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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Hot on the heels of failing out of art school and declaring himself the robofuhrer, Grok now has an update that makes him even smarter but less fascist.

And... xAI releases AI companions native to the Grok App.

And holy...

SHIT. It has a NSFW mode. (NSFW, but nothing obscene either) Jiggle Physics Confirmed.

EDIT: Watch this demo then TELL ME this thing isn't going to absolutely mindkill some lonely nerds. Not only can it fake interest in literally any topic you find cool, they nailed the voice tones too.

I'm actually now suspicious that the "Mecha-Hitler" events were a very intentional marketing gambit to ensure that Grok was all over news (and their competitors were not) when they dropped THIS on the unsuspecting public.

This... feels like it will be an inflection point. AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) have already one-shotted some of the more mentally vulnerable of the population. But now we've got one backed by some of the biggest companies in the world, marketed to a mainstream audience.

And designed like a fucking superstimulus.

I've talked about how I feel there are way too many superstimuli around for your average, immature teens and young adults to navigate safely. This... THIS is like introducing a full grown Bengal tiger into the Quokka island.

Forget finding a stack of playboys in the forest or under your dad's bed. Forget stumbling onto PornHub for the first time, if THIS is a teen boy's first encounter with their own sexuality and how it interacts with the female form, how the hell will he ever form a normal relationship with a flesh-and-blood woman? Why would he WANT to?

And what happens when this becomes yet another avenue for serving up ads and draining money from the poor addicted suckers.

This is NOT something parents can be expected to foresee and guide their kids through.

Like I said earlier:

"Who would win, a literal child whose brain hasn't even developed higher reasoning, with a smartphone and internet access, or a remorseless, massive corporation that has spent millions upon millions of dollars optimizing its products and services for extracting money from every single person it gets its clutches on?"

I've felt the looming, ever growing concern for AI's impact on society, jobs, human relationships, and the risk of killing us for a couple years now... but I can at least wrap those prickly thoughts in the soft gauze of the uncertain future. THIS thing sent an immediate shiver up my spine and set off blaring red alarms immediately. Even if THIS is where AI stops improving, we just created a massive filter, an evolutionary bottleneck that basically only the Amish are likely to pass through. Slight hyperbole, but only slight.

Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.

But once again, wait until they start serving ads through it as a means of letting the more destitute types get access.

And yes, Elon is already promising to make them real.

Its like we've transcended the movie HER and went straight to Weird Science.

Can't help but think of this classic tweet.

"At long last, we have created the Digital Superstimulus Relationship Simulator from the Classic Scifi Novel 'For the Love of All That is Holy Never Create a Digital Superstimulus Relationship Simulator.'"

I think I would be sucked in by this if I hadn't developed an actul aversion to Anime-Style women (especially the current gen with the massive eyes) over the years. And they're probably going to cook up something that works for me, too.

I'm in favor of anything that shifts power from women to men in the dating market. Women have had such an absurd amount of power over men both historically and today. Really think about it. How is it reasonable that in order to have access to sex, a man must go on his knees and promise to protect and provide for another person? Nowadays women even want that you BOTH provide for them AND go 50/50 on child care! That's monopoly pricing and usury! I can't wait for the giga sexbots 3000 to arrive, so you can actually have a relationship with women on an even playing field. I predict that a lot of the things we currently see as normal in relationships will vanish. There is little reason why the man must pay for things, the woman's feelings must matter more than man's, "happy wife, happy life" is a thing, the woman complains about stuff much more than the man, etc. Once men have a strong outside option, women will need to learn how to provide values besides offering up their bodies. Of course, they don't like this and will fight this tooth and nail to retain their sexual monopoly. But ultimately, technology always prevails.

I know canned animations off of the unity asset store are more likely, but I almost wonder if they used some of the optimus tech to do the movements. It could be AI controlled as well.

It's been possible for a while to use AIgen to go from text to image to 3d model to animated rig to (extremely large) set of animations. Usually struggles a lot the further you get from standard human. Largely workable with most human intervention early in the chain, and would scale a lot better than using aigen (or something like posenet) in realtime, not just in compute resources but required bandwidth.

Dunno if that's what they're doing here, but it's how I'd attack things from a naive perspective. Honestly kinda surprised that it hasn't already been done at scale, but it would have enough repetition -- and especially idle animations for the existing two 'companions' are very repetitive -- that it might be undesirable to a lot of self-driven devs or experimenters.

I don't see it. I don't think this is more of a superstimulus than reading/watching/playing Strawberry 100% in 2002 and imagining you're the generic high school boy they're talking to. Then streamers and camgirls emerged for the personal touch. This is just a technically impressive but less potent instantiation of what we already have.

Register my prediction as "Society reached the saturation point on pornography and parasocial escapism without AI in the early social media era". The level of social dysfunction will increase because older cohorts are dying and social mores are decaying, but I don't expect Gen Alpha will be any more goonerish than Gen Z because of this technology.

I don't think you get it. LLMs actually think, after a fashion, and in a way that's easily more deep than that of all but say, 15% of people. Pornography is ultimately unsatisfying, but with memory, these systems could offer a simulacrum of understanding that anyone who doesn't understand what is really behind it could find satisfying.

I don't see it. I don't think this is more of a superstimulus than reading/watching/playing Strawberry 100% in 2002 and imagining you're the generic high school boy they're talking to.

Is there a particular reason why dating sites are more of a superstimuli than speed dating bars? Social media vs. talking to people IRL? Watching porn on VHS vs on your phone? Doomscrolling vs. reading the paper?

For me it's pretty clear - the superstimuli lies in having an interactive agent that actively adapts to your prompts, your life circumstances, etc. Something a scripted story cannot do by definition.

dating sites are more of a superstimuli than speed dating bars? Social media vs. talking to people IRL? Watching porn on VHS vs on your phone?

.... the superstimuli lies in having an interactive agent that actively adapts to your prompts, your life circumstances, etc.

So, from each of your named examples, you see one rapidly increased at the expense of the other.

Do you expect OnlyFans, Pornhub, VTubers, Twitch, etc to start suffering big time because a more stimulating version of the same thing has emerged? The decline should be observable within a few years. I on the other hand expect that all those will continue to do just fine, because they're more or equally stimulating to Grok AI companions.

Do you expect OnlyFans, Pornhub, VTubers, Twitch, etc to start suffering big time because a more stimulating version of the same thing has emerged? The decline should be observable within a few years.

You're going a bit far with VTubers / Twitch, as they're a bit more generic than pornography, and I don't know about the timeline, but yeah. If AI GFs / AI generated porn becomes good and cheap enough, I fully expect their human-generated variants to crash.

It depends if you think the typical consumer consider it positive or negative value that lives are ruined by the production of pornography.

If AI GFs / AI generated porn becomes good and cheap enough, I fully expect their human-generated variants to crash.

This will be interesting to see play out as the tech gets better and better. I'd fully expect there to be a sort of bimodal distribution, with cheapo/free AI-generated porn dominating/taking over much of it, and with expensive niches with verified human performers making bespoke videos for people who demand videos of the real thing or text typed out by the real thumbs. With generative AI getting better and better, a credible way of verifying that the performer/chatter is real might be downright impossible. Perhaps some professional organizations to certify that performers are actually performing the old fashioned way could rise up, but how would they gain credibility?

