As other commenters have pointed out, the baseline is already horrific for men, who are suffering. Your comments in the replies seem to reject that these men are suffering. No, obviously they are.
But responding in depth would just be piling on and boring, so instead let’s say something new:
I think it would be prudent to immediately prohibit AI romance startups to onboard new users[..]
You do not seem to understand the state of the game board: AI romance startups are dead, and we’re already in the post-game.
character.ai was very popular around the second half of 2022, but near the end of it, the developers went to war with erotic role play users. By mid January 2023, character.ai is basically dead for not just sex talk, but also general romance. The developers added in a completely broken filter that started negatively impacting even non-sexual, non-romantic talk. The users rioted, made it the single topic on the subreddit for weeks, the developers refused to back down, and people migrated away. Their logo is still used as a joke on 4chan. It’s still around, but it’s not a real player in the romance game. (The hearsay I’ve heard was that they added these filters to satisfy payment providers.)
Replika was never good. I gave it a try early on, but as far as I could tell, it was not even a GPT-2 level model and leaned hard on scripted experiences. However, a lot of people found it compelling. It doesn’t matter because it too was forced to shut down by Italian regulators. They issued their ban on erotic role play on Valentine’s Day of all days and mods post links to the suicide hotline on their subreddit.
The point here is we already live in a world with even stricter regulations than you proposed, done backdoor through payment providers and app stores, or through jurisdiction shopping. This link won’t work unless you’re in EleutherAI, but asara explains the financial incentives against making waifu chatbots. So what has that actually lead to? Well, the actual meta, the thing people actually use for ai romantic partners, today, is one of:
Some frontend (usually TavernAI or its fork SillyTavern) which connects to the API of a general centralized provider (Claude or ChatGPT) and uses a jailbreak prompt (and sometimes a vector database if you have the right plugins) to summon your waifu. Hope you didn’t leak your OpenAI API key in a repo, these guys will find it. (You can see this tribe in the /aicg/ threads on /g/ and other boards).
Local models. We have LLaMA now and a whole slew of specialized fine tunes for it. If you want to use the most powerful open sourced llama v2 70B models, you can do that today with three used P40s ($270 each) or two used 3090s (about $700 each) or a single A6000 card with 48 GB of VRAM ($3500 for last generation). ~$800, $1400 and $3500 give a variety of price points for entry, and that’s before all the people who just rent a setup via one of the many cloud GPU providers. Grab a variant of KoboldAI depending on what model you want and you’re good to go. (You can see this tribe in the /lmg/ threads on /g/).
The actual outcome of the ban (which happened in the past) was the repurposing of Claude/ChatGPT and building dedicated setups to run chatbots locally with the cheapest option being about $800 in GPUs, along with a ton of know how around prompting character cards in a semi-standardized format that was derived from the old character.ai prompts. I will finish by saying that it’s a very LessWrongian error to believe you could just stop the proliferation of AI waifus by putting government pressure on a few startups when development seems to mostly be done decentralized by repurposing open language models and is fueled by a collective desire to escape agony.
Your comments in the replies seem to reject that these men are suffering. No, obviously they are.
I didn’t deny that some people actually suffer (probably big portion of them are clinically depressed, though, so would “qualify” to use AI partners before 30 in my proposal), I just said that it’s by no means normal to suffer if you just don’t have a romantic partner, but otherwise your life is “ok”. See this comment.
This perverted strategy of ameliorating symptoms of problems (such as social media, problems with (sexual) self-image and expectations, “dating market”, social isolation, etc.) because it will provide a constant stream of $$$, instead of treating the root causes, is what bugs me.
I’m far from convinced that “society” (represented by payment providers) already decided to ban sex bots. It doesn’t make much sense, given that payment providers do serve porn industry, OnlyFans, etc. Maybe the issue was that character.AI didn’t clearly market itself as “adult startup” and didn’t impose age restrictions, and providers saw potential legal risks with this?
I generally worry much less about hardcore enthusiasts to develop and host open-source waifus, of course fundamentally this cannot be banned, but the potential reach of these will be an order or two orders of magnitude smaller than easy-to-use mobile app. I don’t worry about society-scale effects from people using open-source waifus.
