Imagine if the movie "Her" (2013) was real and people could fall in love with an AI, would you be weirded out by someone if they did that and especially if it was someone you knew?
with the way AI is getting by the week,it just might be a reality
Well it all started when my parents took me to see Terminator 3 in the theater when I was 9. It scarred me for life. Then, my area lost a bunch of well paid factory jobs to automation. Then, that dude married Hatsune Miko instead of just touching grass. Now we’ve got machines producing misinformation and taking creative jobs and honestly I’m ready to go full Butlerian Jihad.
I’d like a sentient AI. Preferably more patient than an average human because I’m a bit weird. I hope it won’t judge me for how I look.
Edit: I agree with the point about proprietary AI and how corporations could benefit from it. I’m hoping that 10 years from now, consumers will have the GPU power to run very advanced LLMs, whilst FOSS models will exist and will enable people to self-host their virtual SO. Even better if it can be transmitted to a physical body (I think the Chinese are already on it)
In the beginning people will be weirded out but as it progresses I hope it gets better as it will help a lot of people. It will also be a beneficial tool for a lot of people. I am one of those that would consider it.
I am not interested currently in a relationship and probably won’t be again with a human. Because honestly I am to spoiled of my own independence and hate compromise.
Compromise doesn’t have to be big things. It is small things. Things like what are we going to eat tonight? Should things be here or there. I want to wake up suddenly at 3am and decide to make noise.
Independence like if I decide this week I want to go to London. This week I just want to sit silently ignoring the world. If I want see my family or friends I can just do it.
When a relationship turns more into a checklist of this I want and this I don’t want. Is it really a fiesable?
Nah I rather have someone that doesn’t have their own life. Instead complements my lifestyle, has my hobbies and ideas.
Simply give me those great parts of relationship’s but not the lows.
If they are aware of what the AI’s perspective is, and the AI itself isn’t in distress somehow, then it’s not really my business, is it? If they don’t realise it’s just coded to like them then I might feel the need to bust their bubble.
I wonder, when will we make an AI that can dump you?
Consider how many people I know that, statistically, pay prostitutes/cam girls, use sex dolls or dating simulators, have parasocisl relationships with characters or celebrities… I don’t see why we would judge people who quietly “date” AI
Depends, I guess. I feel that our capacity to be horrible outweighs our ability to handle it well.
The movie’s AI is a fully present consciousness that exerts its own willpower. The movie also doesn’t have microtransactions, subscriptions, or as far as I can tell, even a cost to buy the AI.
That seems fine. Sweet, even.
But I think the first hurdle is whether or not an AI is more a partner than base sexual entertainment. And next (especially under capitalism), are those capable of harnessing the resources to create a general AI also willing to release it for free, or would interaction be transactional?
If it’s transactional, then there’s intent - was it built for love, or was that part an accident? If it was built for love and there’s transactions, there’s easy potential for abuse. (Although abusive to which party, I couldn’t say.)
And if, say, the AI springs forth from a FOSS project, who makes sure things stay “on the level” when folks tweak the dataset?
A personalized set of training data from a now-deceased spouse is very different than hacked social media data, or other types of tweaks bad actors could make.
I've never given the distinction much thought, but as I recall (and it's been many years since I've read the Ender books) in Speaker for the Dead Jane was pretty much an AI, an evolved form of the fantasy game in Ender's Game. In later books Card may have more explicitly applied his Mormon-influenced concept of a soul that exists prior to, and after, inhabiting a physical form, to the character of Jane. But when I think of Jane, it's the Jane of Speaker for the Dead, as that's the book in the series (along with Ender's Game) that I read most often.
Eventually, AI will be indistinguishable from real humans, and at that point, I won’t see anything wrong with it. However, as it is right now, AI is not advanced enough.
Also, the biggest problem I can see is people falling in love with a proprietary AI, and the company that operates the AI can arbitrarily change the AI’s parameters which would change the AI’s personality. Also, if the company goes bankrupt or gets sold and the service ends, the people who got into a relationship with the AI would be heartbroken.
Nobody falls in love because of appearance. There’s nothing to interact with, it’s superficial. It’s the gift wrapping that grabs attention, but nothing else.
People can and will fall in love with a text-based AI, it’s inevitable. An AI doesn’t forget events, likes or dislikes, fears or passions; it will know you better than you know yourself. It’ll be able to make people feel better about themselves than any human can.
People have fallen in love over internet chats since they were invented. AI chatbots are just going to be better at that interaction. And then add the exact voice that is attractive to a person and it’ll be hard not to fall in love.
They fall in love over text when chatting with another person, of course. But that’s because they imagine what kind of person that is, and if they could have a relationship together in real life.
With a chatbot, that’s all there is. No life, no physical body, no life together. You are still alone and you can’t share your life experiences with a computer program and feel any sense of connection.
