105
Uncharted territory: do AI girlfriend apps promote unhealthy expectations for human relationships?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
105 points (91.3% liked)
Technology
59688 readers
4089 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I would also worry about the privacy aspects, as people tend to reveal pretty personal information to each other inside of relationships. What happens when somebody reveals something illegal to an AI chatbot partner? Suddenly your partner is ratting you out to the cops, which admittedly could happen in real life anyways, but in general how much privacy do you really have. It’s kind of niche audience for now I guess, but I suspect when this function gets merged with RealDoll form factors is when this whole artificial girlfriend will really take off. At that point, when the choice becomes whether you go hunting for a real human girl who is difficult to please, unpredictable, doesn’t always do what you want, doesn’t share all your likes/fetishes, etc VS just getting an AI girlfriend that can be anything you want them to be and won’t say no to anything, I think it’s easy to see the route that many will go.
<insert Futurama ‘Don’t have sex with robots’ video>
Brought to you by the space pope
One, I don't think AI RealDolls are gonna be catching drug traffickers lol, and two, there's probably a rather uncomfortable question to be seriously discussed about whether it's wrong for pedos to have an AI relationship doll.
Even if we find it gross, is it wrong if they aren't hurting anyone? That said, it's still secondary to the whole "ignoring all privacy to scan for possible crime" and the debate of whether we should even be treating drugs as a criminal issue instead of a medical one. You're basically arguing that we should secretly put cameras in everyone's homes so we can catch all the nefarious actors. Cameras that are watching all of us every time we have sex.
There are so many dystopian stories based on this concept. You're literally advocating for a police state level of monitoring, so that the government knows so much about you that they can suspect you of crimes that haven't even been committed yet. What happens when investigations start with people flagged for "suspicious" data as determined by black box algorithms that nobody really knows how they handle the data they were trained on.
And drug use is treated as a medical issue in a handful of countries, where instead of making them illegal and pushing them underground, they let people get their heroin tested for purity, get clean needles for free, and shoot up at clinics. It prevents overdoses, ensures vulnerable users are regularly in contact with clinical staff, and makes it easier to help people struggling with addiction. I also fail to see how sex dolls will help catch drug traffickers in a way that would be different from just having everyone's phones or computers spy on them.
Bro, how do you think the things would spy on people, if they don't have computers in them? You're just splitting hairs because you think it's moral to spy on everyone through a sextoy with an internet connection instead of any other computing device with an internet connection, just because it isn't illegal yet.
The whole "those with nothing to fear have nothing to hide" bullshit falls apart when used on you. You may not have anything to hide, but I doubt you'd be happy to let law enforcement watch you masturbate, or sleep, or shower, because you don't have anything to hide. Invite them in to record you talking to friends and family to ensure you aren't communicating about crimes. Sure, you might not have anything to "hide" right now, but there's plenty of things you don't want to share, and you never know what the government is going to be like in the future. Imagine an extremist party gets to power and you hold freely recorded views antithetical to their beliefs? Or you or a family member jokes about speeding or shoplifting and now you're flagged as under suspicion for criminal activity, a preferential suspect for any unsolved crimes geographical near them because breaking the law once makes you more likely to break it again.
Silently watching everything people do isn't some zero cost activity. It's people watching you, your kids, your friends, your family, at all moments of their lives and if you don't think it'll be abused then you're out of your mind.