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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:
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.
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.
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.
Yeeeup.
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.
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