Like ffs. A coworker made an AI powered story reading app for his, is using the kids as test subjects to test the quality of the app and has said that the AI app can get his kids to open up more to it than to him or his wife about their issues. Another coworker finds this interesting.
A third in another separate conversation admitted to going to a white supremacist, neo-nazi concert of some singer and when I said ‘he is a nazi’ she straight up said ‘naah he isn’t people are just making things up’. There is literal evidence of him sieg heiling.
I can’t anymore, people are just in full on psychosis mode and they just don’t see it. I’m giving up on them for real.
yeah I just don’t get why someone would want to have a conversation with a chatbot. Is it just comfort? There is no repercussion to sounding ignorant, or mean spirited, or depressed, etc. So I get why if you feel the need to chit chat something that can fundamentally not stonewall you could feel good, but you aren’t progressing in any form of real relationship, there is nothing on the other end that hears what you told it, its an empty enigma of information that will be spit out what you told it to some other person who finds its comforting to spew their thoughts into that void. Its also shit as an intermediary, even text leaves out basically every form of emotion, body language, tonality, etc. to socializing, why would you want your message to be tailored into something you didn’t come up with.
From what I’ve observed, it’s not always the same thing with every person. But for some people, it’s to help with loneliness. For some, it’s a supplementary thing. For some, they have traumas and such things where it’s hard to find anyone to talk to about it and they feel they can say it to the AI.
As for body language and such things, a lot of chat frontends allow you to set an avatar for the AI, so then it’s similar to talking to somebody on discord as the level of emoting goes. When putting it in that context, you could as well ask, what is fulfilling about texting a real person? Or talking to them on a forum?
My experience is, it’s not fulfilling in the same way that in-person interaction is even when you’re sure it’s a real person on the other end, but sometimes it’s all you’ve got.
I don’t think it’s a healthy thing to be depending on a chatbot, but part of the reason for that is because much of the time, people are depending on a black box corporation for the service. And I’ve seen up close times when people were burned by such a corporation. Like slapping filters on an AI and it suddenly acting differently and upsetting people for that reason.
OTOH, there are times talking to a chatbot has helped people process something and feel a bit better. So it’s complicated.
In a communist world, it’s likely none of us would feel any need to find comfort in an AI cause we’d have it from others. But capitalist alienation and isolation has created the conditions for chatbots to step in.