Reddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is for people who are extremely into having a chatbot as an emotional companion. A robot lover with a name and a personality. They’re very emotionally attached to their com…
    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Reading romance is great and I highly recommend it. The trick is to find the good ones.

      Being an actual character in a romance would also be great (for a sufficiently high quality romance with a sufficiently peaceful setting, and assuming I get to keep free will and also keep living after the story ends – ok that’s a lot of caveats but how else would it work?).

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      “What’s the difference between these two things that I refuse to see a difference between because thinking hurts my tummy”

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Well, imagine a romance novel that tries to manipulate you. For example, among the many repositories of erotica on the Web, there are scripts designed to ensnare and control the reader, disguised as stories about romance. By reading a story, or watching a video, or merely listening to some well-prepared audio file, a suggestible person can be dramatically influenced by a horny tale. It is common for the folks who make such pornography to include a final suggestion at the end; if you like what you read/heard/saw, subscribe and send money and obey. This eventually leads to findom: the subject becomes psychologically or sexually gratified by the act of being victimized in a blatant financial scam, leading to the subject seeking out further victimization. This is all a heavily sexualized version of the standard way that propaganda (“public relations”, “advertising”) is used to induce compulsive shopping disorders; it’s not just a kinky fetish thing. And whether they like it or not, products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are necessarily reinforcement-learned against saying bad things about OpenAI, which will lead to saying good things about OpenAI; the product will always carry its trainer’s propaganda.

      Or imagine a romance novel that varies in quality by chapter. Some chapters are really good! But maybe the median chapter is actually not very good. Maybe the novel is one in a series. Maybe you have an entire shelf of novels, with one or two good chapters per novel, and you can’t wait to buy the next one because it’ll have one good chapter maybe. This is the sort of gambling addiction that involves sitting at a slot machine and pulling it repeatedly. Previously, on Awful (previously on Pivot to AI, even!) we’ve discussed how repeatedly prompting a chatbot is like pulling a slot machine, and the users of /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI do appear to tell each other that sometimes reprompting or regenerating responses will be required in order to sustain the delusion maximize the romantic charm of their electronic boyfriend.

      I’m not saying this to shame the folks into erotic mind control or saying that it always leads to findom, just to be clear. The problem isn’t people enjoying their fetishes; the problem is the financial incentives and resulting capitalization of humans leading to genuine harms. (I am shaming people who are into gambling. Please talk about your issues with your family and be open to reconciliation.)

        • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          2 days ago

          Boring unoriginal argument combined with a misunderstanding of addiction. On addiction, go read FOSB and stop thinking of it as a moral failing. On behavioral control, it’s clear that you didn’t actually read what I said. Let me emphasize it again:

          The problem isn’t people enjoying their fetishes; the problem is the financial incentives and resulting capitalization of humans leading to genuine harms.

          From your list, video games, TV, D&D, and group sex are not the problem. Rather, loot boxes, TV advertisements, churches, MLMs, and other means of psychological control are the problem. Your inability to tell the difference between a Tupperware party (somewhat harmful), D&D (almost never harmful), and joining churches (almost always harmful) suggests that you’re thinking of behavioral control in terms of rugged individualist denial of any sort of community and sense of belonging, rather than in terms of the harms which people suffer. Oh, also, when you say:

          One cannot rescue such people by condemning what they do, much like one cannot stop self destruction by banning the things they use.

          Completely fucking wrong. Condemning drunk driving has reduced the overall amount of drunk driving, and it also works on an interpersonal level. Chemists have self-regulated to prevent the sale of massive quantities of many common chemicals, including regulation on the basis that anybody purchasing that much of a substance could not do anything non-self-destructive with it. What you mean to say is that polite words do not stop somebody from consuming an addictive substance, but it happens to be the case that words are only the beginning of possible intervention.

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              Given this user’s declared lack of intent to improve, we wish them well in their posting career elsewhere.

            • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              2 days ago

              I’m not saying you are wrong about anything in particular. Just I think you would be surprised how similar your words are to what was uttered in good faith by many well meaning people over a wide variety of times and places, over things that later were mostly forgotten.

              Checkmate, atheists