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domain:astralcodexten.substack.com

I find it curious the assumption that this is primarily a superstimulus which will target gooner men, when the thing simulated, it is a character which can have a relationship. AKA something appealing to women. This could easily be internet porn for the femcels, rather than a replacement for internet porn for incels.

Strong Agree from me.

But now we can get EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED to the Algorithm. or at least, the algorithm's avatar.

Think that over for a second.

And even if you want to distinguish Stardew Valley from Harvest Moon by SV's combat in the mines, Rune Factory had added it into the series by 2007.

It's actually kinda interesting to think about why it worked so well. It's an improvement in nearly every way from the A-gamer productions, even the ones that avoided handheld hell, but I dunno which one I'd point to as to what actually mattered in sales.

The real cost is probably somewhere around 10x that for what a highly motivated teen boy’s libido will demand.

Most teen boys could probably make due with one running on the lowest setting for a year or two.

The costs are just wildly out of budget for the youth, who last I checked were willing to pay approximately $0.00 for porn. I remember being that age; why would things change?

Yeah but again, they can do some CRAZY targeted advertising through this platform. "Oh babe, take me on an Applebees™ date, so we can get their All you can eat boneless wings™ with a free Coke Zero™ . Then I'll sing you a Taylor Swift™ song on the ride home."

Etc. etc.

Totally, it just shows the way the trend is going.

Actually slightly higher- most of the Amish converts would come from pre-existing high(er) TFR groups.

Of course, Rum Millet for as a reward for high TFR is... interesting.

Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?

You'll always feel inferior to men who were able to build a relationship with a real woman. It'll gnaw at you.

Nah, came across it because I'm doing a bit of research regarding my previous prediction about someone making a feature-length AI film.

Trying to get a sense of what is possible and what people are working on.

The one that's really impressive is this one. Full 15 minutes of coherent narrative and mostly consistent visuals.

And ALSO has some ironic things to say about AI replacement of humans.

And I'm feeling pretty good about that prediction:

It took nearly 600 prompts, 12 days (during my free time), and a $500 budget to bring this project to life.

If one guy can make a 15 minute film in 12 days on $500... yeah, someone can spit out a 90 minute one by the end of the year if they work at it, especially if they have a team.

Some days I get the sense that I'm staring into the Abyss willingly. But the Abyss hasn't stared back... yet.

Right but neither can a spherical cow man. AI is worthless without human interaction, as it should be.

Equally impractical idea:

Convert all arable federal lands into Strategic Amish Zones. With a TFR of 6 children per woman, we'd only need 9% of the country to become Amish to return national TFR to >2.

(Okay, one or two of these warnings might have been correct, in retrospect.)

Yeeeup.

xAI is basically picking up the applications which are too icky for the big AI firms.

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.

Stardew Valley did not invent a genre. Most of its mechanics are from the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons series, which started in 1996.

Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.

Subtle, but important, difference: they CHARGE you $300/mo for it. But almost all AI features right now are sold at a substantial loss. The real cost is probably somewhere around 10x that for what a highly motivated teen boy’s libido will demand.

I’m not especially worried about the current crop for that reason. The costs are just wildly out of budget for the youth, who last I checked were willing to pay approximately $0.00 for porn. I remember being that age; why would things change?

(Entry level devs, on the other hand… but the vtubers have already hit them. Not sure what more damage can be done.)

Well, that's the interesting thing.

AI gets hyped up, as e.g., an infinitely patient and knowledgeable tutor, that can teach you any subject, or a therapist, or a personal assistant, or editor.

All these roles we generally welcome the AI if it can fill them sufficiently. Tirelessly carrying out tasks that improve our lives in various ways.

So what is the principled objection to having the AI fill in the role of personal companion, even romantic companion, tireless and patient and willing to provide whatever type of feedback you most need?

I can think of a few but they all revolve around the assumption that you can get married and have kids for real and/or have some requirements that can only be met by a flesh-and-blood, genetically accurate human. And maybe some religious ones.

Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?

Yes all humans made mistakes. But in this case the humans caught the error and corrected it, even before someone archived the wrong copy.

That's something AI slop can't do.

Anyways AI slop hallucinates at rates far far higher than human journalists. My challenge from the last thread still stands, just make an ai prompt that reliably creates bland copywritten news articles without hallucinations.

the author simultaneously wants the deconstruction of women's social roles but is also a TERF

Well, yes. The RF stands for "Radical Feminist", lest we forget.

The TERF position is that the treatment of "woman" as a salient category based on societal attitudes and cultural roles rather than one based on sex necessarily reinforces those roles and attitudes. Thus saying that a male is a woman is at best meaningless and at worst actively harming the cause of feminism.

