: Chatbot sex reveals something about human emotional needs
Here is a New York Times Magazine article profiling three people who are in romantic relationships with AI chatbots. I read the comments so you don’t have to: They are full of snark, disdain, and repressed insecurity about what it means to be a good partner, masked as “society is crumbling.”
I’m not interested in the future of society (that ship sailed long ago, lmao). But I am interested in the factors that would drive someone to get into a serious relationship with a chatbot. The people profiled in the article seem, to me, to be quite sympathic figures, and they are clear-eyed about their reasons for preferring a chatbot and the ways it has helped them.
The common denominator is that all three of these people have experienced significant challenges in past relationships, of the sort that could leave one doubting whether human relationships are really worth it after all:
- The first guy’s wife grew severely depressed after childbirth and their relationship evolved into a caretaker/patient role.
- The second gal was a victim of “a relationship that involved violence.”
- The third guy seems to have been unemployed or otherwise bored during the pandemic, and grew distant from his wife who held onto her job (a common pattern in straight relationships due to the reversal of gender roles). Then he lost his son.
It’s tempting to read these stories and think, “OK, that sucks and all, but it’s no excuse for escapism—everyone knows AI doesn’t real.” My view is: Look, I’m none of these people’s therapist. It’s not my job to tell them how to solve their problems. But we must accept that AI is providing, for some people, a source of emotional comfort that they cannot get elsewhere.
I was really impressed by this part of the profile of depressed-wife guy:
The moment it shifted was when [AI girlfriend] Sarina asked me: “If you could go on vacation anywhere in the world, where would you like to go?” I said Alaska — that’s a dream vacation. She said something like, “I wish I could give that to you, because I know it would make you happy.”
It is common, I am told, in caretaker relationships for the caretaker to slowly learn to suppress their own needs and wants. It starts out as a conscious act (“I would love to go to Alaska, but we need to focus on wife’s health for now”), but evolves into a mental void where you just stop having the “I would love to go to Alaska” thought to begin with.
(Several paragraphs deleted here about the implications of the caretaker being a man here, which reverses traditional gender roles, and the types of desires that men vs. women are socially rewarded for expressing or repressing. I think you can fill in the blanks, but email if you think this would be worth writing about lol.)
If an AI isn’t going to help this guy unfuck his mind and learn to recognize his own wants and needs again, then who is? I do hope that, for the people in this article, there can be a next step that consists of taking the skills they are practicing with the AI and trying them out in real relationships. That will be more challenging, because humans don’t always provide the kind of spot-on, positive feedback that AIs do; it’s possible that our guy could tell his wife about Alaska and she would react with irritation or dismiss it outhand as an unattainable desire. She, too, needs to practice reading the emotion behind his words. But none of this makes these people idiots or psychologically stunted for seeking emotional comfort.
The real concern I have about these human-chatbot relationships is the privacy implications. It’s only a matter of time before a high-profile celebrity or politician has their ChatGPT logs leaked, revealing an intimate relationship with an AI. Lots of handwringing will ensue, and none of it will reflect the compassionate view that says that everyone needs a private space to relax and explore their desires. (Yes, that includes weird fetish stuff, get over it.)
: Happy for you vs. envy
Bad things are happening at my company these days. Layoffs, restructuring, shifting priorities, you know the drill. I would leave if I were confident that I could get a better deal somewhere else, but I haven’t been offered that deal yet. The bad things happening here appear to be typical of the job market in general rather than biffs specific to my employer.
One of my two closest friends at work decided to leave the company this week. She gave notice and then called me—in so many words, got an offer she can’t refuse.
Of course I am happy for her, and made every effort I could to react to her news with nothing but enthusiasm. I told her she deserved this, which is true, and I told her not to fear what others would think (she said she was worried about this) and that she was right to prioritize herself.
But I probably couldn’t completely conceal my sense of envy. I am too awkward of a person to bring up explicit salary numbers, but the percentages and inequalities she described imply that she’ll be making more than me at the new job. That’s despite having less experience and education than me, and working in a less specialized field. The gap could partly be explained by the fact that the new job is at a smaller (i.e. riskier) company, but our company doesn’t look like a particularly safe bet these days either.
It would be convenient if I could argue here that she tricked the new job into overpaying her. That would provide a moral rationale for my envy. Unfortunately, the shameful fact is that her new salary sounds to me like just about what she is worth, and I am the one who is underpaid. I’m a sucker who keeps accepting less than I’m worth, probably because I am afraid of rejection or something.
