Imagine this: you’ve “dated” 600 people in San Fransisco without having typed a word to any of them. Instead, a busy little bot has completed the mindless ‘getting-to-know-you’ chatter on your behalf, and has told you which people you should actually get off the couch to meet.
The memes are becoming real. 
In 2021, the AI companion app Replika came under scrutiny after authorities in the U.K. saw a 19-year-old man planning to assassinate the Queen after he was encouraged by an AI girlfriend built on the app.
Critical support?
plotting to kill a ninety five year old woman strikes me as a waste of time
And yet he succeeded
mechanical turk “Replika” operation successful
True, he could have gone after Charles.
By spreading rumors about juice curing cancer
Jacking off in the corner and staring as my AI concierge gets all the pussy
This is just the matching algorithm OK Cupid and older dating sites used to. “The AI went on 600 dates” is just some marketing bullshit. They aren’t going to sim anything, just give people the top 3 percentage matches and pretend it’s better because the AI did it.
Yours is the realistic answer but give me the lathe for a second. If they were going to actually simulate dates and have any insinuation of it being meaningful they could probably claim they need access to all of your text messages and chats to teach the AI your voice and personality. It would be an excuse for a phenomenal level of data mining. If it didn’t turn everyone off with its overreach.
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they’ll probably take information representing some aggregation of interactions for a user and make some scoring model that tries to learn from pairs of user data and outcomes (in terms of whether they successfully dated or whatever you do on these apps). 100% marketing bullshit, doing LLM inference for something like this would have costs spiral out of control FAST. But a scoring model is cheap, they have the data to make one, and it isn’t really all that innovative either.
This reminds me of a concept from Eclipse Phase. The normal mode of travel in the solar system is to upload your mind as data and squirt it across space to a receiving ship or station where you’re download and either instanced as software or written in to a meat or cybernetic brain. then you do your business, upload as data, and get transmitted home (don’t ask about continuity of consciousness it makes people very uncomfortable). If you just need to ask some quick questions or perform very limited functions, especially if you suspect someone could intercept your mind, crack the encryption, and sift through your brain you might send a severely pruned down “fork” of yourself that has been edited to only have specific knowledge and expertise. Depending on how much pruning you do the fork could be a nearly full copy of yourself with a few parts missing or a sub-sentient expert system that can only perform specific tasks. Regardless, the bandwidth costs are cheaper and the risk of being intercepted and wrung out for information is less.
Also, this is how OkCupid used to work, but with buzzwords. OKC just asked you a bunch of quiz questions and their importance to you, then matched you with people with similar values and beliefs. Worked great. No swiping, no AI. It still sucked, but it sucked and order of magnitude less than modern skinner box dating sites.
I miss old OKC. Match turned it into another swiping app.
See the thing about comparing it to a cool thing is that this isn’t really like the cool thing at all.
Oh it’s horrific in Eclipse Phase. What happens when you turn your mind in to a stream of ones and zeroes while nanites scrub you out of the brain you were in? Is whatever is downloaded at the other end really you? What if your transmission is corrupted in transit? What will be left of you? What if someone intercepts your transmission, instances a copy of you, hacks in to your mind and changes your personality, then sends the modified you to the end destination with no one the wiser? Eclipse Phase is very emphatically a cosmic horror story.
Altered Carbon has a lot of the same weird issues. although I enjoyed it, it kinda handwaves over themEDIT: I don’t remember well enough, I think the problems are fundamental to transfer of consciousness and fwiw you have to make some choices to bridge those contradictions. I’ll have to re-read it to articulate it, so I’m striking it.
I feel like the addressed it pretty head on. Every copy of you is equally you. That is the materialist explanation we would expect.
I’ve only read the first book, I should re-read it but I remember having some problems with the way the backups worked. good story though
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Kinda. Once your brain is copied to a chip yeah. After that once it is just a pattern of data then it is just as continuous as you perceive it to be.
Yeah i’m not sure if “losing continuity of consciousness means you died” is a cultural thing that can change or what. Bc people do lose continuity all the time when they black out, go under for surgery, get concussed, and so forth. Subjectively when you come to you feel like you’re the same person and continuity is maintained, and people don’t perceive themselves to have died. But is the mind that boots up after surgery the same mind that was shut down? It gives me the willies.
Barclay was right I ain’t getting in that fucking thing
It’s funny because you linked to the episode which demonstrates very conclusively that being Transported doesn’t even break continuity of consciousness as you stay aware through the entire process and even “see” subspace in the limited capacity your energized pattern can perceive things
Yeah, Star Trek gets real goofy with it. You don’t get broken down and re-constructed, you get turned in to, idk, some weird energy being for a bit then turned back to normal matter at your destination.
I mean yeah, but we only know he was wrong because of omniscient TV plot contrivance
He was right to not trust the soma machine
If there’s anyone we should take cues from it’s the guy who made holograms of his co-workers to act out power fantasies with and presumably fuck sometimes
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I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I’m gonna clone your ego into a bunch of catfish and do a roko’s basilisk on you.
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Just don’t think of your fork’s human rights when “pruning” it.
Eclipse Phase is so cool I wish the system was better.
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zizek thing about how your chatbot will date someone else’s chatbot for you and when you want to have sex the bots will have sex for you and you two will just be friends who know nothing about the other or something
https://youtu.be/7xYO-VMZUGo?si=pd4iuBfdOJGgU3gJ
He peaked here
Maybe I should join that new local pickleball club…
You should, meeting real humans in real life is much better than apps that are designed to keep you, lonely single and desperate!
They keep inventing new means of isolation.
If two dating bots get to third base and there’s no one around to hear them, do they make a sound?
So the only app I even get matches on consistently is going to put yet more barriers in between me and other people and pretend it’s a feature
Not sure why I bother with the apps then
literally black mirror
Lol yep, very close to the Torment Nexus (though in the episode IIRC it’s portrayed as a good thing, soooo).
Enter the breed pod, citizen.
I’m never using one of these shitty apps.
Just saw the other post about OpenAI integrating adverts and imagining the robots spewing ads at each other.
This is actually how the robots fuck. They climax by giving a clickthrough instead of just an ad impression.
Hmmh, this is one of the ones I was thinking of to try getting some friends. Kinda got tired of spending the entirety of my 20s in self-imposed isolation because I loathe and am terrified of other human beings
Ok what other ways do we have to make dating even more miserable and impossible? People sure aren’t miserable and lonely enough we need to get out top scientists on this
:(