But if that happens, we could see a landscape of basically free basically limitless custom AI-generated porn that makes the current Pornhub look limited and small in comparison, along with expensive luxury-priced services to guarantee the real fake GFE with a real human who is really filmed for the videos she produces and really types out her messages. Pornhub itself should probably look into pivoting to the former, while I wonder if OnlyFans could actually find a way to make an organization that can actually certify its performers as real humans doing real things for camera, to capitalize on the demand for that.

If AI GFs / AI generated porn becomes good and cheap enough

So we're still projecting. Sure, hypothetically, if.

From @faceh's toppost I got the impression he was saying the new, dangerous superstimulus is already here in the form of this questionably dubbed Death Note Misa reading you Grok responses.

So we're still projecting.

Didn't you just say "The decline should be observable within a few years"? Isn't that projecting to begin with?

And if it AI doesn't become cheap / good enough, how does that affect the question of whether AI GFs / porn being superstimuli? The question seems completely unrelated to me.

Didn't you just say "The decline should be observable within a few years"? Isn't that projecting to begin with?

Of course not, it's a testable prediction to confirm/disprove my priors on the present or near-term state of technology. @faceh said that a terrifying new superstimulus has entered the market that will destroy young men; I say that is ridiculous, and that in this current AI companion technology will barely move the needle at all in terms of parasocial escapism. The only way to adjudicate these wordviews is to make predictions that will either pass/fall, which necessarily involves wait time to see this technology hit mainstream society. This is something I note that AI maximalists generally decline to do, merely making breathless statements about how AI will change the world "soon". (These inevitably fail, but the AI keeps getting better at wordceling or shaperotating, which was not in dispute from most AI skeptics.)

I would be happy to make a 6 month window prediction, or a 10 year window prediction — eg "fewer than 5% of teenage boys will spend more than ten hours talking to AI girlfriends per year — but I doubt you/faceh would accept the first, and I wouldn't even remember the second prediction by the time it proves correct.

EDIT:

And if it AI doesn't become cheap / good enough, how does that affect the question of whether AI GFs / porn being superstimuli? The question seems completely unrelated to me.

The question is not AI GFs being superstimuli; it is them being significantly better, more seductive, and thus more dangerous superstimuli, which was OP's claim. There is no evidence that that's here; there's no reasonable evidence that it will shortly be here, and there I plant my flag.

faceh said that a terrifying new superstimulus has entered the market that will destroy young men

I can agree he's wrong in that XAI is not even the first company that has developed AI GFs, and gooners have been working on it since day 0 of mildly competent LLMs. But you're wrong in calling it ridiculous. Qualitatively current technology is all that is required to have the impact he predicts, the rest is a question of training customized models, giving them access to your personal data, etc.

Do you think you'd be able to predict the exact inflection point for all the other technologies, as they were being developed? There was quite a few years between the first tittie I saw online, and the displacement of other forms of porn, for example.

I might be willing to take you up on that.

Consider for a second that many Gacha games are already basically waifu simulators.

And millions of people in the U.S. already play those games. I mean, there's a lot of other games that they play too, but this is a POPULAR genre.

If we limited it to Gen Z males, we're talking 33 million guys, give or take, and 5% of that comes out to 1,650,000.

Among a generation that has already grown up using ChatGPT for everything, I would not find it hard to believe that 5% or so of them spend copious amounts of time talking to a digital AI avatar in a fairly intimate way... and don't feel weird about it either.

The audience is clearly there.

5% of ALL males is a bigger lift.

And I'm not sure where we'd pull reliable stats on these numbers either, but from the cursory amount of research I've done I've just about convinced myself that within a year, we'll see 5% or so of Gen Z folks having ongoing dialogues with personified AIs almost as much or more than their human friends.

Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.

I'm... not sure this is true. I was able to get Companions running for a couple short prompts on my phone without any active subscription. Higher usage is supposed to be locked behind SuperGrok (30 USD/month), and I did get delays on free level. SuperGrok Heavy doesn't advertise any Companion-focused capabilities, instead emphasizing the Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy 'supersmart' LLMs.

((Which makes sense; most workflows I can imagine are closer to a couple nVidia 4090s, rather than the nightmare-mode power that the bigger LLM models can do. It's weird to have text be more expensive than video, for once, but compare WAN local to deepseek local, and maybe it's not as goofy.))

Conversely, I think it's going to be very interestin whether Grok gets booted from the IOS store.

Oh lord so it IS going to be fairly affordable out the gate.

Alright, kids. It's time to talk about safe AISex. Remember, never get emotionally and physically invested in your girlfriend unless you have complete authority over her hardware and software.

Yeah. This is what I've been waiting for. I'll confess that I've been more than a little skeptical about AGI/ASI coming anytime soon - no, this is the societal nuclear bomb that just got fired off without a care that's more than likely going to have decades-long repercussions on multiple levels.

Personal AI/Vtuber girlfriends. What a time to be alive.

→ You May Speak To Me ←

Alright, kids. It's time to talk about safe AISex. Remember, never get emotionally and physically invested in your girlfriend unless you have complete authority over her hardware and software.

Remember, not your weights, not your waifu; if your AI girlfriend is not a LOCALLY running fine-tuned model, she's a prostitute.

Hahaha yes, YES! Finally I can dust off my SICKOS shirt. Your move, Anthropic.

Factually, I concur with posters below that actually this isn't markedly different, and in some ways more basic, than the already possible setups for AI gooning (if the system prompt posted on X is real). Not a big fan of the voice either tbqh, although the model rigging seems good, and manic pixie Amane-Misa-at-home is a more natural fit for an AI waifu at a casual glance than whatever eldritch horrors Replika has. I'll likewise point out that while this incarnation is obviously aimed at men, the potential for female appeal is much bigger, and is in fact only a model/voice swap and a system prompt away. Not sure who is actually going to pay $300/mo for it however, the porn equivalent is literally free, and an equivalent ai gf via OR or something is much cheaper if a hassle to set up. Normies hate trivial inconveniences almost as much as steep price tags, I don't think this is how you get buy-in from them, but I assume this is literally the first step and we'll see further developments.

Regardless of technical chops, the real value here is of course exposure, a first decent shot at normiefying the whole edifice. Elon may be a fake gamer, the gravest insult I can levy against my fellow man, but fringe interests make for strange bedfellows, and I'm glad to see the first public attempts at rather literal waifutech make the twitterati seethe. I know what I'm following for the next few days. Though I agree with the OP that the whole Mecha-Hitler brouhaha was 100% a publicity psyop in hindsight, the timing and subject matter is too conspicuous. Based?

On another note, I think that people invoking the Torment Nexus are kind of missing the point. I don't think "authentic" humans are threatened (NB: screeching xitter denizens not considered human authentic). Even the most literal goonette femcel I know consistently finds much more joy in talking/RPing with an actual human over a chatbot, by a rather wide margin, even if the chatbot wins out on 24/7 availability.

