There are plenty of reasons why having a chatbot partner is a bad idea (especially for young people), but here's just a few:

- The sycophantic and unchallenging behaviours of chatbots leaves a person unconditioned for human interactions. Real relationships have friction, from this we develop important interpersonal skills such as setting boundaries, settling disagreements, building compromise, standing up for oneself, understanding one another, and so on. These also have an effect on one's personal identity and self-value.

- Real relationships have the input from each participant, whereas chatbots are responding to the user's contribution only. The chatbot doesn't have its own life experiences and happenings to bring to the relationship, nor does it instigate autonomously, it's always some kind of structured reply to the user.

- The implication of being fully satisfied by a chatbot is that the person is seeking a partner who does not contribute to the relationship, but rather just an entity that only acts in response to them. It can also be an indication of some kind of problem that the individual needs to work through with why they don't want to seek genuine human connection.

After having spoken with one of the people there I'm a lot less concerned to be honest.

They described it as something akin to an emotional vibrator, that they didn't attribute any sentience to, and that didn't trigger their PTSD that they normally experienced when dating men.

If AI can provide emotional support and an outlet for survivors who would otherwise not be able to have that kind of emotional need fulfilled, then I don't see any issue.

I hadn’t heard of that until today. Wild, it seems some people report genuinely feeling deeply in love with the personas they’ve crafted for their chatbots. It seems like an incredibly precarious position to be in to have a deep relationship where you have to perpetually pay a 3rd party company to keep it going, and the company may destroy your “partner” or change their personality at a whim. Very “Black Mirror”.

> I worry about the damage caused by these things on distressed people. What can be done?

Why? We are gregarious animals, we need social connections. ChatGPT has guardrails that keep this mostly safe and helps with the loneliness epidemic.

It's not like people doing this are likely thriving socially in the first place, better with ChatGPT than on some forum à la 4chan that will radicalize them.

I feel like this will be one of the "breaks" between generations where millennial and GenZ will be purist and call human-to-human real connections while anything with "AI" is inherently fake and unhealthy whereas Alpha and Beta will treat it as a normal part of their lives.

What's going on is that we've spent a few solid decades absolutely destroying normal human relationships, mostly because it's profitable to do so, and the people running the show have displayed no signs of stopping. Meanwhile, the rest of society is either unwilling or unable (or both) to do anything to reverse course. There is truly no other outcome, and it will not change unless and until regular people decide that enough is enough.

I'd tell you exactly what we need to do, but it is at odds with the interests of capital, so I guess keep showing up to work and smiling through that hour-long standup. You still have a mortgage to pay.

NYT did a story on that as well and interviewed a few people. Maybe the scary part is that it isn't who you think it would be and it also shows how attractive an alternative reality is to many people. What does that say about our society.

That subreddit is disturbing

My dude/entity, before there were these LLM hookups, there existed the Snapewives. People wanna go crazy, they will, LLMs or not.

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/5/1/219

This paper explores a small community of Snape fans who have gone beyond a narrative retelling of the character as constrained by the work of Joanne Katherine Rowling. The ‘Snapewives’ or ‘Snapists’ are women who channel Snape, are engaged in romantic relationships with him, and see him as a vital guide for their daily lives. In this context, Snape is viewed as more than a mere fictional creation.