alt Hacker NewsSome people are lost to AI fascination quickly because they're curious and maybe a little lonely, or at least isolated.
Suddenly, they have a oracle that can endlessly tickle their curiosity (accurately or not) and follow them as deep into discussion as they can imagine, without ever growing tired or annoyed.
Unfortunately, in many ways, there's a lot of overlap between those people and those that had once made great community members online. They had the curiosity to have already dug deep into topics so as to become knowledgeable about them and discovered interest communities online as a place where they could invest themselves socially and feel less alone. Online communities were good for them and they were good for the online communities.
The story you relate here is not singular, and it's sad one to see, as it likely means these people are going to eventually find that they've lost the esteem and social credit they'd spent years earning and are now as alone online as they ever were before.
> Some people are lost to AI fascination quickly because they're curious and maybe a little lonely, or at least isolated.
There's a scene or an arc in Mr. Robot where the FBI agent behaves this way with her Alexa. I've also heard/read tales of parents realizing just how much their kids interact with Alexa. It's easy to understand how having this oracle as you stated would be interesting to interact with if that's truly what it was. However, knowing how these LLMs work, I find it utterly uninteresting for that kind of use. Knowing how much they "hallucinate" just makes me not interested at all. I've had enough real life interactions with people that I have come to use the term "shitstory" when the person just clearly makes stuff up as they continue to talk about something they don't really know about. My favorite is when it's something I know a lot about while several people are listening and engaged with shitstory totally oblivious to the bullshit. Why would I want to do that with a service I'm expected to pay for?