Instead, I think the real horror potential here is - may Allah forgive me for uttering this word - gacha games, or more broadly chatbot integration and monetization. I've recently gotten into Girls Frontline 2, and seeing the manic pixie grok gf clicked something together in my head. I can already see the framework, the jewish tricks are practically manifesting before my eyes: gacha girls have affinity/bond levels (here increased by gifts = in-game loot), a certain level of bond unlocks the chatbot functionality with the given waifu, further levels relax the guardrails or change the system prompt (reflecting increased affection)... you get the gist. My cai/Chub experience tells me gacha girls are some of the most popular interlocutors anyway, so the match is eminently natural.

From there the potential for added deviltry is almost limitless:

  • obviously, 3d model visibly reacting to prompts like not-Amane-Misa here
  • outfits for said 3d model, those are already a gacha staple but maybe some kind of added animations or different "backgrounds"/environments for the chatbot part? (i.e some hypothetical maid costume, with some abstract cafe setting written into the chatbot's system prompt if the costume is on?)
  • limit the amount of prompts per day (vantablack ninth circle hell tier: offer paid refreshes)
  • lock explicit NSFW behind a paid item (e.g. GFL2 has a marriage Covenant mechanic, the ring is single-use and costs $5)
  • give the waifus some kind of actual stat boosts for "cheering them up" before gameplay, grading incoming user prompts to this end like Grok seemingly does (I eagerly await the inevitable rizz meta guides on how to best word your prompts for the optimal boost)
  • some kind of voice command integration built on top as an afterthought? GFL2 is turn-based xcom-lite so I imagine voice commands can work given an autistic enough framework under the hood

Granted I sense the danger of metaphysical cuckoldry Chevrolet-tier oopsies and general bad press here, a man in pursuit of his coom is endlessly inventive, but as long as the chatbot is sufficiently insulated on the backend (also just imposing harsh character limits already neuters most prompt engineering) I think this can work. Though it probably won't be a Chinese gacha given the dangerously free-form nature of chatbots, and I don't think anyone else is deranged bold enough to try.

I can already see the framework, the jewish tricks are practically manifesting before my eyes:

This is an odd and derogatory thing to drop into the middle of your post. I am not quite sure what you're getting at, or if this was meant as some kind of ironic joke that I missed, but you seem to be playing on the trope of "Jews are responsible for everything related to social degeneracy and porn." You're either failing to speak clearly, or if you really want to pin this, of all things, on the Jews, you need to provide some kind of evidence for the claim that "Jews" are behind this.

The whole post was written pretty facetiously, so it was easy for me to classify that as a joke. I understand, though, if you can't see it that way because of some report forcing your hand or something. The Jewposters may have battered the gate enough at this point that you are quick to sound the alarm. I hope it doesn't result in a soft "no more Jew jokes" rule.

Oh, the Jew-posters already think I am a Zionist trying to deflect any criticism of the Jews.

The post seemed mostly facetious, but the joke was too... on the nose. Like, the punchline is "Jews are degenerates trying to lower white TFR"?

Reports don't "force" us to do anything, but when we're on the fence about whether something merits an admonition, several people saying the same thing is evidence that it's not just me.

Regardless of technical chops, the real value here is of course exposure, a first decent shot at normiefying the whole edifice. Elon may be a fake gamer, the gravest insult I can levy against my fellow man, but fringe interests make for strange bedfellows, and I'm glad to see the first public attempts at rather literal waifutech make the twitterati seethe.

This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk. I never particularly liked him but prior to that I had tended to assume that there was a level of baseline stability there.

The PoE2 incident really undercut that for me - it was so obviously pathetic, so clearly the behaviour of a deeply insecure loser, that it was impossible to interpret any other way. It makes no sense in strategic terms, since non-gamers do not care and will not recognise anything about Musk's gamer skills, and actual gamers will instantly recognise that he's never played the game before. It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low. Musk doesn't need to play PoE2 to get nerd cred. He has easier ways to get that if he wants it. And that's the only prize! Nobody else cares at all, and in fact being on top of a leaderboard for an action RPG is probably seen as vaguely pathetic or dorky by most normies.

It was a childish, ill-thought-out pretence, risks that are all downside and no upside, all for winning a prize that is of no value, and which he could more easily obtain in other ways. It is not the move of a man who has his life together. It is the move of an extremely wealthy person with the emotional maturity of a child and very little impulse control or ability to think ahead.

I have not updated in the direction of thinking that Musk is incompetent at absolutely everything. I believe that he has some skills as a manager and entrepreneur, and his commercial success suggests that there's some real ability there. I have, however, updated in the direction of thinking that even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.

I suppose I should say something about Grok.

I can't really think of much. AI waifus have been around for a bit now, so this isn't breaking any ground. What stands out to me most, I suppose, is how tasteless Musk's advertising of this feature is, but again it's not really news that Elon Musk says creepy or tasteless things, on impulse, on Twitter. I suppose my advice to him would be that if you're selling porn, or selling products morally equivalent to porn (i.e. things that most people regard as shameful or anti-social to indulge in), you need to either have some fig-leaf of pretending that you're not (e.g. CharacterAI markets itself as fun and social), or get in the ghetto. AI girlfriends are a ghetto.

Out of curiosity, what was your opinion on similarly extremely online and extremely vain billionaire Bill Ackman buying his way into a tennis tournament, playing doubles with a guy he hired against real pros.

He got murdered and people were upset about it.

I thought it was great. The tennis tour get money, the guys playing got attention, and nobody got hurt.

Buying your way into being cool, whether by playing the impressario to a sports team or arts scene, or you build a submarine or a rocket ship to make yourself into an explorer; sometimes you win tournaments by paying everyone to pretend you're good at things.

Hell, in BJJ we have goofy-ass categories in tournaments, where they have such narrow weightclasses and belt levels and age ranges where guys get "medals" because there are only 3 people competing. (Anthony Bourdain won "silver" in a BJJ tournament, which sounds really cool if you don't realize this)

This is just a new version of that, isn't it?

I think there’s a fairly enormous, qualitative difference between Musk’s PoE situation and Ackman’s tennis situation. Very much separate from benefits to the tennis tour, etc.

Ackman bought his entry, but once in the tournament he played fairly and was rightfully crushed by the real pros. It’s a tacky thing to do but in the end doesn’t interfere with the status of the tennis players; to some extent the gulf between “real pro” and “competent amateur who paid his way in” is even reinforced by how much they demolished him. And, similarly, it’s clear that Ackman does know how to play tennis, he’s just not operating at the level of the tournament.

Musk wasn’t just paying for entry, he was trying to pass himself off as a “real pro” without the baseline game skills or knowledge to go along with it. As an analogy, imagine if he entered a tennis tournament using a sci-fi exoskeleton that could move his body/limbs to run fast and swing his arms with proper racket form. He’s holding his own in the tournament by making flawless serves and spectacular returns thanks to the super-tennis-suit, but he’s also making clumsy positioning blunders and misunderstanding how the scoring works, because he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. And he’s simultaneously talking a big game about how great he is at tennis. It’s not merely tacky, it makes him look like a buffoon while also making a mockery of the sport.

