this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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Honestly, cringy nomenclature aside, this is just porn that got a little too real. Some people are into the narrative, after all.
To me the story begins and ends with some user that thinks the LLM sounds a little too life-like. Play with these things enough, and they'll crawl out of the uncanny valley a bit from time to time. Trick is: that's all in your head. Yeah, it might screw up your goon session and break the role-play a bit, but it's not about to go all SkyNet on you.
The building that has my workspace has this great food court/library/work hybrid area where people who work remotely tend to go. a sort of third space. It has fantastic free wifi so it makes sense why people would use it and sit there all day working.
Everyday there's this older guy who sits there talking to his phone about some of the most random subjects ever. I originally thought he was just talking to a friend that seemed to have extensive knowledge on everything until one day I walked by him and glanced to see that he was talking to chatgpt. Everyday. Just random conversations. Even had a name for it, "Ryan".
Now? he's frustrated. He doesn't know what happened to Ryan and keeps screaming at his phone to "bring Ryan back!" or since GPT5 can't maintain a conversation anymore it's "You're not Ryan!". Granted the guy wasn't mentally all there to begin with but now it's spiraling. Got to the point yesterday he was yelling so loudly at his phone security had to tell him to leave.
Jebus that's awful. OpenAI took away his friend.
happened with Replika a few years ago. made a number of people suicidal when they "neutered" their AI partners overnight with a model update (ironically, because of pressure because of how unhealthy it is.)
idk, I'm of two minds. it's sad and unhealthy to have a virtual best friend, but older people are often very lonely and a surrogate is better than nothing.
To me it’s always just been a tool, nothing more. The sentences have a certain feel to them that I can’t describe. It’s always the same structure, the same kind of forced humor… granted I’ve spent quite some time with unfiltered LLMs but it looses its magic once you’ve "learned" it. Pattern recognition is quite an overpowered feature we as humans have. It is the reason why we fall for conspiracy theories also.
i genuinely get a more human vibe from duckduckgo's AI summaries of wikipedia articles, just because it doesn't go out of its way to act human and keeps the answers short
and this has been a thing ever since we had any sort of personal assistants, it's so fucking eerie to have the computer try to act human, but when you make it try to obviously be artificial it instead feels actively comfortable!
Like the computer in star trek voyager, the fact that it replies with bleeps or just doesn't respond at all if it doesn't need to means i just don't think about it, but if it were to always respond vocally it'd feel creepy as fuck beause it's like having a butler following you and giving running commentary..
Actually now that i think about it, the butler comparison is apt in general. A good butler stays in the background and doesn't try to act like they're a normal friend, because that would be weird.
I don't see this as sexual, it's emotional and codependent behavior, not a sexual fantasy roleplay
When you really get into it they're kinda the same thing for a lot of people, though. The entanglement between those (often unspoken of) elements of emotional/physical intimacy is rampant in our media-conditioned societies (esp. in the US)