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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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