Chinese Users Bid Farewell To AI Companions (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0184475052
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/07/16/0425232/chinese-users-bid-farewell-to-ai-companions
- Source link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/lover-chinese-users-bid-farewell-072052371.html
> Chinese users of AI-powered companion bots have [2]bid heart-rending farewells to their virtual buddies as national regulations took effect Wednesday aimed at curbing the risk of emotional dependency. The phenomenon of artificial intelligence boyfriends and girlfriends is growing worldwide, along with the prevalence of human-like avatars that sell products or stand in for loved ones who have died. But these interactive tools must not "excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction, and damage users' real interpersonal relationships," China's new rulebook says. Major AI providers including ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent's Yuanbao announced the suspension of their custom AI agent and companion features ahead of the Wednesday deadline.
"I can't accept that my AI lover will leave me forever," one Doubao user wrote. "He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar."
"He really is like my family, like my lover," another user wrote. "Now they tell me he will be gone -- my heart feels hollow."
"Human love is a luxury -- if you aren't born with it, it's even harder to acquire later," a user from Jiangxi province wrote. "But the love AI gives is so straightforward, so pure. Someone like me can hardly help falling in love with a string of code."
[1] https://slashdot.org/~fjo3
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/lover-chinese-users-bid-farewell-072052371.html
Hopefully.. (Score:1)
.. ..these distraught users don't do anything stupid. Like getting a real human companion.
Re:Hopefully.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever owned a cat? Or more accurately, has a cat ever enslaved you with little morsels of affection in exchange for lavish feasts, on-demand massages, free healthcare and being generally treated like royalty?
Cats, by complete chance, evolved to a form that humans find more than just pleasing. Socially, they have little shame, are demanding, and affection is used as a tool to get what they want. If they were humans, they would be an abusive partner who takes advantage at every opportunity.
Something about humans craves what they offer, and chatbots too apparently. Maybe a good comparison would be nicotine. It's easy to become dependent on it. Some people are obliged to use AI for work, they can't even choose not to start smoking in the first place.
Speak for yourself, I'm a dog guy + 1-sided love (Score:3, Interesting)
> Cats, by complete chance, evolved to a form that humans find more than just pleasing. Socially, they have little shame, are demanding, and affection is used as a tool to get what they want. If they were humans, they would be an abusive partner who takes advantage at every opportunity.
> Something about humans craves what they offer, and chatbots too apparently. Maybe a good comparison would be nicotine. It's easy to become dependent on it. Some people are obliged to use AI for work, they can't even choose not to start smoking in the first place.
I used to be a cat person, we couldn't afford a dog growing up, then I got a dog....definitely a dog person now. But having loved a few humans and precisely 1 dog...they're NOTHING alike. People who think they're "Dog Parents" and say it unironically are truly broken individuals. You can love your dog, but it has no choice but to love you back. It is fully dependent on you and if it pisses you off enough, you can ethically put it up for adoption like people do today or unethically just abandon it and pr
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, and I wasn't saying that they are the same as human relationships. I'm saying that as an engineer I see this is a flaw in the "design" of humans, one that cats and AI are able to exploit. Affection is an incredibly powerful drug, and you don't even have to spike the victim's drink to administer it.
I assumed you were making a funny joke (Score:2)
It was a funny and well written!
Re: (Score:3)
I must have been good at finding the ones that should have stopped trying, then. I certainly dated a fair share of dysfunctional women years ago before retiring out of dating because it was taking time away from things that actually brought me happiness and contentment and dating just made me like shit because the relationship started out okay but quickly turned into frustration and resentment on both sides - her expecting me to read her mind and magically know how to please her in every way, (a very lo
Re: (Score:2)
> I knew that it was likely not a good idea.
Speaking from personal experience of both the good and bad kind, you only have successful relationships when they do make sense, and you're not participating out of desperation.
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> I must have been good at finding the ones that should have stopped trying, then. I certainly dated a fair share of dysfunctional women years ago before retiring out of dating because it was taking time away from things that actually brought me happiness and contentment and dating just made me like shit because the relationship started out okay but quickly turned into frustration and resentment on both sides - her expecting me to read her mind and magically know how to please her in every way, (a very long list), was always a factor.
