don't really need this in your life. Who knew!
For people 15-64, males back up 69% of the population, which is pretty loppy.
'Better than real men': Young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39424765