Do we think a Boyfriend version will ever come along? Interesting that I've seen so much talk about AI girlfriends but there's a quiet assumption that straight women won't be interested in this technology. Is that correct?
Very much not correct. I thought it had started with AI boyfriends. The story about those was that, in tapping into what you might call the 'boyfriend archetype', the AIs tended to portray maleness by getting bullying and abusive, sometimes to a shocking degree.
I think there's a lot to be learned by studying all this, but boy is it an ethical minefield.
There's no question that you can get an AI to drop into a 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' mode, using the sum total of human discourse as its neural network (okay, using GPT), but in so doing it's revealing more about us than it is about itself. It doesn't know how to male, or how to female, except for what it draws from us. Its failures are revealing on a very deep level.
Why would you want an AI that refuses to be there for you while passive aggressively demanding that you meet its every emotional need which it cannot even begin to express because it lacks the fundamental language?
Some of us guys would prefer that version as well.
I’m not sure there’s an assumption, more that the author is a straight guy and creating things based on his experience and perspective. Would the creator even know what a woman, or someone like myself wanted in a partner?
There is truth to our industry being predominantly male though, so this probably gets more interest from people on sites like HN and Reddit.
I feel like naming your AI companion "ai companion" is like naming your startup company "startup company": not very descriptive, confusing with all the other people doing the same thing, and harder to search for
I think it is appropriate to thoroughly consider the ethical implications of whatever you are doing, with the support of one of the many researchers interested in ethics