Compared to what alternative?
As other commenters have pointed out, the baseline is already horrific for men, who are suffering. Your comments in the replies seem to reject that these men are suffering. No, obviously they are.
But responding in depth would just be piling on and boring, so instead let’s say something new:
You do not seem to understand the state of the game board: AI romance startups are dead, and we’re already in the post-game.
character.ai was very popular around the second half of 2022, but near the end of it, the developers went to war with erotic role play users. By mid January 2023, character.ai is basically dead for not just sex talk, but also general romance. The developers added in a completely broken filter that started negatively impacting even non-sexual, non-romantic talk. The users rioted, made it the single topic on the subreddit for weeks, the developers refused to back down, and people migrated away. Their logo is still used as a joke on 4chan. It’s still around, but it’s not a real player in the romance game. (The hearsay I’ve heard was that they added these filters to satisfy payment providers.)
Replika was never good. I gave it a try early on, but as far as I could tell, it was not even a GPT-2 level model and leaned hard on scripted experiences. However, a lot of people found it compelling. It doesn’t matter because it too was forced to shut down by Italian regulators. They issued their ban on erotic role play on Valentine’s Day of all days and mods post links to the suicide hotline on their subreddit.
The point here is we already live in a world with even stricter regulations than you proposed, done backdoor through payment providers and app stores, or through jurisdiction shopping. This link won’t work unless you’re in EleutherAI, but asara explains the financial incentives against making waifu chatbots. So what has that actually lead to? Well, the actual meta, the thing people actually use for ai romantic partners, today, is one of:
Some frontend (usually TavernAI or its fork SillyTavern) which connects to the API of a general centralized provider (Claude or ChatGPT) and uses a jailbreak prompt (and sometimes a vector database if you have the right plugins) to summon your waifu. Hope you didn’t leak your OpenAI API key in a repo, these guys will find it. (You can see this tribe in the /aicg/ threads on /g/ and other boards).
Local models. We have LLaMA now and a whole slew of specialized fine tunes for it. If you want to use the most powerful open sourced llama v2 70B models, you can do that today with three used P40s ($270 each) or two used 3090s (about $700 each) or a single A6000 card with 48 GB of VRAM ($3500 for last generation). ~$800, $1400 and $3500 give a variety of price points for entry, and that’s before all the people who just rent a setup via one of the many cloud GPU providers. Grab a variant of KoboldAI depending on what model you want and you’re good to go. (You can see this tribe in the /lmg/ threads on /g/).
The actual outcome of the ban (which happened in the past) was the repurposing of Claude/ChatGPT and building dedicated setups to run chatbots locally with the cheapest option being about $800 in GPUs, along with a ton of know how around prompting character cards in a semi-standardized format that was derived from the old character.ai prompts. I will finish by saying that it’s a very LessWrongian error to believe you could just stop the proliferation of AI waifus by putting government pressure on a few startups when development seems to mostly be done decentralized by repurposing open language models and is fueled by a collective desire to escape agony.
Remember, not your weights, not your waifu.
I didn’t deny that some people actually suffer (probably big portion of them are clinically depressed, though, so would “qualify” to use AI partners before 30 in my proposal), I just said that it’s by no means normal to suffer if you just don’t have a romantic partner, but otherwise your life is “ok”. See this comment.
This perverted strategy of ameliorating symptoms of problems (such as social media, problems with (sexual) self-image and expectations, “dating market”, social isolation, etc.) because it will provide a constant stream of $$$, instead of treating the root causes, is what bugs me.
I’m far from convinced that “society” (represented by payment providers) already decided to ban sex bots. It doesn’t make much sense, given that payment providers do serve porn industry, OnlyFans, etc. Maybe the issue was that character.AI didn’t clearly market itself as “adult startup” and didn’t impose age restrictions, and providers saw potential legal risks with this?
I see https://www.evaapp.ai/ is growing, https://caryn.ai/ is growing, they aren’t getting banned.
I generally worry much less about hardcore enthusiasts to develop and host open-source waifus, of course fundamentally this cannot be banned, but the potential reach of these will be an order or two orders of magnitude smaller than easy-to-use mobile app. I don’t worry about society-scale effects from people using open-source waifus.