I expect pushback on this post, so let me say up front: go read a pop science book or a wiki page or something on how therapy works. Then do the same for friendship. At the end of the day, if you are not participating in a web of mutually healthy communal support, it's not social connection!!!

@vaurora It tells much about the person who suggests to use AI chatbot as friend or therapist and on how they view social relationships, isn't it..? Only a true tech bro could have such an idea.

@vaurora They seem to be useful as tools for consequence-free social emulation to help people with too much anxiety to start with real-world interaction. They're also getting better at theory of mind, so coaching the socially inept is probably in the cards too.

@vaurora Farenheit 451 fuckin' warned us about this one too!! Read your dystopian classics people, the Torment Nexus is always there.

@vaurora The only cringier thing I've seen recently was a report of a service for negligent children to sign their elderly parents up for a service to receive LLM-generated phone calls to chat with them.

@ScottMGS that is so wild! I don't get it all, what do they think they are accomplishing?

@paul I hear you and I can see therapeutic games designed exactly for that, but you can't develop theory of mind using something that has no mind creating it. People can and may benefit from using AI chat, but only with the self discipline and knowledge of your average student therapist, or luck

@vaurora I don't personally use them for therapy, but I know some people that have benefited from treating a local LLM like a snapshot of language. It's a tool for quickly and privately approximating the text that would follow a given string. I just wish people knew that coherent llama3 quants can run locally on a Jetson Orin, or a GPU from 2018.

@tymwol right?

"I wish I had someone to talk to and get support and emotional connection from."

"Okay, why don't you start doing that for other people and see who reciprocates?"

"Not like that!!"

I think about this a lot in terms of the kind of fantasy in which people get lifetime bonds with human intelligent animals or magic spirits or what not. It is a great fantasy to have another intelligent being totally devoted to you, protecting you, with unconditional love, asking nothing in return. Its an appropriate desire to have for your parents while you are growing up, otherwise what you want is called slavery

One of the totally awesome things about the Murderbot story is that it is some ways it is told from the internal view of the fantasy slave character. And guess what!!! Murderbot has its needs and leaves the person cast as the human it should be devoted to go find itself and have its own life and story. Your "AI companion" doesn't have to go deal with its own shit or need you to make sacrifices to support it