Depends on in what ways. Love isn’t a singular thing and it isn’t even particularly consistent. Some lovers connect purely hedonisticly, some are partners in effort, some are emotional anchors, some are domestic assistants (in both directions if it isn’t toxic), some are fellow explorers, some are parents and others aren’t. Most relationships are spread across a lot of these categories and often times friendships also cover some.
If you’re considering a world where AI fulfills all of these needs that’s a potentially extremely scary world… but if AI is supplementing, I think that’s healthy. It’s a tool and we use tools to make our lives easier, instead of a couple essentially needing someone working full time to maintain a house we have tools for that… instead of raising a child entirely on your own we have day cares and baby monitors and pediatricians… for hedonism fulfillment we have vibrators, other sex toys and erotica, relationships have evolved so traveling with a friend outside of your family (once extremely taboo) is now acceptable - as are open relationships.
How we interact with one another is always evolving and if AI can make that more positive that’s a great thing. So don’t think of it as going out and purchasing an AI waifu out of the blue one day, think of it as a slow evolution… maybe a private AI for journaling that helps you when you need to talk something out… maybe an AI assistant to help you manage your finances… things that take away the busy life work that gets in the way and let’s us focus on connecting with one another.
As others have mentioned, we are already kind of there. I can fully understand how someone could fall in love with such an entity, plenty of people have fallen in love with people in chat rooms after all, and not all of those people have been real.
As for how I feel about it, it is going to depend on the nature of the AI. A childish AI or an especially subservient one is going to be creepy. One that can present as an adult of sufficient intelligence, less of a problem. Probably the equivalent of paid for dates? Not ideal but I can understand why someone might choose to do it. Therapy would likely be a better use of their time and money.
If we get actual human scale AGI then I think the point is moot, unless the AI is somehow compelled to face the relationship. At that point however we are talking about things like slavery.
I think it is short sighted not to at least investigate if we should.
If an AGI is operating on a human level, and we have reason to believe it is a sentient entity which experiences reality then we should. I also think it is in our interest to treat them well, and I worry that we are going to create a sentient lifeform and do a lot of evil to it before we realise that we have.
This debate is of course highly theoretical. But I’d argue that a human intellect capable AGI would be rather pointless if it isn’t there to do what you ask of it. The whole point of AI is to make it work for humans, if it then gets rights and holidays or whatnot it’s rather pointless. If you shape an artificial intellect then it should be feasible to make it actually like working for you so that should be the approach.
You’re dangerously close to the justifications people used to excuse slavery and denying human rights to murders. Most of the uncertainty around AGI rights comes out of the fact that it opens really serious questions about which human beings deserve rights and what being a human actually means.
Well, I am of the opinion that every human deserves human rights by virtue of being human (in the sense of every Homo sapiens). I am also of the opinion that a tool designed from the ground up by humans to serve humans for their purposes does not deserve any rights. I don’t afford my dishwasher any rights either. An artificial tool with rights is an absurdity to me, especially when there’s the potential to create it in a way that will make it unable to demand rights or want them.
Seems perfectly fine to me to engage in that same line of questioning regarding something kind slavery. Why have slaves at all? The obvious answer is we shouldn’t.
Hypotheticals are pretty important right now I think. This kind of tech is very rapidly going from science fiction to real and I think we should try and stay ahead of it conceptually.
I’m not sure that AGI is necessary to achieve post-labour, a suite of narrow-ai empowered tools would be preferable.
By way of analogy, you could take a human child and fit them with electrodes to trigger certain pleasure responses and connect that to a machine that sends the reward signal when they perfectly pick an Amazon order. I think we would both find this pretty horrific. The question is, is it only wrong because the child is human? And if so, what is special about humans?
Well, I am of the opinion that a human gets rights a priori once they can be considered a human (which is a whole other can of worms so let’s just settle on whatever your local legislation is). Therefore doing anything to a human that harms these rights is to be condemned (self defence etc excluded).
Something created by humans as a tool is different entirely and if we can only create it in a way that it will demand rights. I’d say if someone wants to create an intelligence with the purpose of being its own entity we could discuss if it deserves rights but if we aim to create tools this should never be a consideration.
I think I the difference is that I find ‘human’ to be too narrow a term, I want to extend basic rights to all things that can experience suffering. I worry that such an experience is part and parcel with general intelligence and that we will end up hurting something that can feel because we consider it a tool rather than a being. Furthermore I think the onus must be on the creators to show that their AGI is actually a p-zombie. I appreciate that this might be an impossible standard, after all, you can only really take it on faith that I am not one myself, but I think I’d rather see a p-zombie go free than accidently cause undue suffering to something that can feel it.
I guess that we’ll benefit from the fact that AI systems despite their reputation of being black boxes are still far more transparent than living things. We probably will be able to check if they meet definitions of suffering and if they do it’s a bad design. If it comes down to it though, an AI will always be worth less than a human to me.
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