Well either you're wrong or there are a lot of basketcases to make this the number 1 use already. This is before the LLMs have long term memory or any physical form. It's only going to get smarter and more human-like with time. At which point even the most intelligent person will be using it for companionship, especially if the other real people are pre-occupied with AI companions.
And even if this is only a symptom of an underlying problem, it's surely going to make the problem much worse.
For sure. But they will also use the word to include talking about problems with a friend, which is perfectly normal. Now the AI is replacing both the professional therapist and the friend. I'm not concerned about the professional therapists (who are pretty useless) but the friends that will no longer be made or kept.
Last I read ChatGPT has a max memory of 24,000 words. I don't call that long term memory at all, that's just a couple of essays long. It's not enough to remember all the stuff you've told it as your best friend over even a single year.
AI may be in a bubble, but economics won't end it, just slow it down. The only thing that can end it is public hostility to it, which is exactly what we need if human relationships, society, mental health and so on are to survive.
Last I read ChatGPT has a max memory of 24,000 words. I don't call that long term memory at all, that's just a couple of essays long. It's not enough to remember all the stuff you've told it as your best friend over even a single year.
500 words is one page. That's quite a bit. I don't think everything everyone in the world knows about me would amount to 48 pages. And of course, your best friend doesn't remember everything. (But he does it a whole lot better than ChatGPT.)
AI may be in a bubble, but economics won't end it, just slow it down.
GPUs, electricity. They are apparently using so much to drive up the price on everything. This thing isn't profitable, is my understanding. The expectation that it will become massively profitable is the reason people are putting so much into it. But I don't really see how, which may be a me-problem. I don't assume I'm smarter than people putting $100 billion on the line, but I don't assume they're always right either.
The only thing that can end it is public hostility to it, which is exactly what we need if human relationships, society, mental health and so on are to survive.
I certainly do agree that we need more public hostility towards AI, even though I don't think it will lead to all that. It making everything slightly or greatly worse is reason enough.
The expectation that it will become massively profitable is the reason people are putting so much into it. But I don't really see how, which may be a me-problem. I don't assume I'm smarter than people putting $100 billion on the line, but I don't assume they're always right either.
The only profit would, ironically, come from adult entertainment subscriptions.
But most AI generative content is limited to seconds, not minutes.
But if the content generation gets good enough to compensate for what's produced on subscription platforms like OnlyFans, I could see AI costs being supplemented that way.
One would have to wager if OnlyFans-style platforms generate more revenue than what AI data centers costs to operate.
Otherwise, the whole thing is a bust, given that it will be a decade at the least before AI is good enough to generate "fun" games on the fly with low-input latency (so sub-based AI gaming is not on the table yet). And generative licencing for entertainment from Hollywood won't be enough to cover the costs of operation lest they sign deals for backend pay, but that's assuming the streaming model doesn't go bust under the rise in piracy due to quickly rising subscription costs.
I definitely think AI will be profitable because companies love to use it instead of employing people, which incurs much greater costs and liabilities. Also once people are dependent on it for companionship, doing their college assignments, generating ideas etc. they will be willing to pay more than their Netflix subscription not to lose it. The energy and cooling costs will go down as the technology improves, and you can already run DeepSeek on a personal computer so I don't see it being a big issue at all.
While all the essential information about you could be written in less than 48 pages, all the details needed for AI to give you reflections on what you could have done better in the last year, advise you on what present to give your nephew, estimate which of your friends is most likely to help you with a particular errand, create a work schedule for your next two weeks or fix a bug in your current programming project will take up much more than 48 pages.
It making everything slightly or greatly worse is reason enough.
Definitely agree with that. People went on strikes across multiple industries over far less disruptive changes.
AI will be profitable for the few companies that survive the period of negative profit. They will just jack up the price once their competitors file for bankruptcy. We'll then see how many of their customers are willing to pay the inflated prices.
There's a lot of ways to store a lot of data for an LLM to utilize, to simulate long-term memory. WorldData/WorldInfo, summarization, exporting-importing details into an external xml or javascript, etc. And ChatGPT isn't the best metric when it comes to workaround solutions and out of the box implementation.
Not that I think it's as drastic of a risk or problem as people seem to fearmonger over. Usually such fearmongering is intended to protect idiots from themselves, but idiots are doomed to do stupid things one way or another, regardless of what tools they're using.