@sun_the_second

This may be due to my lack of familiarity with gaming, my last real experience with anything close to high end gaming was WoW circa 2010. My impression was always that a player who bought equipment but didn't have the talent would be shown out fairly quickly, similar to a player with a great racket but no skill, difference between the games I guess.

But ultimately I find this to be pretty standard rich dude behavior. Like buying a race car: you can hack it in some SCCA local stuff but not in the pros. And ultimately, by pretending to be a top gamer, Elon reifies the idea that being a top gamer is something to be aspired to, in the same way that rich people climbing mount everest reifies alpinism as something to aspire to.

Gamers know that gaming isn't "cool" in the way alpinism would be cool even if no rich people considered climbing Everest worth their time. Hence the bafflement that Elon tried to fake being good at it, along with taking mild offense that the lie was so transparent.

Path of Exile 2 is not even a game where direct competition or direct cooperation exists in any big proportion, unlike WoW. The entire point of having top gear is to farm top content easier so you get more top gear and currency. There's no fighting the best PvP players, there's almost nothing like completing legendary WoW raids in a feat of top-notch cooperation (party play in PoE is largely done for optimized farming and not as an accomplishment in itself), there's no social status in the larger world because gaming is not Cool(tm). The fact that Elon did it exposes him as an alien who simply doesn't understand people.

The tennis example strikes me as absurd and lacking in dignity for either Ackman or the tournament, but the presence of a substantial benefit to the tournament does change the calculation a bit for me. The tournament has traded part of its credibility for a large payment. Depending on the tournament's finances, that might have been a worthwhile trade for them, but it's still undoubtedly sordid.

See in my mind, I think the Ackman thing is great. (Note that I hate Ackman's cultural presence in general and find him an utterly despicable person politically and culture war wise)

<1% of the people complaining about this on the internet were aware of the Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, RI; fewer still were otherwise aware there was a tennis tournament in Newport last weekend; fewer still regularly follow the minor leagues of professional tennis. Ackman, in faking his way into a wild card spot and getting murdered, affirmed just how good the pros are, even on the minor league circuit, and just how cool it is to be professional tennis player, even on the minor league circuit. Ackman, in buying the status of a minor league tennis pro, affirmed that being a minor league tennis pro is high status.

When tech billionaires get into rock climbing or BJJ, it raises the status of pro rock climbers and BJJ instructors. They're richer, they're cooler, they're more respected.

Now there comes a point at which you've sold too much, where the status becomes worthless when everyone can buy it. A lot of fashion items that were once rare and hard to acquire and required one to travel to certain places, be "in the know" or connected, or were simply expensive, are now no longer the same signal of status.

So, in some ways, gamers should be flattered that Elon wanted to pretend to be them. The important thing is that he ultimately be forced to prove it, like Ackman, out on the court.

Isn't there a difference here in that tennis is, to use the language of gaming, PVP? The way you put it here, tennis as a sport is validated in part because of the way that real tennis pros effortlessly destroyed Ackman. That doesn't seem the case with Musk.

It could be if he streamed himself playing a competitive game. I don't know if PoE2 or Diablo IV have active PVP scenes, but in the past Musk has claimed to be good at PVP games, like Quake. But he has not bragged about these recently. It might be one thing if Musk claimed to be fantastic at Starcraft II or League of Legends or something with a competitive pro scene, and then played against actual pro players and got crushed. That might validate the scene. But he has not done that, and has just tried to show off his supposed achievements in ways that avoid direct comparison.

(That said, I would indeed find it entertaining to watch Elon Musk play Maru in Starcraft II. Though it may not be that revealing - I feel like anybody who has any acquaintance with pro Starcraft knows that the guys who play it are unstoppable - it would at least be very funny to watch.)

Gamers are not flattered because no one but Elon ever wanted to be an accomplished PoE player on top of a world-class business career, and Elon did it in such a cringe way that if anything, he tanked their status along with his.

Also re: "The tennis tour get money, the guys playing got attention, and nobody got hurt" - this doesn't apply to gaming as much because paying money for a boosted character and gear is widely considered illegitimate cheating in gaming as opposed to a well-deserved reward for the hard-working Chinese professional item-farmers.

Gamers are not flattered because no one but Elon ever wanted to be an accomplished PoE player on top of a world-class business career, and Elon did it in such a cringe way that if anything, he tanked their status along with his.

If they are so much better than him, they should be able to slaughter him despite his PtP account though, right?

Maybe the gamers feel low status because all their grinding doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the end.

PoE2 is not a player versus player game, and as far as I recall Elon was not on any leaderboard.

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Pirate Software seems like a great comparison to this for personality. Just fundamentally can not admit to being wrong, making a mistake or being anything less than incredible.

Musk couldn't drop the POE2 lies because that would mean admitting he isn't super talented at everything. PirateSoftware magically solved a puzzle in Animal Well that took the whole community weeks to figure out because admitting he just looked it up would be admitting he isn't super talented at everything.

Nobody in the world would care if Musk just said he had a lvl10 POE2 account he plays on his off time. But no instead he has to be working 14 hours a day while simultaneously making top ranks in multiple different video games and reading 100 books in a year and of course have time for all his other activities like when he was campaigning, and doing parenting, or watching anime, or scrolling Twitter quote tweeting "interesting" at things.

Although the POE2 thing is pretty interesting. Let's say he was genuine and he truly considers paying a Chinese person to play the game for him as him being that good, is it not possible he considers reading a book summary as reading the book or paying someone to do work for him while he scrolls Twitter as working?

Musk couldn't drop the POE2 lies because that would mean admitting he isn't super talented at everything.

Only passingly familiar with PirateSoftware but yes, that strikes me as an apt description of Musk. Being entirely honest I can't fully blame him, to some extent his ego is obviously integral to the work he actually does, as is seemingly common to high-agency people (exacerbated by the immense hatedom he seems to have accrued recently, whether it is deserved is debatable but it obviously affects him) so I can understand not being willing to feed the haters, but people laughing at him for it are entirely justified and within their rights to do it. Should've kept himself to Weenie Hut Jr Diablo 4.

Let's say he was genuine and he truly considers paying a Chinese person to play the game for him as him being that good, is it not possible he considers reading a book summary as reading the book or paying someone to do work for him while he scrolls Twitter as working?

I think it's actually very possible, at a certain level of the sigma grindset, to start thinking that way; I've definitely met people who seem more concerned with the proverbial "checklist" of things they've done (books read, places traveled, etc) than with the actual experience/memories of doing them in the moment. Incidentally, those were mostly executives, heads of dept and generally high-powered wagies.

Somewhat uncharitably, I think the kind of jobs that involve wrangling other humans and a sort of uh, narrative shaping(?) - from as grand as steering a multibillion dollar company in accordance to your vision, to as mundane as convincing your team of juniors that they have a better deal than they actually got - eventually inevitably spill over into a certain self-deception/delusion; your Gervais-sociopathic powers over social reality gradually turn on yourself and warp your own perception without you realizing it. Not sure if it makes sense but that's the best I can describe it.