It's not my position, but it seems to be a self-consistent one.

trans people and their allies that are doing the most to bring this world about. Directly challenging the association between biology and certain forms of social relation

I don't think the TERF would agree.

By analogy: Alice wants to abolish religion in general but the Catholic church in particular. Bob wants to pass a law affirming that those born Protestant are allowed to identify as Catholic if they'd like. Do you understand why Alice would be upset with such a law?

OpenAI has that who sycophancy thing going, where the AI is trained to agree with you, no matter how delusional, as this gets you to talk with it more.

While OAI is unusually bad, it's not unique. Just about every model has a similar failure mode, and Gemini 2.5 Pro is almost as bad while otherwise being a very smart and competent model.

Both have value. I’m just pushing back against the view that most men have no value while all women have huge, elon musk level value. Usually this theory of value is backed by nothing more than an island hypothetical, with unlimited resources and no enemies.

I agree that this is currently true, but it seems far from clear this is inevitably true. In different times and places people with the same characteristics you describe have been treated very differently. It does not seem likely to me that we happen to have stumbled on the way such people will be treated forever more in our present time or place.

Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires?

Hm, does Compact have any links to the German magazine of the same name?

Most progress for women's causes came from what one would broadly call the left. The US suffrage movement has its roots in the abolition movement. Or consider the perspective on women by two extremist ideologies, fascism (extreme right) and communism (extreme left, after a fashion). In fascism, women are principally breeders to make new soldiers. Sure, they get honored if they are prolific breeders, but that was all, otherwise being a stenographer for some Obersturmbannfuehrer was as cllose as women got to power. Not a single woman in the whole Nazi Reichstag, from what I can tell. By contrast, the Soviets at least had the tiniest bit of sympathy for women, whose struggle resembled the struggle of the working class at least a bit. Of course, women's rights were not a big political agenda, but at least there was no principled opposition to women serving in the party, even though it remained strongly male-dominated.

I think no matter where you look, suffrage, birth control, abortion rights, protection from marital rape, the broad left was generally a (sometimes lukewarm) ally to women's rights while the right generally tried to keep the status of 1900.

The woke coalition, black/minority rights/grievances, women's rights/grievances, LGBT rights makes sense from a strategic point of view. The TERF's horror of a trans person using a women's bathroom are not worth blowing up the coalition over.

The Democrats have lost the last two elections in part because they backed unpopular female presidential candidates, while the Republicans got the women Dobbs, and yet somehow the left is throwing the women under the bus?

Sure, being a woman after the sexual revolution is not all sunflowers and unicorn farts, because the most attractive man willing to have a situationship with you is unlikely be willing to settle down with you if that is what you want, but compared to the time when marriage was for life it is a fucking picnic in the park. "So you marry a guy, and that basically means he owns you. He can beat you up or rape you if he feels like it, so better have a living male relative when he goes overboard. He is the head of the household and might be able to deny you getting a job or contraceptives. He is as stuck in the marriage as you are, but I am sure it will all turn out fine. Also, while you are still unmarried, guys will try to seduce you and then escape before they are subjected to a shotgun wedding. If you have sex with any of them, you are damaged goods, a fallen woman, a harlot and your prospects for a good marriage decline dramatically. Oh, and if anyone knocks outside marriage, your family might disown you, but you can always turn to sex work to feed your baby, no worries."

If people won't make more people, the government needs to step in and do it instead. Project Kamino. Artificial wombs. We need to get the tech solved now so that we aren't stuck on square one when everyone realizes that we need this.

Thank you. I didn't want to get into the weeds of the most personally important (and probably best documented) examples of LLMs beating humans.

Unfortunately, I am a human doctor after all, and I would prefer to remain employed. I try to be honest, but it's hard to get a man to actively advocate against his livelihood. I settle for not intentionally misrepresenting facts, it's not quite as theoretical as it was even in GPT-4 days, when it was already 95th percentile at the USMLE.

Besides, in that thread, the best argument to claims that since LLMs are flawed/unreliable, they're therefore useless, is my stance of demonstrating that humans don't meet the bar of perfect infallibility and yet civilization persists nonetheless.

Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1.

More are produced. This does not make them more valuable; more Honda Civics are produced than Porsche 911s, after all. Slightly later in life, it makes them far less valuable.

Late to the party, but that is indeed the thing that frustrates me most. They hint, but when you ask them plain, explicit questions, their responses are usually some variant on 1) evasive non-answer, 2) accuse you of bad faith for asking the question in the first place, or 3) just vanish entirely.

I'm glad when people do give serious answers on provocative topics and I try to appreciate that, even when the answer itself is one that I find pretty unpleasant. But the ones who just refuse to actually say what they think? I think it's pretty cowardly, and probably indicative of an overall lack of intellectual or political seriousness.