I don't understand the hand-wringing over it (excepting the exploiting lonely people and collecting massive amounts of highly sensitive data part which is obviously evil). Nobody is going to reject a human partner because they already have a cell phone app. For people who would otherwise never have a human partner why not let them have an app if it makes them happy?
> Nobody is going to reject a human partner because they already have a cell phone app.
I'm not so sure about that, actually. Most people won't, but there do exist people who don't do what's needed to have a human partner because they have porn instead. I don't see how an AI girlfriend would be any different.
> why not let them have an app if it makes them happy?
Who's talking about not letting them have the app? I find it incredibly sad, but it's not my life so not my business.
Treating it as "just having a cell phone app" is quite the trivialization of how much time and emotional investment could go into it. Sort of like calling someone who plays video games 10 hours a day "just on the computer like everyone else at work." There are obviously many people in the modern world that are so engrossed in screens like Youtube, Instagram, and video games, that it's coming at the expense of their in person interaction and relationships.
Personally, I agree with GP, that it's quite a terrible travesty that people are being sucked into being controlled by a machine and forgoing the eternal human condition of building a relationship with real human people in person like we always have.
> For people who would otherwise never have a human partner why not let them have an app if it makes them happy?
I want to agree with you but my optimism has rarely reconciled with history itself.
There's a fallacy here: why are we writing off an entire subset of the population as irredeemable? Ugly people find love. Even assholes find love. Weight is not an exception, nor disability.
This is like giving heroin to someone that's depressed. Sure it'll make them happy, but it won't end well.
For something that takes place behind closed doors there's no oversight either, which is a problem enough with rogue therapists (see the Ramona False Memory case). This undermines social cohesion and makes radicalization trivial-- nobody would see it coming at all enough to intervene.
We're talking private reinforcement of ideas like kill-your-parents-and-yourself, or commit-treason-and-sabotage type of suggestions. Nobody knows little Jimmy is jerking it to Israeli propaganda.
I've asked before why there is no hypnosis porn to make people fetishize anything other than feminizing men. There's no "you like natural beauty" hypno, or "you're fine just the way you are" hypno. It's all an ad campaign to specifically drive sales of therapy and hormones. One nation produces 90% of the world's supply; guess who.
All of this to support a commercial endeavor. God help us when this sort of personalized influence is weaponized for military use.
