• Tommasi [she/her, pup/pup's]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I just don’t see where the contradiction is. Why can you not work on creating human connections that can actually make you happy, while also anthropomorphising a chatbot that you can say I love you to, and hear it said back?

    Of course it’s a coping mechanism, but that’s not unhealthy in itself. Not every minute of your life can be spent on self-improvement or working towards your goals. Sometimes people need an escape and that’s fine. That’s not mutually exclusive with trying to improve things.

    • Ideology [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The arcane puppetry at work here is designed to become an addiction not dissimilar to scrolling through social media to get a parasocial hit of dopamine. The capitalist is putting you in front of a slot machine with humanoid mannerisms. It may not seem like it on the surface but these addictions are a form of self harm.

      Consider the people who spend everything on an onlyfans model and then stalk them. Consider the massive outcry that occurred when replika shut down. These services aren’t being used as stepping stones to a better life. They’re whirlpools that suck you in and chew up your bones so that their creators can live in comforts you can’t afford.

      The only stepping stone to real love and not this mechanical perversion of love is to learn to love yourself, then others, then humanity. If you trust a robot’s love then it’s too late. You’ve already caved to the ideology of a dead world.

    • Tunnelvision [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Meaningful relationships take time and a lot of work to maintain. They involve trust and understanding each other. Messing with this thing for even one second is not worth the time or effort even if it does say it loves you because every second spent on it is one second wasted that could have gone into meeting, developing, or maintaining a relationship. Ultimately do whatever you want, but in my opinion this isn’t even cope, it’s just giving up.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Of course it’s a coping mechanism, but that’s not unhealthy in itself. Not every minute of your life can be spent on self-improvement or working towards your goals. Sometimes people need an escape and that’s fine. That’s not mutually exclusive with trying to improve things.

      Because your social skills are going to get even worse since you’re “practicing” your social skills with a shitty AI that you’ll have to spend more time unlearning. It’s like how people who spend time curbstomping bots suck when they play against actual humans because they pick up habits that come from curbstomping bots.

      • Tommasi [she/her, pup/pup's]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Sorry, but this seems like a huge reach to me. It’s not “practicing social skills”, it’s pure entertainment. Downtime in the same vein as watching youtube or netflix. That it will start to change how you interact with people in any significant way sounds pretty baseless.

        Even in the analogy it doesn’t work like that. In most games, someone who’s spent 30 hours playing against bots and 0 against humans are gonna have a quicker time learning how to play against humans than someone who’s spent 0 hours on both, despite the former having habits to unlearn. They’re bad because they don’t know how to play against humans, not because they played against bots.