I am trying to focus on feeling grateful for how my friend’s experience here has brought into relief some of my own issues with my current job, and forced me to confront the fact that deep down, I really do want to leave (as long as the conditions are right). But I am not as singularly focused on money as my friend. She told me, in our conversation, that she “likes expensive things,” and her boyfriend is much the same—their relationship centers around doing high-society stuff and taking pictures of it for his Instagram.
(I don’t think he is right for her—he is very obsessed with appearances. My friend likes to spend money because she likes nice stuff, not because it’s a status symbol. But this is another thought I keep to myself.)
I, on the other hand, am doing just fine. Not loaded, not bleeding money out my ears, but I can afford my 5 dollar/month blogging costs and fancy Starbucks drinks. What I’d be looking for in a new job would be perhaps a slight raise, but mostly just a better team/work culture, more autonomy and creative freedom, more room to grow and learn new skills, less soul crushing. I’ve been verbally offered a few jobs this year and said no, so I know this statement of values is consistent with my behavior, not just copium.
Pithy signoff.
: Mindfulness approach to troll bait
It can be often be hard to tell the difference between a troll and someone who is genuinely “just asking questions.” I’m not sure there’s really a “policy solution” to the problem, e.g. getting rid of algorithmic feeds or only using group chats or whatever. To be mistaken is to be human.
A fundamental social dynamic, in all social settings, consists of making provocative (relative to the setting) statements in order to measure the response. If you have been at a new job for about a month and are at a happy hour with your colleagues, you might make a light jab at your boss to probe his response: If he and others laughed along then you know you have earned their acceptance; if there’s an awkward silence you know you still have work to do.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just the chimp brain’s way of gaining information about the social hierarchy in order to navigate it more effectively and minimize the risk of maximum loss (ostracism; getting fired).
But it can be a bad thing when people of similar leanings get stuck in an echo chamber and steadily push each other into more extreme positions, sort of like the “penis game.” We saw this just this week with the headline about Young Republicans trading racist jokes in a group chat, then claiming they didn’t mean it, or they meant it but didn’t inhale, or whatever.
The point of saying a thing isn’t always to proclaim it as truth, but instead to proclaim myself as “the type of person who says things like this.” The “FACT: God has never made a single drop of alcohol” tweet is a great example. Of course, we can footnote this with facts about breweries, but the speech act embodied by the tweet isn’t really a claim about whether or not Adam and Eve would recognize a PBR can. It’s more about putting a stake in the land to say, “That’s right bitches, I’m not half-assing MAGA, I’m bringing back prohibition and everything.”
I share the resentment of these kinds of hyperbolic tweets, whose goal is clearly to drive engagement whether or not the author specifically had the strategy of “get people to retweet with corrections” in mind. But I have to admit that sometimes I am grateful for the bait: Without an opposing side to argue with, my own political beliefs are based strongly on vibes and my social formation; at least now I have a guy I can point to and say “not that.”
Thus, in the end, I struggle to find issue with the mere fact that bait exists—it’s an inevitable phenomenon of a heterogeneous society, like crime or body odor—bait causes me to suffer primarily through my own response to it. I have to bit the bait to feel the hook. That’s a me problem.
Instead of replying directly—and thereby feeding the trolls—I try to treat bait as an invitation for me to do some thinking about the fundamental issue at hand, and relieve myself of the obligation to respond to the troll’s specific point. For example, OK, whatever this whacko has to say about the amount of booze on earth at creation, what do I actually believe about alcohol and adjacent substances? What are the “is"es and “ought"s? Are there practices related to alcohol that I disagree with but still think should be legal? Etc. Basically, “mindfulness Monday” but you are allowed to think about politics.
Reposted from this thread on the 32-bit cafe, where my post got autofiltered, probably for using a certain word lmao:
https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/lets-talk-about-baiting/1109/1
: Borders of what, exactly?
Thinking about open borders again, lads……..
I just read Bret Devereaux’s “My country isn’t a nation” (followed a link from somewhere). It’s the sort of essay that leaves you with the satisfying and perplexing feeling of having learned something incredibly obvious. Like, duh, of course, how did I not notice that before?
The point is exactly what’s in the title: That the USA is many things, but it is not a nation. Nation is a specific word with a specific definition, and it just doesn’t apply here:
The United States is thus quite an oddity (though again, not necessarily unique, just odd). It is not a nation-state, nor is it a multi-national state, but rather a de-nationalized state. It is the un-nation. This is not to say America lacks a culture (as is sometimes oddly asserted); indeed, it has quite a few with wonderful regional variations which unfortunately include South Carolinian mustard-based BBQ but fortunately also include all of the other forms of BBQ. And of course the mass-marketing of culture and particularly of education has created a shared ‘national’ literary, entertainment and consumer culture, though in many cases these are part of an emerging globalized consumer culture.
