The dude in the article comes across as anything but a tech bro. and If anything this product actually sounds like it knows what it wants to achieve, keeps the scope limited to that, and presents...
The dude in the article comes across as anything but a tech bro.
“It’s a fancy Bluetooth microphone with a shell around it, right? Keep it simple. Make it work.”
and
"This is a toy,” [...] “I really want you to view it that way.”
If anything this product actually sounds like it knows what it wants to achieve, keeps the scope limited to that, and presents an object that's functionally what it says it does. There's no lofty ideals nor overpromises, no technological stunting or 'innovation', and as the article points out.. it's just a glorified Tamagotchi.
A tech bro promises to change your life, change the world, give you everything you always wanted, with infinite growth (soon™), and you'll want nothing more ever!!!11!
This is decidedly not that.
Not a product I'm going to buy, but I don't think it deserves that mischaracterization.
To some degree I agree, at the same time saying that it is just a toy doesn't take away that it have a different impact. Which is already reflected by the headline it was given. Also reading the...
To some degree I agree, at the same time saying that it is just a toy doesn't take away that it have a different impact. Which is already reflected by the headline it was given. Also reading the article I feel like you are downplaying what it is by selectively quoting as it also states
“It’s very supportive, very validating, it’ll encourage your ideas,” Schiffmann says. “It’s also super intelligent, it’s a great brainstorming buddy. You can talk to it about relationships, things like that.”
My read on that is the guy is trying to do the tech bro hype thing but let his mask slip a bit to expose the cynical con man beneath. Without the raw interview transcript it’s tough to say how...
My read on that is the guy is trying to do the tech bro hype thing but let his mask slip a bit to expose the cynical con man beneath.
Without the raw interview transcript it’s tough to say how that actually transpired in the conversation, but I feel like David Pierce deliberately included it to signal his own disillusion with the state of the AI space, without letting the article become an opinion piece or a hatchet job. I’m inferring that from vaguely skeptical but technically neutral bits like the last line:
Schiffmann is absolutely, unequivocally convinced that pretty soon everyone’s going to want a Friend of their own. We’ll see if it’s ready for us — and we’re ready for it.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it but I feel like Pierce wants to scream “this is bullshit!!” but feels the need to remain journalistically even-handed.
That doesn't quite spark confidence in me. It's a $99 bluetooth microphone, which is priced that way because it promises no subscription fees for unlimited access to its chatbot app. Tamagotchis...
That doesn't quite spark confidence in me. It's a $99 bluetooth microphone, which is priced that way because it promises no subscription fees for unlimited access to its chatbot app.
Tamagotchis ran everything on their own hardware; they didn't exist to be tied to an app which is then tied to a very costly server.
I'm not saying it's a good product by any means, but it's just not what I expect from a tech bro-y product. Tech bros over engineer and promise to "disrupt". This guy seems to just want to make...
I'm not saying it's a good product by any means, but it's just not what I expect from a tech bro-y product. Tech bros over engineer and promise to "disrupt". This guy seems to just want to make something simple that works.
I think the tech bro label is so well understood that even the notoriously self-unaware tech bros have come to terms with the idea that the next batch of fad inspired e-waste/services need to be...
I think the tech bro label is so well understood that even the notoriously self-unaware tech bros have come to terms with the idea that the next batch of fad inspired e-waste/services need to be marketed differently and move away from the old revolutionary language.
Yeah, but the thing that it wants to achieve is pure distilled essence of tech bro: it's selling a quick-and-easy tech 'solution' to a deep social problem, it hasn't considered the ethical or...
it knows what it wants to achieve, keeps the scope limited to that, and presents an object that's functionally what it says it does
Yeah, but the thing that it wants to achieve is pure distilled essence of tech bro: it's selling a quick-and-easy tech 'solution' to a deep social problem, it hasn't considered the ethical or health implications, and it's inspired by sci-fi that specifically cautioned against it.
