Apparently there are several narratives in regards to AI girlfriends.

  1. Incels use AI girlfriends given that they can do whatever they desire.
  2. Forums observing incel spaces agree that incels should use AI girlfriends to leave real women alone
  3. The general public having concerns towards AI girlfriends because their users might be negatively impacted by their usage
  4. Incels perceiving this as a revenge fantasy because “women are jealous that they’re dating AI instead of them”
  5. Forums observing incel spaces unsure if the views against AI girlfriends exist in the first place due to their previous agreement

I think this is an example of miscommunication and how different groups of people have different opinions depending on what they’ve seen online. Perhaps the incel-observing forums know that many of the incels have passed the point of no return, so AI girlfriends would help them, while the general public perceive the dangers of AI girlfriends based on their impact towards a broader demographic, hence the broad disapproval of AI girlfriends.

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      7 months ago

      Sure. Multimodality is impressive. And there is quite some potential there. I’m sure robots / androids are also going to happen and all of this has a profound impact. Maybe they’ll someday get affordable to the average Joe and I can have a robot do the chores for me.

      But we’re not talking about the same thing. The video I linked suggests that performance might peak and plateau. That means it could be very well the case that we can’t make them substancially more intelligent than say ChatGPT 4. Of course we can fit AI into new things, innovate and there is quite some potential. It’s just about performance/intelligence. It’s explained well in the video. (And it’s just one paper and the already existing approaches to AI. It doesn’t rule out science finding a way to overcome that. But as of now we don’t have any idea how to do that, instead of pumping millions and millions of dollars into training to achieve a smaller and smaller return in increased performance.)

      Hmmh. I’m a bit split on bio implants. Currently that’s hyped by Elon Musk. But that field of neuroscience has been around for some while. They’re making steady (yet small) progress. Elon Musk didn’t contribute anything fundamentally new. And I myself think there is a limit. I mean you can’t stick a million needles into a human brain everywhere from the surface to deep down, to hook into all brain regions. I think it’s mostly concerned with what’s accessible from the surface. And that’d be a fundamental limitation. So I doubt we’re going to see crazy things like in the sci-fi movies like The Matrix or Ready Player One. But I’m not an expert on that.

      With that said, I share your excitement for what’s about to come. I’m sure there is lots of potential in AI and we’re going to see crazy things happen. I’m a bit wary if the consequences like spam and misinformation flooding the internet and society, but that’s already inevitable. My biggest wish is science finding a way to teach LLMs when to make up things and when to stick to the truth… What people call “hallucinations”. I think it’d be the next biggest achievement if we had more control about that. Because as of now the AIs make up lots of facts that are just wrong. At least that’s happening to me all the time. And they also do it when doing tasks like summarization. And that makes them less useful for my every-day tasks.

        • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
          2·
          7 months ago

          With the worth, that’s an interesting way to look at it.

          I don’t think you grasped how exponential growth works. And the opposite: logarithmic growth. It means at first it grows fast. And then slower and slower. If it’s logarithmic, it means at first you double the computing power and you get a big return… Quadruple the performance or even more… But it’ll get less quickly. At some point you’re like in your example, connecting 4 really big supercomputers, and you just get a measly 1% performance gain over one supercomputer. And then you have to invest trillions of dollars for the next 0.5%. That’d be logarithmic growth. We’re not sure where on the curve we currently are. We’ve sure seen the fast growth in the last months.

          And scientists don’t really do forecasts. They make hypotheses and then they test them. And they experimentally justify it. So no, it’s not the future being guessed at. They used a clever method to measure the performance of a technological system. And we can see those real-world measurements in their paper. Why do you say the top researchers in the world aren’t “well-enough informed” individuals?

            • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
              1·
              7 months ago

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

              No. Science isn’t done by a vote of majority. It’s the objective facts that matter. And you don’t pick experts or perspectives, that’s not scientific. It’s about objective truth. And a method to find that.

              We’re now confusing science and futurology.

              And I think scientists use the term “predict” and not “forecast”. There is a profound difference between a futorologist forecasting the future, and science developing a model and then extrapolating. The Scientific American article The Truth about Scientific Models you linked sums it up pretty well: “They don’t necessarily try to predict what will happen—but they can help us understand possible futures”. And: “What went wrong? Predictions are the wrong argument.”

              And I’d like to point out that article is written by one of my favorite scientists and science communicators, Sabine Hossenfelder. She also has a very good YouTube channel.

              So yes, what about DNA, quantum brains, Moore’s law, … what about other people claiming something. That all doesn’t change any facts.

                • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
                  1·
                  7 months ago

                  You still misinterpret what science is about. We’ve known that human language is subjective for centuries already. That’s why we invented an additional, objective language that’s concerned with logic and truth. It’s mathematics. And that’s also why natural science relies so heavily on maths.

                  And no sound scientist ever claimed that string theory is true. It was a candidate for a theory to explain everything. But it’s never been proven.

                  And which one is it, do you question objective reality? If so I’m automatically right, because that’s what I subjectively believe.