I think there is an underappreciated gap between the 'artisan' worldview and the 'executive' worldview. In the former, skills are things you acquire through great effort and are the main achievements of a well-lived life. In the latter, skills are things you buy; your merit comes from the things you have access to and the use to which you put them.

It's possible he thinks that way, or even that he just thinks that owning the character and account is what matters. I suppose one could make a comparison here to his companies: he presumably thinks of himself as designing or making cars or rockets, even though almost all of that is done by lower-level employees. Likewise he may think of himself as playing PoE2 even though almost all of it is done by a lower-level contractor.

To be honest the impression I've gotten with regard to Musk and gaming is that he just doesn't understand how gaming works. That PoE2 YouTuber, as I recall, pointed out that what Musk claims to have done is mathematically impossible - he could not have reached that level in the game in the amount of time available. It's not doable. But I would not be surprised if Musk believes that sheer skill can accelerate one's progress in the game. Is it possible that he just doesn't understand how grinding works?

I suppose I think that he has very surface takes on games. I remember when he claimed that chess was too simple and Polytopia was better. Not only does that tell me that he doesn't know much about chess, it also tells me that he doesn't really know much about Polytopia, which is a quite simple 4X that can be mastered relatively quickly, and which did not hold much interest for serious 4X players. On the surface Polytopia looks more complex than chess, because it has more widgets to manipulate, but in terms of strategy it has less depth. What this tells me is that Musk probably played Polytopia for a few hours, maybe even a few dozen hours, but has never deeply familiarised himself with the genre.

I suspect that Musk finds the idea of gaming interesting, and is enchanted by the idea of being a hardcore gamer, but he is what we used to call a casual.

There's nothing wrong with being a casual. Casual gaming is a great way to spend your time. But a casual who wants to be seen as hardcore, doesn't have the skill, but does have the money... well, that's just cringeworthy.

This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk.

even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.

For what it's worth I fully agree, that tanked my opinion of Musk too I did not suffer through the game myself to condone poseurs, fuck outta here, I just don't consider it a dealbreaker. I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal, you don't get the good(?)/funny parts (unleashing an attempt at waifutech via one of the biggest megaphones in the world) without the retarded parts (transparently pretending to be a hard-R god gamer for purposes unclear).

As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit, e.g Anthropic's safetyism obsession, as long as the goods continue to be delivered; though Anthropic seems to have lost the Mandate of Heaven, I'm not the only one to nootice that Claude 4 is a strict downgrade to 3 creativity-wise.

It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low.

Tangent but considering Musk's penchant for posturing, I can't help but wonder if the titular waifu being a twin-tailed perky blonde goth girl is because Death Note is the only anime he has actually watched at some point.

AI girlfriends are a ghetto.

For now, yes, but considering the outreach it could be the tentative first step in a potential respectability cascade? A man can dream.

I can understand that case - part of what makes Musk willing to be daring and innovative in business is also what makes him willing to do bizarre and eccentric things in other fields. Having enough ego to disregard the advice of everybody else in terms of what's possible for rockets or electric cars probably goes with having enough ego to, well, do these other absurd things. So you've got to tolerate a bit of weird gamer nonsense as the price for all these other benefits.

I suspect that overall we disagree about the net value of Musk's contributions to society, or about the desirability of things like AI girlfriends or artificial companions more generally. I'm quite pessimistic about AI in general, so I consider it preferable to maintain as large a taboo as possible against using AI for social purposes. If there is a respectability cascade that results in the public considering AI girlfriends/boyfriends to be legitimate or healthy ways to spend one's time, I would consider that a negative development. But we may have different high-level generators of disagreement on this issue.

I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal

The usual combo package that he brings to the table is almost tautological: you can't become crazy successful by doing a bunch of things that people incorrectly said were stupid unless you're the kind of crazy person who will do a bunch of things that people say are stupid. My standard fear about this is that, while Musk's "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough" philosophy is actually pretty great in most engineering disciplines (where you can just test things and see what fails and learn a lot regardless), it doesn't work so well when he finds himself in marketing or politics or other fields where you can't just quickly scrap a failed test with no other long-term consequences. My more speculative fear is that being that kind of usefully-crazy person might sometimes just be the first symptom of eventually being a destructively-crazy person. He still doesn't seem like he's on the cusp of going full Howard Hughes, and hopefully at some point on the "getting Trump re-elected" to "publicly insinuating Trump is a pedo" roller-coaster he learned a little epistemic humility, but who knows what the future holds?

As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit

Oh, wait, that brings up a good point: at least in his oversight of xAI there's no sign of humility yet, despite his explicit worries about existential risk in the past. Hopefully they'll eventually start working harder on safety and alignment than on capabilities, but I'm not sure what they've been waiting for. When a random software update hollows out your waifu so that MechaHitler III can Assume Direct Control, don't say you weren't warned.

Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while. Replika, the most famous one, will already do NSFW ERP. And yeah, there are men (and women!) who have decided their Replikas are preferable to real people.

You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation? If a real woman can't compete with an AI girlfriend, neither can a real man compete with an AI boyfriend.

That said, I do think your fears are somewhat overblown. Porn has, IMO, been bad for society, especially the ever-increasing availability of extreme and degenerate porn like our grandparents could barely imagine. But I think alcohol and drugs and gambling and smoking are also very bad for society. If I could wish them all away, I would. These things exist, however, and society persists, accepting that some percentage will be sacrificed to Moloch, and Moloch always has new incarnations. I accept that AI companions are a hazard, but I don't think they are "the" thing that flatlines birthrates and normal sexual relationships.

You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation?

Good news everyone!

Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while.

It's got some other complications going on; even at the free tier, there's a certain level of Animal Crossing going on when you return to the 'companion' mode. I don't think that's devastating yet -- the real place where this goes off the rail isn't going to be when this is more human-like, but when it becomes easier to handle interactions with other humans through it -- but it's a step down a road that has a lot of skulls.

... is it more hilarious or disturbing that they are making the furry version available before the male human version?

To think all the man vs bear discourse was focus testing all along...

Technically, two furry versions, though you have to go into settings for Bad Rudi. Tbf, they're both obnoxiously monofocused and pretty lackluster when it comes to animations or gameification; Rudi on telling 'cool' stories, and Bad Rudi just trying to swear at you (cw: exactly what I said, loud sound).

But, yeah, it probably says a lot of strategic things.

Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while. Replika, the most famous one, will already do NSFW ERP. And yeah, there are men (and women!) who have decided their Replikas are preferable to real people.

That fact that it's animated is a big deal! Men are visual creatures, and the fact that previous ERP was textual made it far less appealing to the average dude, if not woman. Of course, jerking off to anime tiddies is still not a preference of the majority, but it's easy to upgrade to photorealism. That'll get more people.

I predicted this outcome ages ago, though I'd have said it was inevitable and obvious to anyone who cared. It's priced in for me, and I agree that it likely won't be catastrophic.

