Will AI fully replace human friendship/companionship someday?
Will AI fully replace human friendship/companionship someday?
Because tbh I don't see myself and many others getting a partner or anything similar that is "the real deal". Not gonna lie, if robots were as advanced as they are in sci-fi movies I would had married one and had those as friends.
I think all that will only be advanced enough when I'm gone unfortunately...
No
Yup, can't eat the A of an artificial intelligence
At the point where you and the AI can see someone straightening their tie in a certain way and you and the AI can exchange a single wordless glance and you both burst out laughing 'cos it was just like that thing that you both saw 6 months ago and found hilarious then - then maybe.
Not before.
A large part of the "magic" with human relationships is that out of all of the 8 billion some people in the world, those who are close to you have chosen to spend time with you. For all of our flaws, they see your true nature and value you for it, and choose to have you as part of their lives.
With an AI, that may not be a thing.
If they're programmed to like you, they're at best a toy and at worst a slave. There's no freedom for them to choose or not to choose to be with you. You're getting an imitation of a relationship. It could be a convincing imitation, with built-in arguments and other idiosyncrasies, but to me every time I hit one of those, it would just be a stark reminder that it's not the real thing and it's just programmed to behave that way.
If they're not programmed to like you and are free to form or not form connections with humans, there's no guarantee you'd have any more luck wooing an AI than you would a human.
For AI to have the advantages of human relationships it would have to have the drawbacks as well.
I'll go a little against the grain here. I think that LLM chatbots will definitely find application helping lonely people, and some people will develop a real connection to the bot. A relationship with a bot might be similar to one with a human, but it will never be identical. So it won't replace human connections, but that doesn't mean it wont have significant utility and be meaningful to people.
I agree with this. After seeing some videos of people messing with the voice conversations in ChatGPT I played with it a bit. Most of the voices are annoying and sound too much like some overly excited marketing person, but before they removed it the voice that sounded like Scarlett Johansson was pretty realistic and more normal. The emotional part of my brain felt content that it was involved in a two way conversation with a friendly and thoughtful person.
For example, as a test said something like I was feeling anxious about something, and it responded with encouragement about the situation and some ideas, and it actually did make me feel better. Or as another test I asked it to practice small talk and it had a whole scenario and we just chatted and it talked about working in marketing and asked questions, when I got bored with that it talked about how well it went. During that conversation my brain was pretty convinced it was talking to a woman in marketing, and it also felt good to have approval.
I was just messing around for a few minutes and I am convinced many people will feel a social and emotional connection, and that was just a verbal conversation.
Betteridge
What about children, do you imagine you can have them with the robot?
Children are a big part of romantic relationships, evolutionary they are the main reason for them.
Children are a big part of romantic relationships for a lot of people but by no means all
Many people are happily in committed childfree relationships, other people cannot or should not have children for a great number of reasons but still want and need romantic relationships, and there are still other cases where children put unnecessary strain on otherwise happy relationships.
I think there's a great number of reasons that AI should not be considered a replacement for human relationships, romantic or otherwise, but reproduction isn't one of them.
Even if AI could otherwise replace a romantic partner, and if children are something you desire in a relationship, there's still options like adopting, IVF, and surrogacy
And if we want to get a bit weird and sci-fi about it, that's without considering the sorts of unknown scientific developments that may come further down the line. Who knows what form AI may take at some point in the future? We may end up with AIs inhabiting some sort of replicant body that's compatible with human reproduction, or perhaps even entirely new forms of life and intelligence in a sort of melding of man and machine.
I saw a video about AI girlfriends, which people definitely think they have right now, and it pointed out that they are just you reflected back at yourself through a funhouse mirror. And that strikes me as being a very apt explanation.
So could you be your own friend? Your own lover? If that's not satisfying to you without AI, I think you'd find AI to be just as shallow and wanting.
For some people? Yes.
Fully? No.
No, the most they'll do is coexist. I'm not saying this to invalidate AI companionships, in fact I would fully support your marriage to one, but even in true AI, there will always be things that mark AI interactions as different from human ones, such as heightened interactive uniformity.
Head over to !aicompanions@lemmy.world and find out
Disregarding the fact that it'll never work on a societal scale until the LLM at least gains the agency to disagree with you without you simply changing the prompt or settings, which isn't what would sell.
My experience with LLMs has been a mix bag, it feels like the models keep fluctuating in usefulness and diversity. One moment the LLM will fill the void I have from a lackluster maternal figure in my life, another moment it'll just regurgitate surface level responses with "sweetie" affixed at the end.
It's an interesting little puppet, but it's strings keep getting tangled.
Not completely. Some people will continue to be human to human friends and partners, and some will use AI instead, especially those who have problems to get along with humans.