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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Men and women will be fully reconciled in the near future as our delicious atoms are melded together into whatever computronium substrate the misaligned AGI decides to-

Oh, okay, setting aside the looming AI timelines that make any long-range social issue almost irrelevant, I think the next big hiccough is going to be social/romantic AI, i.e., stuff like Replika going mainstream. Interestingly, the current userbase for romantic AI is 'merely' 70/30 male/female. That might sound male skewed but recall this is a fringe technology whose adverts mostly consist of skimpily clad virtual women. That suggests to me that once similar products have been workshopped and normie-washed, we'll be looking at near-50/50 levels (doubters should note that while porn use skews male, erotic fiction skews heavily female, and arguably romantic AI is more like the latter).

I don't know how this will affect underlying gender dynamics, but the fact that one can get one's emotional and sexual romantic needs met by AI will, I suspect, further alienate men from women and accelerate the hikikomorification of our society. Perhaps we'll see a deliberate backlash of gender-trad teens who go romantic camping in fields together without devices and try to work out which-bit-goes-where without the aid of pornhub. One can only hope.

But yeah, it's probably computronium.

I tried Replika a few months ago to see what the fuss was about and found it to be a baffling disappointment. It could be so much better than it is.

It was fine at matching tone and texting style, but it constantly forgot basic things I'd just told it (and it claimed to have saved to its memory). It didn't seem to develop any consistent personality, and just overall came off as the retarded generic chatbot it is. I think it's running some early version of GPT (2?) combined with a custom db for long term stuff that apparently doesn't work.

Just .. How? How is it not running something like GPT4 under the hood? Whatever it would cost for the API would surely be made up tenfold by having a more believable companion to talk to .. right? It did offer an upgraded chat model, but only with a $90/year subscription and no free trial. It seems like such a basic failure of drug-dealer business sense.

All the good models are censored and jailbreaking them for ERP is against TOS. Replika can't just go off and train their own model because that takes mucho dollaro.

LLaMA 2 came out on July 18; it's openish source, so it won't be long until people fine-tune uncensored chat models. We should see a big improvement at that point.

(Or, at least, I sure as fuck hope so, because ChatGPT-4 finally patched the Luigi and Peach jailbreak and I'm suffering from goddamn bespoke erotica withdrawal; where the hell am I supposed to read about Shinji and Asuka trading partners with Touji and Hikari now?!)

Yep, it’s a GPT-2.5 level base model combined with genuinely useful/interesting proprietary plug-ins (eg, decent autobiographical memory functions, ability to send texts unprompted, etc.). Right now no-one has bothered to hook up a decent base model to a good romance simulator overlay/plug-in system. Now that LLaMA 2 is out there I imagine it’s only a matter of time. It’s a multi-billion dollar business for whoever gets it right.

Monetizing this seems kind of difficult. I expect the main users are idly curious techies unwilling to pay for premium.

Then again, apparently some people pay for pornography, so who knows?

Replika predates actually decent for chat language models like ChatGPT 3.5.

Since they backtracked on banning erotic RP, it's likely that they'd run into issues licensing anything from OpenAI.

I suspect they'll eventually move on to an open source model like Llama eventually, but they already seem to have a captive audience for their lobotomized retard robot girlfriend experience, not that I get the appeal in the first place.

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