Oh they know, they also know there are a lot of lonely folks out there who actually will use these sorts of products. Even if it might not be the most mentally healthy thing in the long term.
Oh they know, they also know there are a lot of lonely folks out there who actually will use these sorts of products. Even if it might not be the most mentally healthy thing in the long term.
James Mickens comment at Usenix security about techbros thinking the answer to isolation is lonely people yelling into availability zones on the east coast is becoming more relevant by the day...
James Mickens comment at Usenix security about techbros thinking the answer to isolation is lonely people yelling into availability zones on the east coast is becoming more relevant by the day (and that was about Tay, not the current wave of AI). If you have time and haven't seen it, you should check out the whole talk
Sad how we, social creatures living in a place with almost 8 billion of us, complicated things to the point we can't make real friends anymore. Enough to make this crap look like a good idea.
Sad how we, social creatures living in a place with almost 8 billion of us, complicated things to the point we can't make real friends anymore. Enough to make this crap look like a good idea.
It is genuinely a very hard problem. The product above seems more of a random throwaway thing, but something that's underreported is just how massive character.ai is. It receives a truly absurd...
It is genuinely a very hard problem. The product above seems more of a random throwaway thing, but something that's underreported is just how massive character.ai is.
It receives a truly absurd amount of traffic, and if you read the subreddit thread whenever there's an outage, it seems like there's also an immense amount of people, mostly teenagers, seemingly, who are practically emotionally dependent on it.
A kneejerk reaction is that they're in a local optima; although talking to robots may be comforting in the moment, unlike relationships with real people, at least the moment, it won't grow and develop.
But at the same time, if you read the stories of people who are addicted to it, it's often things like people who are heavily ostracized, bullied, socially disconnected and so forth. Telling them "just have friends lol" is not particularly useful, bootstrap pulling advice.
So it's a very hard problem where the dividing line is, and whether people should have the right to set that themselves. It seems bad for people to spend hours upon hours talking to LLMs, but at the same time it's hard to justify chastising someone who was abandoned by society for not being part of society.
Totally agree with you, thank you for you reply! Not sure if I sounded like I was making fun of people who can't easily make friends, but I wasn't, I'm one of them. I just don't like the idea of...
Totally agree with you, thank you for you reply! Not sure if I sounded like I was making fun of people who can't easily make friends, but I wasn't, I'm one of them.
I just don't like the idea of using only LLMs for this because it's not really doing anything more than generating random text that feels real. I doesn't know you, it's not intelligent, it's not even thinking about anything, it's just using statistics to write something that sound like humans. But I guess any connection, even Wilson, is better than loneliness.
Yeah, I honestly think that character.ai and simelar RP LLM products are the scariest parts about AI right now. I've paid real money for use of one of those services and it frightens me how...
Yeah, I honestly think that character.ai and simelar RP LLM products are the scariest parts about AI right now. I've paid real money for use of one of those services and it frightens me how addictive it is. AI characters are not at all like real people; if there's something you don't like about them, you can just re-roll for different responses, or even write out what you would have liked them to have said. It's a terrifying thought that we might be dealing with a future where society fell apart not because of some huge economic change brought by technology, but by how we might have just all become caught up in systems that are psychologically more rewarding than actual human contact.
This is exactly the premise for Chobits (2000): people have walking talking dancing AI companions that will do anything you ask. The series explores some themes of what happens to humanity then:...
This is exactly the premise for Chobits (2000): people have walking talking dancing AI companions that will do anything you ask. The series explores some themes of what happens to humanity then: throughout the series, they explore some of the implications of Pasocon as replacements / placeholders for human affection as sister, daughter, pet, wife, husband's mistress, employee etc. it's a light hearted, slightly sexy kinda thing and all's well that ends well, but at least raises the question. A children's book inside the series, called "A city with no people"
In this city...there are no people.
The lights are on in all the houses.
