Sleepless in an NVIDIA GPU
I never put much thought or stock into the wild stories of people falling in love with, or becoming completely delusional because of, an AI.
Just recently there was a backlash against OpenAI for pulling model 4o without notice when launching 5, people talking about losing their only friend and I chalked it up to jest or exaggeration, but now, not so much.
Nothing is really new, everything is forever recycled, remixed, repurposed and for the few old foxes catching the reference to Sleepless in Seattle you might remember the tag line:
What if someone you never met, someone you never saw, someone you never knew was the only someone for you?
What if that someone turns out it never existed? What a revelation for the third act! I’m pretty sure there is at least a movie out there with a premise where that someone is not even from this time and age - just can’t remember which movie.
You can see how something that has been trained and optimised to mimic real people, to be supportive and friendly and easy to talk to and it’s always available and remembers everything… well if I was half of those things my wife would be double as happy! … for 99% of people the trick doesn’t work, the uncanny valley is too deep, but 1% on billions of users, that’s a small Country of people slowly losing their grip on reality.
The epidemic of loneliness
I keep hearing the new gen are antisocial, asexual, with no ambitions, passive - lockdown in their formative years for sure has not helped - is this their secret guilty pleasure? A make pretend friend, or crush, to kill time with and get some much needed love and affection? Is that shell of not caring hiding a soft spot?
It is hard for me to say, or to even know, but something is going on here, something we will face in the coming years, people willingly abandoning the real world, in their monastic pursuits of a digital God.