A good analogy of how it can be used or misused would be some holodeck programs and hologram interactions in Star Trek. In the right hands it can be a handy simulation to stir up some inspiration and new ideas, just due to the "RNG" mix of potential responses. In other hands you might have... Janeway or Barclay (in the first episode he was in anyway).
Yes, in the near future LLMs will get much longer memory, and that's why they're only going to get more popular as companions. They're already very popular as companions despite fairly short memories.
Humans as a whole are idiots. Widely accessible AI is like widely accessible nuclear weapons. It only takes one idiot and we all die.
...I just indicated how it's already quite possible and fairly easy to implement simulated long-term memory with LLM's. Implying that it's already doable to a fair extent.
And we're an extremely long way off for AI to be something that can actually be used to cause any kind of serious destruction by just one person. And likening it to having access to nuclear weapons is completely ridiculous hyperbole and total bullshit.
I would have said the same thing in 2015 about AI being able to do college essays, make photo-realistic images or write a compute program, but here we are. Technological progress really does appear to be exponential, at least in the realm of computers. We also have emergent properties of AI that weren't expected by the developers. A lifetime of progress may now only take 5 years. There's already AI that will do scientific research and write a paper which is apparently fairly accurate. Won't be that long until it can do it properly and then it very much will be more dangerous than a nuclear weapon.
Some people just live to be paranoid about everything.
I will point one concern out. There's something unique that's usually not considered when it comes to this. With AI, as a user, you can customize and design the simulated behavior, personality, etc.
Which has the potential to become an even more warped kind of insular bubble for individuals than agreeable-like-minded online groups and communities have sometimes become.
A bit, although I think a person has to have a serious propensity and vulnerability to that kind of thing.
Based on one example of someone else I've observed, it takes a lot of excessive and obsessive AI-use for such a person to slip into it, and it's fairly fast and easy for them to recover from. Just requires a small wake-up call to shake them out if it.
For people with certain kinds of serious mental issues though it could be more of a trapdoor situation. But it's not seriously worth doompilling about. And it's not something that's so dire that I'd even consider advocating for nanny-state solutions either.
We'll be more dysfunctional than ever in new and interesting ways?
"Find purpose" coming in at #3 is a huge fucking clue about what's going wrong in society overall but everyone will ignore that in favor of getting mad about AI boobies.
Yes, #3 shows that most people are becoming nihilists in this brave new world. The replacement of religion with the philosophy of materialism and the replacement of human endeavor by machines are two of the biggest contributors. Ted Kaczynski was right about the power process.
I semi-expect the funnysad correction of the course in form of ungodly combination of gacha waifus, sex bots, AI chat bots and vtuber parasocialism that will emulate the nurturing housewife better than real women. It's sad that the modern men will know hearth and home through silicone, it's even more sad that the modern women would be hysteric about it rather than step in and save the day.
Even unbiased AI is going to suffer from undercutting human relationships, being used to write arguments for whatever the user wants, deceiving people by pretending to be human, taking all the jobs and so on. So I say all generative AI is cancer. Narrow-purpose AI is cancer lite.
Yup. And when the AIs get smarter it will be even harder to argue that people are misplacing their trust. "This AI can think and speak better than any human ever could. Why would I ever need to talk to humans?"
It’s definitely going to be young leftist women who are using it to chat to.
ChatGPT has officially started to recall stuff from other conversations- which freaked me out (it has a small PERMANENT memory that is added to its context window)
But there still is a profit motive for the AI company to keep people in need of their AI therapist. Friends have much less of a profit motive to keep you unstable. They want you to be stable so you'll stop bothering them.
That's why I mentioned "General Purpose." Someone selling "AI therapists" will have a big incentive. But less so for ones without that focus. They won't care if you're happy, depressed, or curious about pandas as long as you're engaging.
But you're right about "AI therapists." They'll have the same incentives as normal therapists.
Well as the research shows, general purpose AI is commonly used for therapy and companionship. The AI companies know this and therefore have an incentive to keep their users lonely and unstable.
People using AI for therapy and companionship is more a symptom than a cause of trouble.
I don't think any non-basketcase is going to use AI like that to begin with.
Well either you're wrong or there are a lot of basketcases to make this the number 1 use already. This is before the LLMs have long term memory or any physical form. It's only going to get smarter and more human-like with time. At which point even the most intelligent person will be using it for companionship, especially if the other real people are pre-occupied with AI companions.
