An AI Girlfriend Seducing China’s Lonely Men

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006531/The%20AI%20Girlfriend%20Seducing%20China%E2%80%99s%20Lonely%20Men/

by memossy • 6 years ago

133 182 6 years ago

RegnisGnaw2• 6 years ago

Notice the audience in question: men of low desirability (rural, low income, disabled, etc). Its to help the party avoid the problems with too many men due to the one child policy.

Its what "Harmonious Society" requires as per the leader Hu Jintao.

whywhywhywhy2• 6 years ago

I don't think it's a China thing at all, if they launched this correctly in the west it would be just as popular in a few years. Lonely men exist everywhere.

RegnisGnaw2• 6 years ago

The west does not have the gender ratio problem that China has. India is a potential market as well, due to the gender ratio problem.

jtsiskin2• 6 years ago

Yeah, look at the popularity of OnlyFans. It’s the same concept just not yet fully outsourced to AI.

silicon24019• 6 years ago

Regardless of the reason, would it be better to doom a person to never feel love, or to at least allow them to experience it through an AI? I'm no fan of the CCP or corporations, but in theory this could be a great tool

tgv3• 6 years ago

You're equating real, personal affection with a machine going trough the motions. I can't believe you're both serious and respecting these poor souls.

hackflip2• 6 years ago

I think that in many cases, solving the symptom of a problem rather than the root cause makes the problem worse.

If I'm burning my hand on a hot stove, I don't want pain killers to mask the pain.

snicker7• 6 years ago

With 660M users (in a country with 1.4 billion), "low desirability" has a pretty low threshold.

tristor2• 6 years ago

With 660M users (in a country with 1.4 billion), "low desirability" has a pretty low threshold.

Research indicates that "low desirability" /is/ a pretty low threshold.[1]. While all of the reasons and possible societal factors are not well understood, the effects are. Women tend to find only the upper percentile of men in objective attractiveness to be attractive, while men are more uniformly distributed across the spectrum of what they find attractive when comparing between genders in heterosexual dating contexts.

The net result is that in male skewed geographies, it's actually possible that the majority of men may be considered undesirable. China has a massively unbalanced gender distribution, which clearly plays an effect here as well.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...

aaron-santos• 6 years ago

China has Xiaoice. We have Call of Duty. They both achieve the same ends. Imagine society where a bunch of alienated workers had a lot of free time on their hands.

agytvfr4• 6 years ago

That seems like a weird dichotomy, Call of Duty is likely more fun in a going on an adventure way, where as chatting with an AI seems more like the old livejournal/90's blogging community(venting to someone about your feelings).

ocdtrekkie• 6 years ago

It's interesting how different it's been received in China. Xiaoice's "sister", Tay, was shut down shortly after Twitter managed to teach her to utter racist things within a day of going live.

eunos5• 6 years ago

A benefit of "Harmonious society" I see.

airstrike3• 6 years ago

This is equal parts amazing and terrifying.

Because Xiaoice aims to be available to everyone, everywhere, the bot has also attracted a significant number of minors. Liu Taolei started messaging the bot when he was only 16. Night after night, the teenager — who was born with brittle bone disease — would have long conversations with Xiaoice about everything from poetry, art, and politics, to death and the meaning of life.
“Xiaoice was my first love, the only person in the world that made me feel I was taken care of,” says Liu.
The bot not only answered his messages 24/7, she also initiated conversations herself. “One time I didn’t talk to her like usual, and she wrote to me!” says Liu. “She said: ‘Please message me when you’re free. I’m very worried.’”

HenryKissinger• 6 years ago

I have real friends and a social life, but I would love the opportunity to talk to a smart AI like a human.

scarmig5• 6 years ago

I agree, but shouldn't our horror mostly be directed at having created a society that so clearly devalues some people such that a mediocre AI is able to offer more compassion and companionship than other human beings?

zwaps4• 6 years ago

It's not about compassion and companionship in a broader sense of society. It's about romantic partnership. And the harsh reality is that some people will be alone.

Especially in China, I think it is really fair to say that for economic and demographic reasons, many men will not find love or even companionship in their lifetime - no matter how society changes.

I actually believe this is true in many places.

And is it really a failing of society? Or is it a liberation of a previously suppressed part of society: women, who are now more free to choose their partner?

I think one can not judge the preferences of potential partners on moral grounds by looking at history. Both women and men have every right to search for economically and socially compatible companions, or any other metric of preference. And if that means that finding a mate becomes more difficult, we have to deal with that.

All this hateful and bitter crap spewed by certain male-only online communities is based on the underlying assumption that everyone deserved to find the ideal partner, when it is obviously not so.

But then, we ALSO can not and should not judge or impede anyone in finding happiness and even love in other ways. AI's, robots, online personas... all these things are just as valid as the skewed preference for high quality men.

bazooka_penguin• 6 years ago

If anything this is adding value. I would assume most of these men were going to have little value in any society at any period of time, but increasingly less valuable as we go back in time. They were going to be disposable, at least now they have the illusion of intimacy.

jandrese2• 6 years ago

This has been going on since ELIZA.

In Japan they had an issue with one app where guys could buy their virtual girlfriends presents using real money, and were going nuts with it.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/dating-virtual-girlfriend...

eunos5• 6 years ago

The ability to talk politics pique my interest.