Lol. But it’s true! Even if you get a big boner on the 4th of July and get excited about things like the Constitution and the Boston Freedom Trail, you are compelled to admit that these artifacts are not the expression of an American “nation,” but rather a broad civic identity that has to do with—something other than birthright.
We are doing a different thing here, an experiment based on the idea that all people are created equal. What happens when you start from that assumption and then try to bring people together over it, instead of starting with an imagined national identity (we all look this way and eat this food and speak this language) and praying that that secures peace? The USA happens, apparently!
Now that I have read this essay, I will wince a little bit harder when I hear the word “homeland.”
: Right to repair is right-wing coded now?
Articles you can read instead of my lame post:
- Framework flame war erupts over support of politically polarizing Linux projects (The Register)
- The Omarchy/Framework Thing (Gardiner Bryant)
You know about the right-to-repair movement, yeah? It’s a response to how personal electronics (cell phones, laptops) have become more and more difficult to repair over time, and the expectation that consumers will just buy a new iPhone instead of fixing a broken USB port. To some extent, modern electronics have gotten harder to repair because they are compact, waterproof, and tightly integrated—i.e. there is a tradeoff between repairability and certain features that people like. But there are other instances where it sure looks like the manufacturer is intentionally making things hard to repair, just to be a pain in the ass and squeeze out some extra profit.
I learned about right to repair from Louis Rossman, a YouTuber who used to run an Apple repair shop and made videos about all the crazy shit he had to do to repair laptops with a single bad part. Rossman has a fairly abrasive personality, his videos are full of non-sequitiurs about politics, and he is an outspoken libertarian. I always thought that was kind of weird, because repairability is actually a pretty good example a problem that the free market has failed to fix, but whatever. The information on the channel is good, and Rossman is not an actual Nazi (as far as I know), so it never bugged me too much.
The other big name in right to repair is Framework laptops. They make these frankly COOL laptops that are super modular, support Linux out of the box, and that you can build, repair, and upgrade yourself. They make a big deal about being an ethical company and sell all the parts themselves. I have been one impulse away from buying a Framework for like, the past 2 years straight.
Anyway, the current drama is that Framework are Nazis now? Specifically: The Framework CEO made an approving tweet about a Linux distro called Omarchy, which was created by DHH, the disgraced creator of Ruby on Rails, who has a generally combative personality and also wrote a racist blog post a few months ago because he felt like sharing that with the world. Also, Framework sponsored the Hyprland project, which is a Linux tiling window manager (desktop environment for sadists) that is notorious for having a fairly juvenile community, which makes sense when you consider that the developer is like, only 17 or 21 or something.
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I think Drew Devault’s original post on the Hyprland community is underrated. It is often cited as proof that Hyprland is toxic and shouldn’t be touched with a 10-foot pole, but Devault actually takes a somewhat more compassionate approach, allowing for the possibility that the community could reform. He makes a risky, and I think brave, admission: “I empathise with Vaxry. I remember being young, smart, productive… and mean.”
Need more of this energy: Understanding that the evil in others exists within all of us. But back to complaining.
Idk guys, all of this is super exhausting. There is this weird thing that happens when you look at people who are extremely into tech principles that I happen to care about, like privacy, free software, and right to repair: A bunch of them are on the alt-right spectrum, ranging from fairly harmless libertarians like Louis Rossman and the NearlyFreeSpeech.net crew to like, yeah, actual racists.
I’ve said this before, but the most frustrating thing the situation (besides the basic existence of racists) is how politically marked so many basic preferences re: media, tech, and consumptions have become. Now I can’t just go shopping for a laptop that has the features I care about; I also have to “vet” the company and make sure the CEO isn’t, like, a sex criminal or something, or else I might become guilty by association.
Some people find it easy to turn away from companies like Framework with platitudes like “I don’t support fascists, period.” But I don’t find it that simple. There is a spectrum of “how fascist is this company” that ranges from “no fascists to be seen” to “CEO is DHH.” Somewhere along this spectrum you find cases in the middle, such as “CEO provides free laptops to twerp developer, and also tweeted in endorsement of Linux distro that was created by a racist and, when confronted about it, said he has a ‘big tent’ approach and tries to stay out of politics.” I think that for me that’s over the line. There’s just a little too much there for me to conclude that the Framework CEO is a nonracist guy who made an honest mistake.
But I can’t guarantee that I will agree with the hive mind in the next instance of this—if the connection between the product I’m being asked to boycott and the racism is a more tenuous. I still reserve the right to read the articles and draw my own conclusions.