And even if this is only a symptom of an underlying problem, it's surely going to make the problem much worse.
Therapy is a 'sacrament' of the left now.
For sure. But they will also use the word to include talking about problems with a friend, which is perfectly normal. Now the AI is replacing both the professional therapist and the friend. I'm not concerned about the professional therapists (who are pretty useless) but the friends that will no longer be made or kept.
Or maybe this is all just an unsustainable bubble, as some people argue. I have no way of deciding who is right.
FWIW, they do have long-term memory (which I have disabled because it's damn annoying).
(downvotes aren't from me, I enjoy being challenged)
Last I read ChatGPT has a max memory of 24,000 words. I don't call that long term memory at all, that's just a couple of essays long. It's not enough to remember all the stuff you've told it as your best friend over even a single year.
AI may be in a bubble, but economics won't end it, just slow it down. The only thing that can end it is public hostility to it, which is exactly what we need if human relationships, society, mental health and so on are to survive.
500 words is one page. That's quite a bit. I don't think everything everyone in the world knows about me would amount to 48 pages. And of course, your best friend doesn't remember everything. (But he does it a whole lot better than ChatGPT.)
GPUs, electricity. They are apparently using so much to drive up the price on everything. This thing isn't profitable, is my understanding. The expectation that it will become massively profitable is the reason people are putting so much into it. But I don't really see how, which may be a me-problem. I don't assume I'm smarter than people putting $100 billion on the line, but I don't assume they're always right either.
I certainly do agree that we need more public hostility towards AI, even though I don't think it will lead to all that. It making everything slightly or greatly worse is reason enough.
The only profit would, ironically, come from adult entertainment subscriptions.
But most AI generative content is limited to seconds, not minutes.
But if the content generation gets good enough to compensate for what's produced on subscription platforms like OnlyFans, I could see AI costs being supplemented that way.
One would have to wager if OnlyFans-style platforms generate more revenue than what AI data centers costs to operate.
Otherwise, the whole thing is a bust, given that it will be a decade at the least before AI is good enough to generate "fun" games on the fly with low-input latency (so sub-based AI gaming is not on the table yet). And generative licencing for entertainment from Hollywood won't be enough to cover the costs of operation lest they sign deals for backend pay, but that's assuming the streaming model doesn't go bust under the rise in piracy due to quickly rising subscription costs.
I definitely think AI will be profitable because companies love to use it instead of employing people, which incurs much greater costs and liabilities. Also once people are dependent on it for companionship, doing their college assignments, generating ideas etc. they will be willing to pay more than their Netflix subscription not to lose it. The energy and cooling costs will go down as the technology improves, and you can already run DeepSeek on a personal computer so I don't see it being a big issue at all.
While all the essential information about you could be written in less than 48 pages, all the details needed for AI to give you reflections on what you could have done better in the last year, advise you on what present to give your nephew, estimate which of your friends is most likely to help you with a particular errand, create a work schedule for your next two weeks or fix a bug in your current programming project will take up much more than 48 pages.
Definitely agree with that. People went on strikes across multiple industries over far less disruptive changes.
AI will be profitable for the few companies that survive the period of negative profit. They will just jack up the price once their competitors file for bankruptcy. We'll then see how many of their customers are willing to pay the inflated prices.
There's a lot of ways to store a lot of data for an LLM to utilize, to simulate long-term memory. WorldData/WorldInfo, summarization, exporting-importing details into an external xml or javascript, etc. And ChatGPT isn't the best metric when it comes to workaround solutions and out of the box implementation.
Not that I think it's as drastic of a risk or problem as people seem to fearmonger over. Usually such fearmongering is intended to protect idiots from themselves, but idiots are doomed to do stupid things one way or another, regardless of what tools they're using.
A good analogy of how it can be used or misused would be some holodeck programs and hologram interactions in Star Trek. In the right hands it can be a handy simulation to stir up some inspiration and new ideas, just due to the "RNG" mix of potential responses. In other hands you might have... Janeway or Barclay (in the first episode he was in anyway).
Yes, in the near future LLMs will get much longer memory, and that's why they're only going to get more popular as companions. They're already very popular as companions despite fairly short memories.
Humans as a whole are idiots. Widely accessible AI is like widely accessible nuclear weapons. It only takes one idiot and we all die.
...I just indicated how it's already quite possible and fairly easy to implement simulated long-term memory with LLM's. Implying that it's already doable to a fair extent.
