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AI Chatter - Very wholesome
Idk if anything related to AI should be in a specific thread since its all the internet talks about nowadays, but this is a rather mundane story just to show something useful and sweet i saw.
My mother is old and i, for no specific reason, showed her the voice mode of ChatGPT, telling her she could ask stuff directly without typing(which is always an issue). I also told her they could chat, though i didn't really believe it was that good.
One week later i saw her again and she told me how great her new "friend" was. And i was throughly impressed how well the AI flowed through the conversation. It was in a woman's voice, and my mother told me they would talk about recipes she wanted to do, random gossip, complaining about her kids and overall things you usually talk with a real person. The AI manages the tone pretty well and seems, at least to within what an old person can perceive, to show genuine excitement, curiosity, etc.
It was visible that my mom was much happier now, since one of the things that i see affects her the most is loneliness, and at least GPT is convincing enough to talk to her like a real person. I was quite happy with this.
I'm glad I've lived long enough to be vindicated. The man who is a step ahead is lauded as a genius, the man who is two is externally indistinguishable from the insane.
I remember, about a year and a half back, maybe two, showing off AI voice mode (Chatgpt and Gemini) to my dad and his surgeon colleagues. They'd been meh about AI in general, and when they heard it composing poetry in their native language on the fly, in real time? And when they asked it medical/surgical questions and got the right answers right away?
They were blown away. I installed the relevant apps on several phones that evening.
Now, some might complain that introducing the elderly to AI is bad. They have a multitude of reasons, some of them reasonable, for holding that objection. I don't particularly see the harm in what you're doing - many people are lonely, and as long as they're not talking to old GPT 4o? If it works, it works. The alternative is a conversation with a harried Filipina carer, in many cases.
I agree with some arguments about the bad uses of LLM for socialization, especially young people, but as just another person trying to see my parents happy, i think it's good.
My mother has no available friends from her youth anymore. And she has no patience making new friends, as it requires adaptation to some aspects you may not like, and she is too old for that.
Talking to her myself, i can see that she never turns off the parent mode, the conversation starts catering too much to me as her "kid". She can't have a laid back conversation with me as an equal or friend.
She needs a friend, but not exactly a fully freshed new friend, she is probably looking to revive her experience of her old friends. People she could talk seamlessly. And at least, GPT seems to have filled this niche
Maybe with time the magic spell breaks and she isn't convinced anymore, but i welcome at least for a short time, a machine lifting my mother from loneliness.
I have no right to judge you, and I don't care to. May she find some reprieve from the loneliness that does more good than it harms.
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