People are falling in love with their chatbots. There are now dozens of apps that offer intimate companionship with an AI-powered bot, and they have millions of users. A recent survey of users found that 19% of Americans have interacted with an AI meant to simulate a romantic partner.
19% of American fell in love with something that doesn’t exist; no consciousness, no general intelligence, not even mechanical animal instinct, a glorified slot machine spitting out google searches and Wikipedia entries
This is the logical conclusion of liberalism and it’s theory of the individual, standing in front of an interactive mirror and talking to yourself, convinced you’ve found genuine love, illusion meets delusion giving birth to a new form of narcissism
The death flags for this empire just keep piling up
🔥
“Talking” to these machines makes a mockery of personhood. To suggest that you can love word-static is profane. As if love cannot be distingushed from the experience of pleasure, that the yearning of minds to close the gap between them and mingle into something new was merely instrumental and not the thing itself.
It is disgusting, beyond anti-human it is a stance against life itself.
Jerk yourself off with a clanker, I don’t care, but you have not found love. You are reading erotica stripped of even the thin human connection of author to reader.
they cant be persons in any philosophical sense anyways in their current state because they have no moral agency which is a crucial part of personhood
this is the equivalent of the people who marry the eiffel tower and then every now and then go grind on it but at least for those people it is a real thing that exists in physical space to actually grind on
I don’t know if I would agree with that as a requirement for personhood, I extend the concept to all animals and I’m hardly alone in that.
I think we agree though that there has to be some sort of being for there to be a person and any meaningful connection. If it isn’t like something to be that thing then it can’t be something you have any sort of relationship with beyond use.
LLMs don’t even have persistent state, it’s exceedingly difficult to imagine that you could to anything like “talk” to one, let alone have a romance.
moral agency being a requirement for full personhood is pretty well established in philosophy like im not speaking off cuff here or from some personal bias
this is not to say all philosophers require it but its pretty big in the list of requirements for personhood by most
and one can argue that many animals have some sense of moral agency even if it may be rudimentary or different from our own. it is, for instance, blatently obvious that many dogs will put themselves in danger to act in ways contrary to survival instinct to protect members of their “family”. that they feel guilt indicating a sense of right and wrong and so on.
anyways we’ll get off track here going down this debate and honestly, a lot smarter people than me have discussed this issue in greater detail with much more insight than i can ever give it