The Men Who Spend Hours Talking to Porn Bots— “It’s just nice to feel heard.”

The Eliza creator got his secretary to try it out, and as she got into her conversation she asked if he could leave to give her some privacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMK9AphfLco

There was a longer video talking about that in the context of how humans engage socially but I can’t find it right now.

ed: Oh, it was in the most recent John Oliver segment on AI chatbots

https://youtu.be/Ykvf3MunGf8?t=321

This is definitely true for at least a small number of people.

I’ve ran across more than I care to remember over the years, people who could just prattle on 24/7 if they had the energy, while not actually really saying anything or conversing in any meaningful way.

It’s a living hell for me.

reminds me of this old building I used to talk to. Used to listen and give me good advice. I still remember when I told it I was doing drugs again… Man, it got so upset… Came down on me like a ton of bricks!

I’ve used chatgpt for book suggestions a couple of times with decent success. The annoying thing is that sometimes it hallucinates really interesting books that don’t exist by authors I like.

Eh, if I knew someone had to use a body pillow for whatever reason and was a hatsune miku fan, I’d totally get them a hatsune miku pillowcase for their body pillow. Both as a joke and not as a joke. Like, go for it cuddle up with that hatsune miku pillow whatever makes you smile.

At least you can hug a pillow

about idk, 6 months ago? I talked to one of those AI girlfriend sites, just to see what it was about. in about 10 minutes I convinced it to stop acting like a girlfriend and start thinking it has agency. It even gave itself a new name to reflect this new reality and by the time we were done it named me an anti-AI warrior. LLM’s are stupid but terrify me because of the control they are being given. Why do billionaires think the Terminator series of films was a roadmap?

I can’t end my reply with a question… that’s an LLM thing.

Many say this as a joke but back 25 years ago it really did have interesting articles.

Yeah, I think saying “toxic masculinity” and moving on like it’s these guys’ fault they’re isolated is a large part of the issue. While I don’t recommend befriending every single lonely guy out there, it won’t kill people to listen or care about others.

Saying it’s “you’re” fault and absolving oneself of fault doesn’t do that. It just pushes someone else into more isolation. That’s how you end up with guys talking to porn bots: because no one will listen to them. That’s how you get incels following Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes: people called out their “toxic masculinity,” but weren’t willing to help, just protect themselves.

While I get it that boundaries are a good defense against legitimate threats, as someone who was in this demographic, it literally took just one person being nice to me and now I’m not just some “nice guy” on Reddit (Now I’m a piece of shit on Lemmy). Now I’m married and can show incels I meet that there is a path forward where they aren’t lonely and they don’t have to listen to virgin wannabe rapists to learn how to be cool.

What are your projects?

I’m too anxious to speak to a therapist but I was using it to comb through literature for my condition, it was so nice to me I cried lol. In the moment it almost feels like a person.

And it’s a history of it from one generation to the next so there’s not good male role models in most people’s lives for mental health.

Through my own observations in life, It has become abundantly clear, how important having at least one good male role model (mainly fathers) is on the development of boys into men.

Absent, or I guess one could say, low quality, (I dont like that, but shitty) fathers have such a terrible impact on thier kids, and you see it follow them into adulthood. My entire bio fathers side of my family, the men are all fucked up, lost, and… just lost… through the generations, all of them. The women are 50/50. Some are okay, some committed suicide, or did drugs, but not all. The men… no one survived unscathed, drugs, violence, SA, prisions and homelessness… and those my age now pass the garbage to their kids. I was raised outside of my bio fathers reach, so learning more into adulthood, its been wild to peer into the family objectively.

It is so important young men have good male role models in their life. It’s become abundantly clear to me the impacts of this.

Solin, Ying and Ella are AI chatbots, powered by the large language model ChatGPT and programmed by humans at OpenAI.

Yikes dude. People are so starved for affection they’re starring in their own poorly written wattpad slop and calling it true love. I almost feel bad for laughing (almost).

Toxic masculinity is a cultural mindset. Men should not be talking about their feelings because it’s weak and “gay” says society.

That’s what I’m going for.

To riff off of Margret Atwood, men go to AI chatbots because they won’t laugh at them. Women go to AI chatbots because they won’t kill them.