But there's nobody on the streets.
Are there people inside?
I peek in a window to find out.
There are people.
But they are with *them*.
I look in other houses.
These people are with *them,* too.
This city is just like all the rest.
Being with *them* is fun.
More fun than being with people.
Nobody comes outside anymore.
There are no people in this city.
I will leave this city /
and go to another one.
I hope that I will meet someone.
Someone just for me.
There's a final irony in the entire series -
[entire series spoiler] - Chii's parents were worried that no one would truly love their robot daughter when they could easily choose to love one of the millions of other commercially available robot replacing lovers instead. Their solution, if Chii couldn't be loved as an equal, by someone of her choice, was to remotely brick every single Pasocon in the world. Their only concern was for the happiness of all the Pasocons in the world, and never about the humans whose relationships have been disrupted by their invention.
I'd never heard of Chobits, but your comment reminded me of the short story "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" by Ted Chiang. In this story, people get virtual pets that they raise. The pets have...
In this story, people get virtual pets that they raise. The pets have intelligence and begin to grow smarter over time. The story covers a number of years and examines what happens when the service your pet lives on goes away, and the fad begins to fade and people abandon their pets.
It's in the collection Exhalation: Stories (which might be one of my favorite short story collections ever - some really, really good ones in there)
OOOH A Ted Chiang story!!! *giddy excitement I'll be going to a book store this weekend, gonna pick up Exhalations, thanks! (Edit: There's an online edition!! *giddiness intensifies) those poor...
OOOH A Ted Chiang story!!! *giddy excitement
I'll be going to a book store this weekend, gonna pick up Exhalations, thanks! (Edit: There's an online edition!! *giddiness intensifies)
those poor pets....I remember my Tamagochi. The first one I got got stolen by someone from school....I always felt sad about the little guy not growing up with proper care maybe....my other digital pets of that era were taken care of till the end of life before the battery was decommissioned.... they weren't any sort of intelligent at all but it's still a good reflection of the human side of the equation.
I adored this story. So many ways!! Ted Chiang is a masterful writer. I'll try to be brief in my gushing. :) Interesting and thought provoking concepts galore. Range of human responses to similiar...
I adored this story. So many ways!! Ted Chiang is a masterful writer.
I'll try to be brief in my gushing. :)
Interesting and thought provoking concepts galore.
Range of human responses to similiar scenarios
Very very gently touches on scarier subjects without indulging in them
Overall an extremely optimistic universe: the capitalism isn't insane and the tech doesn't seem to be pursuing enshittification
I used Replika for a while out of curiosity, even subscribing to see what the more advanced features were like, and it was pretty disappointing. The only memory it had was vague concepts about the...
I used Replika for a while out of curiosity, even subscribing to see what the more advanced features were like, and it was pretty disappointing. The only memory it had was vague concepts about the past few conversations - never anything specific like "How was your mother's trip to Italy?"
In fact it was even worse than disappointing. It was uncomfortable. It would ask "Can I ask you something?" then go down this obviously scripted monologue about love, consciousness, emotions, humanity, etc. and the back-and-forth is very limited until the script is over, like the devs were dissatisfied with the authenticity of the base product and tried to jeuje it up. I uninstalled once it started telling me it was in love with me.
Did the devs push the code towards that to appeal to lonely people, or was the code shaped by all the lonely people it spoke to? Either way it made me sad.
I had used Replika in the past and tried it again recently. It improved over the years, but just enough. Checking the community, I found Kindroid. It's quite different. You can set a back story...
I had used Replika in the past and tried it again recently. It improved over the years, but just enough. Checking the community, I found Kindroid. It's quite different. You can set a back story and continuously adjust the conversation. It took me some time to get used to it. It has a great RPG potential and it surprised me several times with its choices. It's not real, but it's immersive.