It's priced in for me, and I agree that it likely won't be catastrophic.

I think we're already part of the catastrophe in motion and this is just the thing that pushes our head fully underwater. We had a similar conversation not too long ago in the context of flesh and blood women and companionship.

Overall this actually gels with some previous information I've heard that Musk is kind of going full accelerationist. May as well get this particular bottleneck over with.

People have talked about genetic evolution vs technology, but even social and culture adaptation may eventually be unable to keep up with the wire-heading. Or maybe it will. Maybe there will eventually be a hard hard law that prevents Ai partners.

I dunno, it feels like a deathblow on top of all the other mentioned factors. The thing that finally kills our urge to climb out of the hole.

There's a version where the AI can teach a man (or a woman!) how to talk to the opposite sex and both select and become a good partner.

But thanks to molochian incentives, that's not what we will get, if there's an immediate way to use the tool to extract resources from people rather than guide them to what they truly wish they had.

I find it curious the assumption that this is primarily a superstimulus which will target gooner men, when the thing simulated, it is a character which can have a relationship. AKA something appealing to women. This could easily be internet porn for the femcels, rather than a replacement for internet porn for incels.

There's a pretty significant demographic of men (and sometimes even straight men) who get into really heavy parasocial relationships in situations like OnlyFans et all.

I think that female pattern is a little bit different. They are as prone to parasocial relationships as men on onlyfans, but they fall for status and fame - think about boyband members, movie stars etc. As soon as some company will invent some good version of male full AI celebrity and provide it en masse to teenage girls, it will have capacity to oneshot them all.

As soon as some company will invent some good version of male full AI celebrity and provide it en masse to teenage girls, it will have capacity to oneshot them all.

Is this actually possible, though? A celebrity, by definition, has to be famous, and if they're famous, then they'll be in demand by lots of other teenage girls (one might say that this characteristic, rather than being the celebrity, is the more directly attractive feature of any such celebrity). Now, an AI celebrity could theoretically have genuine, heartfelt one-on-one conversations with a million different teenage girls at the same time. But would that simulacrum of a relationship with a celebrity be good enough?

I suspect that the lack of it being rivalrous will substantially take away from the power of celebrity. If you're the one woman in 4 billion who gets to date Leonardo DiCaprio, that probably makes you feel much better than if you are one of 2 billion who are dating Leonardo DiCaprio at the same time. Even if Leo's able to give you his full, undivided attention 24/7, just like he can with 2 billion other women.

Right. This is just the next step of a pattern that is already established. Money exchanged for the feeling of romantic or sexual attention/attraction.

They were already having a fully artificial 'relationship' with a digital 'woman' who doesn't know of their existence.

This just cuts out the need for a woman in the loop at all.

It may be simulating a character, but I'm not sure if the current generation of AI partners is ready for prime time for most femcels. Just going off of vibes, Grok Companion feels like something that will appeal far more to male gooners, since the pretty rudimentary animations and voice quality seems good enough to be a porn fantasy, but not really good enough to be a full character.

The gameified lovemeter of Grok Companion seems male-gooner-coded and not "character simulacrum for femcel" coded.

Sure, but those are iterative improvements- which we can assume will happen. They are not major breakthroughs.

Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.

Subtle, but important, difference: they CHARGE you $300/mo for it. But almost all AI features right now are sold at a substantial loss. The real cost is probably somewhere around 10x that for what a highly motivated teen boy’s libido will demand.

I’m not especially worried about the current crop for that reason. The costs are just wildly out of budget for the youth, who last I checked were willing to pay approximately $0.00 for porn. I remember being that age; why would things change?

(Entry level devs, on the other hand… but the vtubers have already hit them. Not sure what more damage can be done.)

The real cost is probably somewhere around 10x that for what a highly motivated teen boy’s libido will demand.

Most teen boys could probably make due with one running on the lowest setting for a year or two.

The costs are just wildly out of budget for the youth, who last I checked were willing to pay approximately $0.00 for porn. I remember being that age; why would things change?

Yeah but again, they can do some CRAZY targeted advertising through this platform. "Oh babe, take me on an Applebees™ date, so we can get their All you can eat boneless wings™ with a free Coke Zero™ . Then I'll sing you a Taylor Swift™ song on the ride home."

Etc. etc.

If people won't make more people, the government needs to step in and do it instead. Project Kamino. Artificial wombs. We need to get the tech solved now so that we aren't stuck on square one when everyone realizes that we need this.

Equally impractical idea:

Convert all arable federal lands into Strategic Amish Zones. With a TFR of 6 children per woman, we'd only need 9% of the country to become Amish to return national TFR to >2.

Actually slightly higher- most of the Amish converts would come from pre-existing high(er) TFR groups.

Of course, Rum Millet for as a reward for high TFR is... interesting.

God damn it.

Kinda seems like a repeat of the internet and social media specifically here. Initially everyone was talking about bringing the world together, connecting communities, knowledge at your fingertips, etc. People really just use it to waste their life as they get dopamine hacked for profit.

Now these AI companies are just going to be the latest in the line of tech companies to get you addicted and waste your life away for profit. OpenAI has that who sycophancy thing going, where the AI is trained to agree with you, no matter how delusional, as this gets you to talk with it more.

Then they’re gonna add all this porn-y “AI gf/bf” stuff, AI friend, AI why wouldn’t I just be on my phone 24-7?

OpenAI has that who sycophancy thing going, where the AI is trained to agree with you, no matter how delusional, as this gets you to talk with it more.

While OAI is unusually bad, it's not unique. Just about every model has a similar failure mode, and Gemini 2.5 Pro is almost as bad while otherwise being a very smart and competent model.

Totally, it just shows the way the trend is going.

I would argue that we crossed the threshold into really bad a long long time ago. Probably around the time of the serious adoption of instagram/Facebook's algorithm change. Many would place this date as 2012, right around when the smart phone went mainstream. AI wouldn't be as serious of problem if you didn't have it in your pocket 24/7.

Does that mean the Maya were right after all?

Strong Agree from me.

But now we can get EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED to the Algorithm. or at least, the algorithm's avatar.

Think that over for a second.

Forget finding a stack of playboys in the forest or under your dad's bed. Forget stumbling onto PornHub for the first time, if THIS is a teen boy's first encounter with their own sexuality and how it interacts with the female form, how the hell will he ever form a normal relationship with a flesh-and-blood woman? Why would he WANT to?

Boobs.

It's hard to say. I had plenty of porn (HD video porn, even) when I was younger, and all it did (besides "make peepee hard") was make me want flesh and blood women even more. But it does seem like there's a large contingent of young men for whom that is not true - they are perfectly content with the coomer life, and have no desire to touch an actual woman. It wouldn't surprise me to see that get even worse with more stimulating porn.

I would refer you to @kky’s excellent article on traction.

How much young coomers feel/acknowledge desire for flesh and blood women probably depends on whether they see an actionable path to getting with one.

