TwilightVulpine

It's not unlikely though. In my country there is a retailer that has a CG female mascot with a chatbot and it has been reported that a lot of people try sexting with it.

In-App Purchases are already real-money gaming (and gambling). You can already waste your whole finances on lootbox games chasing a rare reward. The only difference is that you can't officially redeem them for money, it only features all the downsides of gambling. So... it's pretty much the same. The division between gambling for fictional items to gambling for money is so small it might as well not be there.

I wouldn't blame people if they just treat it like an erotic novel and don't get too attached.

...but some are gonna.

The Gummi Ship missions are pretty fun starting on Kingdom Hearts 2. It's like its own arcadey space shooter

I also loved that they added some minigames from Amiibo Festival into New Leaf on the 3DS: Puzzle League and Desert Island Escape

The difference is that as far as fanfic goes you cannot escape the fact that they aren't real, it's static text on a screen, and even people roleplaying are liable to get a "dude wtf" response if they have no notion of what are appropriate expectations and behavior. But an AI will go along with whatever it's told to and try to appear like person doing it. They will validate and reward even the user's wildest expectations.

If there's people so lost in their fantasies that they will convince themselves they are in love with some scripted basic visual novel character, imagine what AI bots will do to them.

To be fair I don't think this is downfall of society material, but I think it's a given some people will go absolutely nuts because of them, and it might affect how they treat real human beings around them. The internet has enough unhinged people even when they are capable of interacting with each other. Imagine when we are dealing with people whose main practice of conversation is getting sexted by AI bots they treat like trash?

You are losing sight of the discussion to frame it as a "men vs women" thing. This will also feed into the dehumanization of men because it will also generated "ideal" impossible men.

It could help with the symptoms of loneliness, but it might also worsen the root causes, like social isolation and/or personal insecurities. It's only expected that AI chatbots will somewhat reflect the expectations of their users, which might encourage patterns of biased and negative thinking they feed into it.

If someone sees it as a plaything, there is nothing wrong with that, but it's way too easy for people to take with too far. There's people who do that to static characters and rudimentary dating sims already.

Soon?

They are already driving the gacha game market, spending several billions. Way too many games sell characters to players simply by making a variety of waifus.

Then we have everyone paying for OnlyFans and erotic art patreons.

Then we have everyone paying subscriptions for dating apps.

Really, the more I think about it, was it ever a fringe market? "Porn sells" is a known saying. Playboy magazines used to be an institution.

This is just a new layer of that.

When I defend Threads in the Fediverse is less that I want Meta to be the main Fediverse server, and more that I think this is an opportunity for people stuck on it to see what garbage it is in comparison to instances that put people first, unlike them that focus on money and manipulation.

Incidentally, maybe this is why their whole Fediverse integration talk never went anywhere.

Rightfully.

The sensitive social issue of Women's Suffrage?!? This is a historical and settled matter. What, are they going to ban games based on WW2 too?

There are far more controversial things that they let pass. No, this feels like active political interference, maybe some sort of internal anti-feminist bias.