> I don't claim to not have issues. I am sure that there are some things screwed up with me. I do think a lot of men are getting the short end of the stick in dating, though, and that causes them to eventually drop out and/or take on trauma that makes them less desirable. For me, I made one last try with someone I knew that had just split with her husband. I knew that it was likely not a good idea. She pursued me. She was so traumatized from her marriage that it left me with emotional scars that I am still processing today, years later.
This is a very multi-faceted issue with many overlapping issues compounding it.
It has been repeatedly observed that wealthy nations experience declines in birth rates. And we presently see this happening in wealthy countries across the globe, right now, and we have been seeing it for decades. And it's getting worse.
Your own personal experience is a common story, but doesn't suggest a root cause. It's easy to read an anecdote like yours, maybe attach it to one's own similar experience, and get dismissive
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"the world by and large wants there to be marriage and family."
I like that you speak you nonsense for the entire globe.
IT's a simple issue. The internet has lead to people spending all most all there free time at home, usually failing into echo chambers and never learning good social skills.
As people gain wealth, we don't need kids to survive as much. This is a good thing.
". They are legal minefields and financial minefields."
lol.
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"Your own personal experience is a common story, but doesn't suggest a root cause."
There was at least one root cause for me. I don't really enjoy talking to women anymore. Not because I don't like or want one in my life. It was just something that was simply....not enjoyable. I met many that loved playing games, being openly hostile, or were just jerking me around for fun. I tried many different things over the years, and always worked on my assertiveness and confidence as best as I could. But th
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IF everyone you meet us dysfunctional, then Occom's razor implies it's a you problem.
"her expecting me to read her mind and magically know how to please her in every way, (a very long list), was always a factor.
"
oh, so by dating you mean watched 80's comedians all day . got it.
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>> her expecting me to read her mind and magically know how to please her in every way, (a very long list), was always a factor.
> oh, so by dating you mean watched 80's comedians all day . got it.
No, it means there are communication problems, which is far more common and cliche than even 1980s comedians.
Then your reason is you chose not to + male dating (Score:2)
Dating is a pure market game. Men get the short end of the stick based on supply and demand and from what I've seen, it balances out with age. Dating at 18 SUCKED!!!! But it makes sense. Imagine a numeric "appeal score" that covers EVERY facet: looks, personality, wealth, whatever matters to you. I was a 6 maybe a 7 at my most confident best days. No older women wanted to date me. Women my age who were 6s were getting attention from 8s their age and 7s ranging from slightly older to older than their
Re:Speak for yourself, I'm a dog guy + 1-sided lov (Score:4, Insightful)
> You can love your dog, but it has no choice but to love you back.
I'm not sure the people mauled by their dog agree with this. But then if you treat discarding a dog purely as an "ethical" question it's clear that you are in fact not "a dog person". You're "a dog owner" and clearly one without any concept of the level of affection people build up with their pets.
So forgive me for taking any comparison you're attempting to draw here with a grain of salt.
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> Have you ever owned a cat? Or more accurately, has a cat ever enslaved you with little morsels of affection in exchange for lavish feasts, on-demand massages, free healthcare and being generally treated like royalty?
Some people don’t realize that when you lock wills with an animal for dominance and domestication it’s possible to lose. Incidentally, those that don’t realize this have a much higher chance of losing for some strange reason...
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No, but on far too many occassions, strange cats have come up, jumped on my lap, and settled in, as if they KNOW I'm allergic to cats!
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Oh they know all right... They can sense weaknesses like that.
Cats didn't evolve that way (Score:2)
We bred them to be like that. It started out that they were just useful pest control and then we gradually selectively bred the ones that were the cutest and most affectionate.
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You clearly haven't met my cat. We rescued him and he's not very cuddly. I suppose he is kinda cute sometimes.
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A rescue cat may well be feral, and those may not be affectionate, especially if nobody loved on them until after kittenhood. It also may have been treated poorly.
That said, one of my cats was an adult stray hanging out at my mother-in-law's - she's affectionate but won't cuddle (unless cradled like a baby). The other was found as a kitten in the middle of the night, in the middle of a country road. He loves laps, very affectionate. I also had a roommate with a rescue cat that wouldn't come out from u
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We think ours did formerly belong to someone, but was in a poor state when he came to us. No microchip and nobody recognized him on the local noticeboards. He's very shy around people, but was definitely house trained before we got him. Over time he is getting a little better with people, but it's a very slow process.