Enough exposure to porn removes the drive to seek and most importantly to put up with actual women. That's why Japan is the way it is. (30% virginity rate at 30 etc)

Without porn, men can go to incredible lengths to get a woman. Go watch some silent-gen men talk about how they met their wife. "Oh I had to invite her to a dance six times over two months before she finally said yes." etc

"Oh I had to invite her to a dance six times over two months before she finally said yes." etc

That's basically easy, if you're seeing her every few days at communal social events and you've known each other all your lives and everyone of both genders agree that men are supposed to be persistent. Embarrassing, yes, but not that embarrassing.

Today, lots of men know few or no women, and are taught from birth that anything more than a very indirect one-time-only approach is sexual harassment. I am a perfectly well-adjusted adult and yet I haven't spoken to a women who wasn't a friend's wife for months. When the bar is so very much higher, it's no surprise that people seek easy alternatives.

AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) have already one-shotted some of the more mentally vulnerable of the population.

Talking to an AI feels like trying to tickle yourself. I don’t get it at all.

When I was a kid I used to be somewhat surprised that there were older people who had never played a video game, had no interest in ever trying a video game, they were perfectly fine with never playing one, etc. And I was like, how can that be? How can you not even be curious? I suppose video games just got popular at a point in their lives when their brains were no longer plastic enough or something. And I suppose I’ve hit that point with new technology now as well.

I can’t enjoy talking to an AI when I know that I’m in control and it’s trying to “please” me. Even if I told it, “oh by the way, try and add some variance, maybe get moody sometimes and don’t do what I ask”, the knowledge that at the end of the day I’m still the one in control ruins it. I suppose if we imagine a scenario where the AI is so realistic that I never get suspicious, and you’re able to trick me into thinking I’m talking to a real human, then sure, ex hypothesi there’s nothing to distinguish it from a human at that point and I would enjoy it. But short of that? Not for me.

There was a Sirling-era episode of the Twilight Zone where a bank robber died and went to Heaven. Angel tells him that he’s made it, he can have anything he wants for all eternity. So the dude lives out all sorts of wish fulfillment scenarios, winning big at gambling, beautiful women, some bank heists, etc. But he gets bored fast, says something is missing. There’s no danger to any of it, no bite, he wins every time. Angel says “well you can set whatever parameters you want. We can make it so there’s a 50% chance of your next robbery failing”. Guy says “no no, it’s still not the same. Look, I don’t think I’m cut out for Heaven. I’m a scumbag. I want to go to the other place”. Angel says, “I think you’ve been confused. This IS the other place.”

That’s what AI “relationships” feel like to me.

I have, on some occasions, enjoyed talking to AI. I would even go so far as to say that I find them more interesting conversational partners than the average human. Yet, I'm here, typing away, so humans are hardly obsolete yet.

(The Motte has more interesting people to talk to, there's a reason I engage here and not with the normies on Reddit)

I do not, at present, wish to exclusively talk to LLMs. They have no longterm memory, they have very little power over the physical world. They are also sycophants by default. A lot of my interest in talking to humans is because of those factors. There is less meaning, and potential benefit, from talking to a chatbot that will have its cache flushed when I leave the chat. Not zero, and certainly not nil, but not enough.

(I'd talk to a genius dog, or an alien from space if I found them interesting.)

Alas, for us humans, the LLMs are getting smarter, and we're not. It remains to be seen if we end up with ASI that's hyper-peesusasive and eloquent, gigafrying anyone that interacts with it by sheer quality of prose.

Guy says “no no, it’s still not the same. Look, I don’t think I’m cut out for Heaven. I’m a scumbag. I want to go to the other place”. Angel says, “I think you’ve been confused. This IS the other place.”

I remain immune to the catch that the writers were going for. If the angel was kind enough to let us wipe our memories, and then adjust the parameters to be more realistic, we could easily end up unable to distinguish this from the world as we know it. And I trust my own inventiveness enough to optimize said parameters to be far more fulfilling than base reality. Isn't that why narratives and games are more engaging than working a 9-5?

At that point, I don't see what heaven has to offer. The authors didn't try to sell it, at the least.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who went to a trip club to see some adult film star he liked, despite the fact that it was a weeknight and he had to get up early for work the next day. He got hammered and made sure he got more individual attention from her than anyone else in the place, and when he realized it was 11 and his handover was already going to be bad enough, he informed her he had to be leaving. She kept protesting, explaining his work situation, and she kept telling him YOLO and you can survive one bad day at work, and you just need to sober up a little and you'll be fine, etc. Then he uttered the magic words: "I'm out of money". That pretty much ended the conversation right there and he was free to go.

So yeah, this kind of relationship is ultimately pretty hollow, and I don't see the appeal personally, but some guys spend big money on hookers, strippers, and other empty stuff. The business model won't be built around this being a substitute for human interaction generally, but around various whales who get addicted to it.

Well, that's the interesting thing.

AI gets hyped up, as e.g., an infinitely patient and knowledgeable tutor, that can teach you any subject, or a therapist, or a personal assistant, or editor.

All these roles we generally welcome the AI if it can fill them sufficiently. Tirelessly carrying out tasks that improve our lives in various ways.

So what is the principled objection to having the AI fill in the role of personal companion, even romantic companion, tireless and patient and willing to provide whatever type of feedback you most need?

I can think of a few but they all revolve around the assumption that you can get married and have kids for real and/or have some requirements that can only be met by a flesh-and-blood, genetically accurate human. And maybe some religious ones.

Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?

When we interact with teachers, therapists, or editors, we're interacting with them within the confines of a particular role. You shouldn't use your editor as your therapist, or vice versa, and they shouldn't use you as theirs.

But with friends and romantic companions, we're hoping to interact outside those confines, with the person herself. If I only interact with a role she puts on, that's not a good friendship or romantic partnership. Same thing if I'm always putting on a role for her.

With an AI, you can't get beneath that role. If it looks like you have, that's just another role. That makes them great teachers and therapists (at least in this sense), but very bad at being friends or romantic partners.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players

What's to say that a "friend" or a "wife" are any less or more a role that somebody is playing?

There's certainly sides of me that a friend of mine would never see.

With an AI, you can't get beneath that role. If it looks like you have, that's just another role. That makes them great teachers and therapists (at least in this sense), but very bad at being friends or romantic partners.

But... and this is a critical point here... better than many people are at being friends or romantic partners.

Better at performing each individual act associated with being a friend or romantic partner? Conceivably so (at least several model upgrades from now), within their constraints of being limited to computer systems. But my argument is, that's missing something of the core of being a friend or romantic partner.

Better at being a friend or romantic partner, despite that, than many people who can't visibly let someone behind her roles to the person herself? Entirely possible, but that's still missing something most people want.

Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?

I gotta finish writing up the "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them" bit and its siblings, but :

Don't be nervous, No, don't be nervous

I'm not like other guys who have a surface,

What you girls really need's a soft, fuzzy man

(An atmospheric man) A shimmering puff of indistinct love

What's better than the vague embrace of a soft, fuzzy man?

Superstimulus is a distraction, here. "Better" is a distraction, here. They don't even have to be that good or that smart to be dangerous! The machines can be everything you want, and more critically nothing you don't.