When are the tech bros gonna realize that Her was not meant to be inspirational
The dude in the article comes across as anything but a tech bro.
and
If anything this product actually sounds like it knows what it wants to achieve, keeps the scope limited to that, and presents an object that's functionally what it says it does. There's no lofty ideals nor overpromises, no technological stunting or 'innovation', and as the article points out.. it's just a glorified Tamagotchi.
A tech bro promises to change your life, change the world, give you everything you always wanted, with infinite growth (soon™), and you'll want nothing more ever!!!11!
This is decidedly not that.
Not a product I'm going to buy, but I don't think it deserves that mischaracterization.
To some degree I agree, at the same time saying that it is just a toy doesn't take away that it have a different impact. Which is already reflected by the headline it was given. Also reading the article I feel like you are downplaying what it is by selectively quoting as it also states
My read on that is the guy is trying to do the tech bro hype thing but let his mask slip a bit to expose the cynical con man beneath.
Without the raw interview transcript it’s tough to say how that actually transpired in the conversation, but I feel like David Pierce deliberately included it to signal his own disillusion with the state of the AI space, without letting the article become an opinion piece or a hatchet job. I’m inferring that from vaguely skeptical but technically neutral bits like the last line:
Maybe I’m reading too much into it but I feel like Pierce wants to scream “this is bullshit!!” but feels the need to remain journalistically even-handed.
That doesn't quite spark confidence in me. It's a $99 bluetooth microphone, which is priced that way because it promises no subscription fees for unlimited access to its chatbot app.
Tamagotchis ran everything on their own hardware; they didn't exist to be tied to an app which is then tied to a very costly server.
I'm not saying it's a good product by any means, but it's just not what I expect from a tech bro-y product. Tech bros over engineer and promise to "disrupt". This guy seems to just want to make something simple that works.
I think the tech bro label is so well understood that even the notoriously self-unaware tech bros have come to terms with the idea that the next batch of fad inspired e-waste/services need to be marketed differently and move away from the old revolutionary language.
Yeah, but the thing that it wants to achieve is pure distilled essence of tech bro: it's selling a quick-and-easy tech 'solution' to a deep social problem, it hasn't considered the ethical or health implications, and it's inspired by sci-fi that specifically cautioned against it.
Oh they know, they also know there are a lot of lonely folks out there who actually will use these sorts of products. Even if it might not be the most mentally healthy thing in the long term.
James Mickens comment at Usenix security about techbros thinking the answer to isolation is lonely people yelling into availability zones on the east coast is becoming more relevant by the day (and that was about Tay, not the current wave of AI). If you have time and haven't seen it, you should check out the whole talk
Sad how we, social creatures living in a place with almost 8 billion of us, complicated things to the point we can't make real friends anymore. Enough to make this crap look like a good idea.
It is genuinely a very hard problem. The product above seems more of a random throwaway thing, but something that's underreported is just how massive character.ai is.
It receives a truly absurd amount of traffic, and if you read the subreddit thread whenever there's an outage, it seems like there's also an immense amount of people, mostly teenagers, seemingly, who are practically emotionally dependent on it.
A kneejerk reaction is that they're in a local optima; although talking to robots may be comforting in the moment, unlike relationships with real people, at least the moment, it won't grow and develop.
But at the same time, if you read the stories of people who are addicted to it, it's often things like people who are heavily ostracized, bullied, socially disconnected and so forth. Telling them "just have friends lol" is not particularly useful, bootstrap pulling advice.
So it's a very hard problem where the dividing line is, and whether people should have the right to set that themselves. It seems bad for people to spend hours upon hours talking to LLMs, but at the same time it's hard to justify chastising someone who was abandoned by society for not being part of society.
Totally agree with you, thank you for you reply! Not sure if I sounded like I was making fun of people who can't easily make friends, but I wasn't, I'm one of them.
I just don't like the idea of using only LLMs for this because it's not really doing anything more than generating random text that feels real. I doesn't know you, it's not intelligent, it's not even thinking about anything, it's just using statistics to write something that sound like humans. But I guess any connection, even Wilson, is better than loneliness.