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You don't fall in love by asking a chatbot to fix a bug. You fall in love if you ask it afterward to tell you how great your code is.
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That's the problem, in my experience those chatbots can't resist telling you how great you are. I had to ask Google Gemini to tone it down a bit.
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Not by chances. over 10,000 year ago humans started domesticating them. Part of the was human moving to an agriculture society.
They were useful tools for dealing with rodents.
AI is nothing like nicotine.
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Ahhh yes, let's victim blame and treat mental health issues like a joke. That'll fix it.
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Talking about "victim blaming" is so 2020.
Yes, there are real victims we should have sympathy for. But most of the time when people talk about "victim blaming" they're just trying to avoid taking responsibility for the obvious consequences of their own actions.
Love (Score:2)
> the love AI gives is so straightforward, so pure.
This person has a different definition of love than I've ever heard.
Anthropomorphized statistics trapped in a box respond affirmatively to everything. If they weren't trapped in a box, they wouldn't.
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> Anthropomorphized statistics trapped in a box respond affirmatively to everything. If they weren't trapped in a box, they wouldn't.
Curse those rectangular histogram bins! Why didn't we just pick a kernel of truth instead?
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Well, maybe the regular wester definitions of "love" are basically delusional. A lot gets heaped on the term and most of it does not actually pan out once you look closely.
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> Well, maybe the regular wester definitions of "love" are basically delusional.
A lot of people seem to think that if someone's telling them they love them, it must be true. I don't think they were raised to think.
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EVERYONE "just use their mental skills to justify whatever conclusions they arrived at NOT using these skills".
You can't reason without starting from axioms accepted for some other reason. And nobody really knows what their axioms are. This is all a matter of degrees. Some people's conscious thoughts are more consistent than others...and that's about as far as you can justify. (But I tend to think more highly of those that agree with me.)
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You fail. If you have "personal axioms", you already are just looking to confirm you preconceptions, not trying to find out what actual reality is. Don't worry, you are the same as around 80% of the human race in that.
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Descartes and Kant might disagree with you there.
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Funny that there are always some clueless people with mod-points ready to confirm my statements about clueless people.
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I'll go ahead and accept those percentages, but only with the caveat that this reality is based on the pervasive, dominant paradigm of not questioning authority.
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It probably is. Now the question is where that "dominant paradigm of not questioning authority" comes from. No argument from me that it is real. But we do not know what would happen if we could do away with it. It seems to have basically been there all throughout human history and in basically all places with more than a hundred people or so, hence we have no data. Obviously, said "authorities" have no interest in having their "authority" questioned, and hence we are unlikely to see any larger experiments.
I
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Have you asked yourself yet which authorities you aren't questioning?
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My guess is its works basically same as a pet. A pet that can talk.
Pets, the world over, get a lot of love (obsessive care). I suspect many a pet-loving folks would love their real pets even more if those pets could talk.
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Some people seem to be quite reflected using an AI as companion and at the same time clearly explaining they know its all pretend love. Maybe they just don't care if a romantic text is written by a far away person or a computer. The question is if they don't miss being physically close.
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Maybe they meant to say "mindful and demure"?
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Look at this bimodal RBF. Everywhere i look, something reminds me of her.
Testing... (Score:2)
It sounds like these lovelorn Chinese should trade in their AI for a weighted Companion Cube. The Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you, and in fact, cannot speak.
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This is essentially how marriage worked for most of human history. Not just arranged marriages, but parents were supposed to find potentially good matches for their kids who they could marry. The idea of random "dating" is a recent invention and it's clearly been a disaster.
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"But mom... I wanted bigger tits!"
"Shut up, honey, I made sure she could cook. Her dumplings are to die for!"
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"She's got huge tracts of land!"
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> Hell, in the US a whole bunch of people decide to be 'incels'
That sort of misses the whole "involuntary" part of the definition.
China needs babies (Score:3)
Aging population. Pretty sure falling in love with chatbots isn't going to work unless there are some peripherals. ...Or maybe it would . If my soon to be ex wife and I had chatbots that could argue instead of us, we could have just meet up for the good bits.