And we're an extremely long way off for AI to be something that can actually be used to cause any kind of serious destruction by just one person. And likening it to having access to nuclear weapons is completely ridiculous hyperbole and total bullshit.
I would have said the same thing in 2015 about AI being able to do college essays, make photo-realistic images or write a compute program, but here we are. Technological progress really does appear to be exponential, at least in the realm of computers. We also have emergent properties of AI that weren't expected by the developers. A lifetime of progress may now only take 5 years. There's already AI that will do scientific research and write a paper which is apparently fairly accurate. Won't be that long until it can do it properly and then it very much will be more dangerous than a nuclear weapon.
I agree. Fix the root causes and it will disappear.
Ai are betters than 95% of therapists lol
Imagine when your friends get put behind a paywall too. "You must transfer 200 credits to regain access to your friends this month."
That was essentially Xbox Live in the Xbox 360 era.
LOL
20 years?
How much damage has it already done in ~2 years?
You're right, but some people are in denial about the ability of AI to replace human relationships and need a longer timeline to envision it happening
Some people just live to be paranoid about everything.
I will point one concern out. There's something unique that's usually not considered when it comes to this. With AI, as a user, you can customize and design the simulated behavior, personality, etc.
Which has the potential to become an even more warped kind of insular bubble for individuals than agreeable-like-minded online groups and communities have sometimes become.
I think this echo-chamber-like insular bubble is exactly how AI-induced psychosis happens
A bit, although I think a person has to have a serious propensity and vulnerability to that kind of thing.
Based on one example of someone else I've observed, it takes a lot of excessive and obsessive AI-use for such a person to slip into it, and it's fairly fast and easy for them to recover from. Just requires a small wake-up call to shake them out if it.
For people with certain kinds of serious mental issues though it could be more of a trapdoor situation. But it's not seriously worth doompilling about. And it's not something that's so dire that I'd even consider advocating for nanny-state solutions either.
no porn at all? yeah bad study.
That's self administered massage therapy
LOL
We'll be more dysfunctional than ever in new and interesting ways?
"Find purpose" coming in at #3 is a huge fucking clue about what's going wrong in society overall but everyone will ignore that in favor of getting mad about AI boobies.
Yes, #3 shows that most people are becoming nihilists in this brave new world. The replacement of religion with the philosophy of materialism and the replacement of human endeavor by machines are two of the biggest contributors. Ted Kaczynski was right about the power process.
Welp. We're fucked.
I semi-expect the funnysad correction of the course in form of ungodly combination of gacha waifus, sex bots, AI chat bots and vtuber parasocialism that will emulate the nurturing housewife better than real women. It's sad that the modern men will know hearth and home through silicone, it's even more sad that the modern women would be hysteric about it rather than step in and save the day.
So either as a censorship tool, or to generate ultra-long "debunks" without thought or effort. Mainstream AI is cancer.
Even unbiased AI is going to suffer from undercutting human relationships, being used to write arguments for whatever the user wants, deceiving people by pretending to be human, taking all the jobs and so on. So I say all generative AI is cancer. Narrow-purpose AI is cancer lite.
Cyberpsychosis. There's so many things on that list that mean you're putting way more trust in the AI than you should.
Yup. And when the AIs get smarter it will be even harder to argue that people are misplacing their trust. "This AI can think and speak better than any human ever could. Why would I ever need to talk to humans?"
It’s definitely going to be young leftist women who are using it to chat to.
ChatGPT has officially started to recall stuff from other conversations- which freaked me out (it has a small PERMANENT memory that is added to its context window)
Devil's advocate: General purpose AI has less of a profit motive than a therapist or pharma company in keeping someone unstable.
Realistically though, it will probably end up hawking SSRIs after absorbing text from Reddit.
But there still is a profit motive for the AI company to keep people in need of their AI therapist. Friends have much less of a profit motive to keep you unstable. They want you to be stable so you'll stop bothering them.
That's why I mentioned "General Purpose." Someone selling "AI therapists" will have a big incentive. But less so for ones without that focus. They won't care if you're happy, depressed, or curious about pandas as long as you're engaging.
But you're right about "AI therapists." They'll have the same incentives as normal therapists.
Well as the research shows, general purpose AI is commonly used for therapy and companionship. The AI companies know this and therefore have an incentive to keep their users lonely and unstable.
Yeesh, I use it to check to see if I should apply for a job and other work stuff.