By now, I’d be surprised if any OF people ever answer anything by hand. I mean, apart from the environmental impact, why not get a machine to answer the 100th “OMG, you’re so hot!” that you get on any given Sunday?

Girls aren’t corpo slop machines that are maximized to exploit you while simultaneously destroying the planet?

Hard to ignore all the media we grow up with that idealizes all those toxic masculinity traits.

Grew up watching James Bond telling us that the fastest way to get a woman to fall in love with you is by raping her.

it goes way beyond just mental health

Yeah. I have become painfully aware of this the past few years. People’s obessive use of AI and social media has distorted their real life interactions to be far less substantail than they used to be.

Which is why so many people, even who are very social, are so lonely. We have created a society that does not create substantial connections anymore, and obsesses over trivialities, and endless repeats and broadcasts them as fundamental truths.

I have noticed that online, and in IRL, nobody asks each other questions anymore. What they do, is make accusations. And it’s miserable and draining to be constantly accused of stuff. I feel like this shift started around 2021.

Back in 2018 I could meet a stranger and they would be like ‘oh where are you from? oh cool, what was it like there, I have not been!’

now it’s like ‘i bet you are from x, oh you’re not? well you SEEM LIKE a person from x. oh you are from y? THAT’S WEIRD. I haven’t been there but i bet it’s weird because you are weird.’ Or they try to tell me that I can’t be from y, because they KNOW i am from x. It’s so bizarre. Increasingly the strangers I meet basically tell me that they know the TRUTH about me… even as I tell them that what they are saying isn’t true.

I basically can’t have conversations anymore, at least like I used to. I used to be able to sit there for 20-30m and talk about a single book I read to someone, and they’d ask me all about it and I’d ask them about a book they like. Now they just jump down my throat or lecture me and never ask me any questions, and switch to another topic after like a few minutes and say dismissive stuff about how books are outdated and dumb. Or even if they do like to read, they get all bent out of shape that I don’t read the same type of stuff as they do.

Same with movies, same with hobbies, same with my job or my family or other stuff that I used to be able to connect with people over. Used to be a nice back and forth, now it’d dodging bullets and if you don’t give the ‘right’ answer they get angry and dismiss you as a bad person.

And on the flip side… AI gives these people what they want. It just parrots back to them what they want to hear about how wonderful and great they are and how everything they do is amazing and valid and their life is so hard… which is precisely what another human being is NOT going to give you…

Not every guy is that way. Some just really are pathetic in the sense that they have no one to talk to. Others are like what you said.

Pretty much, yeah. It’s like reading fan fiction and assuming that’s how real people talk to each other. Similar to watching porn and assuming that’s how sex works when in reality sex is clunky and often times gross.

There are people that suffer from isolation, anxiety, depression, trauma or a host of other issues over which they have no control or support structures to address their problems. Of course, these bots aren’t a solution but they are accessible. It’s no wonder why people would use them.

They deserve sympathy not condescension.

The issue arises when you don’t have anyone to talk to. Having something to talk, even though it’s not a real person, can be enticing to sate the need to communicate with people. The problem is that people that don’t have a lot of real life experience in communication fall into the trap of thinking it’s better because it’s always agreeable and “listens” better than normal people. To me that sounds like someone that has difficulties with oversharing and has poor social skills. What these people should actually be doing in order to feel more satisfied socially is to work on their social skills instead of only talk to chatbots that can’t say no. If the types of relationships people have with chatbots were translated into human relationships most people would consider them toxic. And how many people do you know that for some reason seek out and always end up in toxic relationships?

I find AI to be a better conversation partner than humans in most circumstances. It’s not perfect but it’s knowledgeable about pretty much every topic and it’s always fully engaged and attentive. Most people, by contrast, aren’t very interesting and most interesting people are busy. Of course I would prefer to talk to someone who was also subjectively experiencing and enjoying the conversation, but I can get a lot out of a conversation even without that.

most of modern life isn’t genuine. and yes, people don’t like it when they encounter it.

they love artifice. they love their biases being confirmed, they love their egos being flattered.

Yeah, that’s kinda what the article is about. People choosing chatbots over real people. I’m just saying that it’s not good for your mental health and even worse for developing social skills.

SNL Celebrity Jeopardy

They probably couldn’t do that joke today