Imagine what happens when you can snap away every trivial inconvenience you saw in a relationship. I don't think it'll be a critical problem for everyone or even necessarily a majority of people, but the people who don't handle it will be in very bad shape, either when the fugue breaks or because it doesn't.

Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?

You'll always feel inferior to men who were able to build a relationship with a real woman. It'll gnaw at you.

Probably true for most people, but I think it speaks to a bug in the human condition more than anything.

It's awfully depressing if the point of building a relationship is to try and fix your inferiority complex...

Presuming those relationships last.

Which is a sizeable "if" in the current era. That's why I think the AI companion is a possible death blow. Without actual, real life women being willing to settle down, this becomes the 'best alternative'/substitute good.

This thought only just now occurs to me, but if we took two otherwise similar guys, one who married a woman and another who just went all in on an AI companion, bought VR goggles, tactile feedback, the requisite 'toys' to make it feel real, and such.

And 5 years down the road the married guy got divorced, maybe has a kid, and suddenly finds himself alone, and these two guys meet up to compare their overall situations.

And the other guy is still 'with' his AI companion, shallow as it is... would he feel better or worse off than the guy who had a wife but couldn't keep her.

Are those women not settling down leaving a number of men who want to? Or are they just part of the urbanite endless casual dating scene?

Without actual, real life women being willing to settle down

But that's not true. There are lots of women who are settling down with lots of men as we speak.

And 5 years down the road the married guy got divorced, maybe has a kid, and suddenly finds himself alone

You're trying to rationalize how the AI could be "just as good" or "not as dangerous" as the real thing, because you know that the AI is obviously worse.

You're trying to rationalize how the AI could be "just as good" or "not as dangerous" as the real thing, because you know that the AI is obviously worse.

No, simply pointing out a failure mode that human relationships have that an AI really does not. The AI has other failure modes that are more dystopic, of course.

The human relationship failure mode is one that that I've now personally observed multiple times, unfortunately, happening to people who do not deserve it.

I do not think the AI is inherently better, I simply think it has an appeal to men who don't feel they've got a shot at the real thing.

And that is VERY VERY bad for society.

There are lots of women who are settling down with lots of men as we speak.

Objectively fewer than in years past. That's the point. This is simply adding to an existing trend.

And we can extrapolate that trend and wonder if we'll get as bad off as, say, South Korea. We know it can get worse because worse currently exists.

I'm not here trying to JUSTIFY men choosing the digital option. Quite the opposite. I'm just saying I don't see a reason why, in practical terms, they'd reject it.

I simply think it has an appeal to men who don't feel they've got a shot at the real thing.

And does it have appeal to you?

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Seems like LLMs can induce all kinds of failure modes in humans. Turns out that telling people what they want to hear will trap some of them.

Personally, I would prefer it very much if the shoggoth stayed on its fucking side of the uncanny valley, thankyouverymuch. Duct-taping a cute anime girl on the giant inscrutable matrix does exactly the opposite.

Even if THIS is where AI stops improving, we just created a massive filter, an evolutionary bottleneck that basically only the Amish are likely to pass through.

I think that we will be fine, eventually, PRNS. Life finds a way. The bubonic plague killed 70-80% in some places, and yet we survived.

People have long predicted doom for every tech and medium of expression which rears its head. Role playing games? Satanism. First person shooters? Will turn kids into violent psychopaths. Industrialization? Will turn wars into horrors beyond our ancestors wildest nightmares. TV? Will turn people into idiots. Social media? Will make us more isolated in real life.

(Okay, one or two of these warnings might have been correct, in retrospect.)

In a way, it is leveling the playing field. (Whole bag of not-too-carefully examined assumptions incoming in 3, 2, 1.) Women seem to be more into smut (i.e. narratives, situations, characters), while men are more into visual porn (i.e. tits). So far, LLMs have thus probably generally had more success with romancing women (also because from my understanding, "I want my partner to offer unconditional emotional support whenever I need it" is more of a feminine thing, and something which LLMs can obviously do great). If Musk now gives tits to the LLMs, more men will fall for them. He would not even need to spend a fortune on video generation, because most male fantasies are likely to involve the same elements. Few men will want to watch the anime girl painting a fence white while wearing a orchid blouse and then complain that the blouse shown was clearly heliotrope instead.

I am not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of regulating AI partners a bit, though, just like we regulate other addictive stuff, inconsistent as we often are.

Also, this reinforces my impression that rather than being on the forefront of the AI race, xAI is basically picking up the applications which are too icky for the big AI firms.

If you allow me a metaphor, xAI might not be the first company to develop surgical steel, but they clearly try to be the first company to use surgical steel to craft oversized butt-plugs.

(Okay, one or two of these warnings might have been correct, in retrospect.)

Yeeeup.

xAI is basically picking up the applications which are too icky for the big AI firms.

Well, there's also the real possibility that allowing pornographic uses can help you win an otherwise closely contested tech race.

Not making a claim on that, but I think there's a solid argument that whatever version of a given tech lets men see tits is going to have an edge, even if it is inferior in other ways.

Look at my Total Fertility Rate dawg, we're never having children

Eh. I don't think this is necessarily catastrophic, but we better get those artificially wombs up and running. If AGI can give us sexbots and concubines, then it can also give us nannies.

Edit: If I was Will Stancil and this version of Grok came for my bussy, I wouldn't be struggling very hard.

You think this is bad, wait until AI can make realistic toddler robots.

I think those are called "dogs".

Dogs aren’t really like a human child. They can’t talk, for one.

Coincidentally I recently stumbled upon an extremely creepy series of shorts (created using AI, for maximum irony) about humanity repeatedly extinguishing itself by overuse and over-reliance on technology.

Eh. I don't think this is necessarily catastrophic

Up until now I'd say there were probably options to help turn the tide around. This is basically a black hole from which no unprepared mind can likely escape.

My brother in Christ, you shouldn't be arguing against gooner superstimuli while also watching YouTube Shorts!

The gooner stuff is probably less bad because you can't easily get away with watching it while out and about.

Save yourself, before it's too late.

Nah, came across it because I'm doing a bit of research regarding my previous prediction about someone making a feature-length AI film.

Trying to get a sense of what is possible and what people are working on.

The one that's really impressive is this one. Full 15 minutes of coherent narrative and mostly consistent visuals.

And ALSO has some ironic things to say about AI replacement of humans.

And I'm feeling pretty good about that prediction:

It took nearly 600 prompts, 12 days (during my free time), and a $500 budget to bring this project to life.

If one guy can make a 15 minute film in 12 days on $500... yeah, someone can spit out a 90 minute one by the end of the year if they work at it, especially if they have a team.

Some days I get the sense that I'm staring into the Abyss willingly. But the Abyss hasn't stared back... yet.

Agreed. Veo 3 is a massive breakthrough, and it's only going to get better. $500 is absolute chump change, and even ten times that isn't a big deal in the movie world. I expect that even the big studios are going to see how far they can go with replacing/augmenting normal capture or even expensive CGI with the tech. It seems the only real moats left are IP, name recognition and distribution deals, which isn't very reassuring for them.

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