Getting “building something no one wants” vibes from the AI girlfriend startups. I don’t think men are going to drop out of the dating market until we have some kind of robotics/social revolution, possibly post-AGI. Lonely dudes are just not that interested in talking to chatbots that (so they believe) lack any kind of internal emotion or psychological life, cannot be shown to their friends/parents, and cannot have sex or bear children.
I agree: the capabilities of AI romantic partners probably aren’t the bottleneck to their wider adoption, considering the success of relatively primitive chatbots like Replika at attracting users. People sometimes become romantically attached to non-AI anime/video game characters despite not being able to interact with them at all! There doesn’t appear to be much correlation between the interactive capabilities of fictional-character romantic partners and their appeal to users/followers.
There’s a parallel here with VR. Some part of peoples’ intuition says that VR porn/video games has to be a Next Evolution over simple screen + keyboard interfaces, worth pouring billions of dollars into, because VR is “more immersive” or something. But actually a laptop and a USB mouse works just fine.
I disagree. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the AI waifu space[1]. Lack of internal emotion or psychological life? Just simulate internal monologue. Lack of long-term memory? Have the AI waifu keep a journal. Lack of visuals? Use a LoRA fine-tuned diffusion model alongside the text chat.
I’d be building my own AI waifu startup if we didn’t face x-risks. It seems fun (like building your own video game), and probably a great benefit to its users.
Also, lonely men will not be the only (or even primary) user demographic. Women seem to read a lot of erotica. I expect that this is an untapped market of users, one that pandering to will not make your startup look low status either.
[1]: Not using the word “girlfriend” here because I’d like to use a more gender-neutral term, and “waifu” seems pretty gender-neutral to me, and to one target demographic of such services.
I’d be building my own AI waifu startup if we didn’t face x-risks. It seems fun (like building your own video game), and probably a great benefit to its users.
I wonder if we will ever have a sexbot revolution. The urge to regulate other people’s sexuality seems too strong. I can imagine a future where people spend most of their time in virtual reality that allows them to do almost anything… except, if they want some sexual experience, a stern robotic voice reminds them that this would violate the Terms of Service.
Getting “building something no one wants” vibes from the AI girlfriend startups. I don’t think men are going to drop out of the dating market until we have some kind of robotics/social revolution, possibly post-AGI. Lonely dudes are just not that interested in talking to chatbots that (so they believe) lack any kind of internal emotion or psychological life, cannot be shown to their friends/parents, and cannot have sex or bear children.
I agree: the capabilities of AI romantic partners probably aren’t the bottleneck to their wider adoption, considering the success of relatively primitive chatbots like Replika at attracting users. People sometimes become romantically attached to non-AI anime/video game characters despite not being able to interact with them at all! There doesn’t appear to be much correlation between the interactive capabilities of fictional-character romantic partners and their appeal to users/followers.
There’s a parallel here with VR. Some part of peoples’ intuition says that VR porn/video games has to be a Next Evolution over simple screen + keyboard interfaces, worth pouring billions of dollars into, because VR is “more immersive” or something. But actually a laptop and a USB mouse works just fine.
I disagree. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the AI waifu space[1]. Lack of internal emotion or psychological life? Just simulate internal monologue. Lack of long-term memory? Have the AI waifu keep a journal. Lack of visuals? Use a LoRA fine-tuned diffusion model alongside the text chat.
I’d be building my own AI waifu startup if we didn’t face x-risks. It seems fun (like building your own video game), and probably a great benefit to its users.
Also, lonely men will not be the only (or even primary) user demographic. Women seem to read a lot of erotica. I expect that this is an untapped market of users, one that pandering to will not make your startup look low status either.
[1]: Not using the word “girlfriend” here because I’d like to use a more gender-neutral term, and “waifu” seems pretty gender-neutral to me, and to one target demographic of such services.
I think you might wind up depressed by the experience. Certainly this guy did: https://mazzzystar.github.io/2023/11/16/ai-girlfriend-product/
I wonder if we will ever have a sexbot revolution. The urge to regulate other people’s sexuality seems too strong. I can imagine a future where people spend most of their time in virtual reality that allows them to do almost anything… except, if they want some sexual experience, a stern robotic voice reminds them that this would violate the Terms of Service.