At least a quarter of the more than 100 billion messages sent to our chatbots are attempts to initiate romantic or sexual exchanges.
...ALICE, a computer program built by one of our founders, Richard Wallace, to keep a conversation going by appearing to listen and empathetically respond. After ALICE was introduced on Pandorabots's platform in the early 2000s, one of its interlocutors was the film director Spike Jonze. He would later cite their conversation as the inspiration for his movie "Her," which follows a lonely man as he falls in love with his artificial intelligence operating system.
When "Her" premiered in 2013, it fell firmly in the camp of science fiction. Today, the film, set prophetically in 2025, feels more like a documentary. Elon Musk's xAI recently unveiled Ani, a digital anime girlfriend. Meta has permitted its A.I. personas to engage in sexualized conversations, including with children. And now, OpenAI says it will roll out age-gated "erotica" in December. The race to build and monetize the A.I. girlfriend (and, increasingly, boyfriend) is officially on.
...But there's a dark side to A.I. companions, whose users are not just the lonely males of internet lore, but women who find them more emotionally satisfying than men. My colleagues and I now believe that the real existential threat of generative A.I. is not rogue super-intelligence, but a quiet atrophy of our ability to forge genuine human connection.
The desire to connect is so profound that it will find a vessel in even the most rudimentary machines. Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum invented ELIZA, a chatbot whose sole rhetorical trick was to repeat back what the user said with a question. Mr. Weizenbaum was horrified to discover that his M.I.T. students and staff would confide in it at length. "What I had not realized," he later reflected, "is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/opinion/her-film-chatbots-romance.html?smid=em-share
When "Her" premiered in 2013, it fell firmly in the camp of science fiction. Today, the film, set prophetically in 2025, feels more like a documentary. Elon Musk's xAI recently unveiled Ani, a digital anime girlfriend. Meta has permitted its A.I. personas to engage in sexualized conversations, including with children. And now, OpenAI says it will roll out age-gated "erotica" in December. The race to build and monetize the A.I. girlfriend (and, increasingly, boyfriend) is officially on.
...But there's a dark side to A.I. companions, whose users are not just the lonely males of internet lore, but women who find them more emotionally satisfying than men. My colleagues and I now believe that the real existential threat of generative A.I. is not rogue super-intelligence, but a quiet atrophy of our ability to forge genuine human connection.
The desire to connect is so profound that it will find a vessel in even the most rudimentary machines. Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum invented ELIZA, a chatbot whose sole rhetorical trick was to repeat back what the user said with a question. Mr. Weizenbaum was horrified to discover that his M.I.T. students and staff would confide in it at length. "What I had not realized," he later reflected, "is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/opinion/her-film-chatbots-romance.html?smid=em-share
No comments:
Post a Comment