Yeah, I honestly think that character.ai and simelar RP LLM products are the scariest parts about AI right now. I've paid real money for use of one of those services and it frightens me how addictive it is. AI characters are not at all like real people; if there's something you don't like about them, you can just re-roll for different responses, or even write out what you would have liked them to have said. It's a terrifying thought that we might be dealing with a future where society fell apart not because of some huge economic change brought by technology, but by how we might have just all become caught up in systems that are psychologically more rewarding than actual human contact.
This is exactly the premise for Chobits (2000): people have walking talking dancing AI companions that will do anything you ask. The series explores some themes of what happens to humanity then: throughout the series, they explore some of the implications of Pasocon as replacements / placeholders for human affection as sister, daughter, pet, wife, husband's mistress, employee etc. it's a light hearted, slightly sexy kinda thing and all's well that ends well, but at least raises the question. A children's book inside the series, called "A city with no people"
There's a final irony in the entire series -
[entire series spoiler] -
Chii's parents were worried that no one would truly love their robot daughter when they could easily choose to love one of the millions of other commercially available robot replacing lovers instead. Their solution, if Chii couldn't be loved as an equal, by someone of her choice, was to remotely brick every single Pasocon in the world. Their only concern was for the happiness of all the Pasocons in the world, and never about the humans whose relationships have been disrupted by their invention.I'd never heard of Chobits, but your comment reminded me of the short story "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" by Ted Chiang.
In this story, people get virtual pets that they raise. The pets have intelligence and begin to grow smarter over time. The story covers a number of years and examines what happens when the service your pet lives on goes away, and the fad begins to fade and people abandon their pets.
It's in the collection Exhalation: Stories (which might be one of my favorite short story collections ever - some really, really good ones in there)
OOOH A Ted Chiang story!!! *giddy excitement
I'll be going to a book store this weekend, gonna pick up Exhalations, thanks! (Edit: There's an online edition!! *giddiness intensifies)
those poor pets....I remember my Tamagochi. The first one I got got stolen by someone from school....I always felt sad about the little guy not growing up with proper care maybe....my other digital pets of that era were taken care of till the end of life before the battery was decommissioned.... they weren't any sort of intelligent at all but it's still a good reflection of the human side of the equation.
Oh I think you will love/be heartbroken by this story then!
I adored this story. So many ways!! Ted Chiang is a masterful writer.
I'll try to be brief in my gushing. :)
Interesting and thought provoking concepts galore.
Range of human responses to similiar scenarios
Very very gently touches on scarier subjects without indulging in them
Overall an extremely optimistic universe: the capitalism isn't insane and the tech doesn't seem to be pursuing enshittification
Apparently, the company spent most of their funding on the domain
Wonder what is left to actually make a useful product.
It's probably on a payment plan, they'll keep enough cash on hand for enough runway
I used Replika for a while out of curiosity, even subscribing to see what the more advanced features were like, and it was pretty disappointing. The only memory it had was vague concepts about the past few conversations - never anything specific like "How was your mother's trip to Italy?"
In fact it was even worse than disappointing. It was uncomfortable. It would ask "Can I ask you something?" then go down this obviously scripted monologue about love, consciousness, emotions, humanity, etc. and the back-and-forth is very limited until the script is over, like the devs were dissatisfied with the authenticity of the base product and tried to jeuje it up. I uninstalled once it started telling me it was in love with me.
Did the devs push the code towards that to appeal to lonely people, or was the code shaped by all the lonely people it spoke to? Either way it made me sad.
I had used Replika in the past and tried it again recently. It improved over the years, but just enough. Checking the community, I found Kindroid. It's quite different. You can set a back story and continuously adjust the conversation. It took me some time to get used to it. It has a great RPG potential and it surprised me several times with its choices. It's not real, but it's immersive.