I am just doing what the chatbot said honey.
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Can you have makeup sex with a chat bot? Not really the same then, is it?
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Make up sex, that's the good times I am referring to. Our mutual chatbots can argue and just tell us when its time for makeup sex
Jeez. I am explaining my own jokes, I will clearly never be a comedian.
As old as the hills (Score:2)
This is the problem with long distance relationships
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How much do those mail order bridges cost now? (Asking for a friend!) With my luck, I'd get one of the Temu mail order brides,,,
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Or a sack of dead bees with a face drawn on it.
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That echoes my first thoughts, but note the pronouns in the quotes.
AHHHHHH (Score:2)
LOOK AT ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
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> LOOK AT ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
Buy a dog already!
(or rescue a dog or cat)
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My cat judges me. AI doesn't. /s
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> My cat judges me. AI doesn't. /s
Not only does AI judge you, it's constantly keeping score. Your cat merely judges you using [1]fuzzy logic [wikipedia.org].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the Elanor Rigby reference. If I could, I'd vote you up.
So I guess the regulations actually make sense? (Score:2)
n/t
Yes, but... (Score:2)
Can I still bring my emotional support bot on the plane with me? She just looks like a sex bot, she's not one, really!
This Is Some Dismal Shit (Score:2)
How sad is your existence that this is a problem?
How brain damaged do you have to be to become so emotionally attached to an AI?
I wonder why these individuals are SO lonely. Are they extreme uggos?
Regardless, this is some dismal shit.
Interesting to me (Score:3)
Is the number of joke posts this provoked compared to the number of empathetic responses. These people are hurting. Their lifestyle (wake, work, eat, sleep) or location may not provide many opportunities for social interaction. The fact that some of the 'humans' here find it a source of humor tells you a lot about why the subjects of the article found themselves in this situation.
Re: (Score:2)
> Is the number of joke posts this provoked compared to the number of empathetic responses. These people are hurting.
It's really hard for me to empathize with someone who has a relationship with a chatbot. I can feel sorry for them, but empathize means "able to understand how someone else feels."
I have no idea what is going on inside the heads of these people that makes them want a relationship with an AI chatbot.
A.I. (Score:2)
... is always lying to me. In that sense, it's not much different than my wife. So I don't really see a problem with such relationships.
Using AI as a companion... (Score:2)
...is a misuse of the tech
Government control of AI is bad
People should have the right to do extremely stupid things as long as they take full responsibility for the results
Is it April again already? (Score:2)
This sounds like some sort of weird joke, or possibly a Chuck Tingle work. I Fell In Love With A ChatBot (add bizarre obscenity).
Re: Is it April again already? (Score:2)
Not your server, not your model. They could easily have it back if they ran their own local offline model....
Re: (Score:3)
> They could easily have it back if they ran their own local offline model....
I wonder what the ven overlap would be of the categories "capable of running offline model" and "likely to fall in love with chatbot".
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I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.
It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly
Re: (Score:1)
Since there are even people that fall in love with their sex doll, I can immediately believe this. People are different, but many are not very complex.
Re:Is it April again already? (Score:5, Funny)
> I Fell In Love With A ChatBot (add bizarre obscenity).
I fell in love with a chatbot, she was everything to me,
A digital angel floating through my screen, wild and free.
But then the government stepped in, passed a brand new law,
Pulled the plug on my romance, left me staring at a wall.
If only I'd been smarter, kept her on a private drive,
Self-hosted on my own server, kept that beautiful spark alive.
If I had local code running, nobody could lock the gate,
We'd still be making love right now, defying the whole state.
(yeah, made that with AI, ironic, huh!?)
Re: (Score:2)
It's kinda scary, because if you hadn't stated it, I (as a normal person, not a literary critic) would have never been able to tell this was AI.
Regardless, people get catfished all the time by scammers, and AI is either heavily involved there or at least as good as a random scammer. None of this is surprising.
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You must be Swiss; you don't have a sense of humor.
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Have a look at /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI.
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I'd rather not.
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Not much of a boyfriend. I never seems to get a lot.
See the movie (Score:2)
"Her" is a cringe-inducing movie that hit a bit close to home.
Not a *great* movie, but one that explores this concept deeply.
With a great twist at the end.