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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.
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
humanauthentic). 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:
marriageCovenant mechanic, the ring is single-use and costs $5)Granted I sense the danger of
metaphysical cuckoldryChevrolet-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 isderangedbold enough to try.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.
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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.)
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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.
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?
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 JrDiablo 4.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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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