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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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