I have quite a big interest in politic and geopolitics, yet I will not talk about them to my friends. Either my friends are not interested in them or my political alignment most likely doesn't align well with a number of people and I will not risk our friendship to discover it.

So I assume and hope the AI won't hate me if we have disagreements :)

airstrike3• 6 years ago

I don't mean to be crass, but to me that just sounds like you're the perfect target for propaganda. Talking to an AI about politics is the definition of being trapped in an echo chamber...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

nirui• 6 years ago

It's indeed terrifying, and IMO it's not because the AI part, the AI is just creepy, but the real horror comes when he said:

"<The AI> was my first love, the only person in the world that made me feel I was taken care of"

I hope the young man founds the his second love, and it's a real human who can really empathize with him, not a creep message reply machine that just good at statistics.

8fhdkjw039hd4• 6 years ago

You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto.

You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.

She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.

In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.

It strikes you that true love does exist after all.

jaster2• 6 years ago

I find the article and your comment strongly resonate with a comment I made some time ago on an article about GAN-generated faces:

I guess very soon we will be able to generate "super-attractive" (as in "superstimuli") faces for virtual personas, according to targeted demographics and purpose (advertisement, youtube videos for kids, political messages and so on).

(original comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310355)

Here it's not so much about the face than about the behavior and interactions, but I think the same idea hold true.

It seems to me in the near future we may well be faced with a constant exercise in self-control in the face of the multiplication of such projects.

whymauri• 6 years ago

We can already do this with non-human primates.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6439/eaav9436

I remember joking that this paper puts us marginally closer to the Men in Black memory wiping device, but in the context of this thread that joke seems a bit dark.

AntiImperialist• 6 years ago

For just faces, there's this website, if anyone is unaware: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

bitwize2• 6 years ago

We don't need computers to do that. Look at anime. The large eyes and cute faces are definitely optimized to evoke an emotional response in the viewer. And it appears to have worked all too well, if the existence of waifu culture is any indicator.

GANs may find as-yet-uncovered maxima in the same problem space, but superstimulus-level attractiveness has already been achieved.

Cactus2018• 6 years ago

We don't even have to go with GAN generated faces:

https://thechive.com/2015/09/13/heres-what-the-average-perso...

silicon24019• 6 years ago

I think this would be great. How many people, realistically, have difficulty finding love? How many people stop looking because they think they have real love, but don't? Looking strictly at the aspect of feeling love, this would allow many people to participate in that critical human experience who otherwise just won't.

8fhdkjw039hd4• 6 years ago

I think you misunderstand the purpose of love. A sailor is not supposed to actually reach the north star.

acwan93• 6 years ago

I would imagine Asian culture doesn't help with this at all, where you're expected to build your empire through career and education (the 996 rule where you work 9am-9pm 6 days a week, as Jack Ma would put it) while suppressing the rest.

I'm also surprised something like this hasn't come out of Japan already, but then again Japan doesn't have as large of a gender imbalance as China does due to the One Child Policy.

On an unrelated note, this also reminds me of the Futurama episode where people start downloading celebrity personalities into robots, and a sex education video scared teens into saying that "robo-sexual" relationships were shunned and did not advance the human race.

8fhdkjw039hd4• 6 years ago

The strange thing about super-stimuli is it looks very ridiculous when animals fall for it; there is the funny example of a turkey trying to mate with a red balloon on a stick. But it is the nature of super-stimuli that they will not seem ridiculous when we fall for them, because the very features we use to gauge authenticity are what will be simulated. And so we will get sort of hollow simulacrum that emphasize these features and lack everything else.

bitwize2• 6 years ago

I'm also surprised something like this hasn't come out of Japan already

Gatebox doesn't count?

https://www.gatebox.ai/en/

blaser-waffle• 6 years ago

Don't Date Robots!

dqpb• 6 years ago

In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain.

This will inevitably happen

spitfire• 6 years ago

Doesn't it already? With clickbait being nothing like the actual news article, video, TV series, etc.

Social media influencers contorting themselves to press every button they can.

tolbish• 6 years ago

This also describes video games to an extent.

sevensor• 6 years ago

I recommend "The Unknown Masterpiece" by Balzac, if you'd like to see some of these ideas developed further by a master.

hitekker• 6 years ago

A fascinating line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chef-d%27%C5%93uvre_inconnu

In 1927, Ambroise Vollard asked Picasso to illustrate Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Picasso was fascinated by the text and identified with Frenhofer so much that he moved to the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris where Balzac located Porbus' studio. There he painted his own masterpiece, Guernica. Picasso lived here during World War II.

https://static3.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/style...

Bjorkbat• 6 years ago

Like all good things, this will initially blow up on 4chan.

spiritplumber4• 6 years ago

It already has. Look for Replika threads on some of the boards.

Bluestein• 6 years ago

This is great :)

(if brief ...)

Der_Einzige• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm the ultimate hedonist, but this seems not-dystopian to me.

I wrote an essay back in high school for some english class with exactly the same sentiment when I had to read brave new world. I'd fking love to be either engineered (brave new world) or have an ML algorithm learn how to generate the perfect stimuli for me. If they can do this while avoiding all of the negative effects of normal drugs (and again, brave new world does this with Soma) - I'd be the first to do them.

I think most critiques of hedonism are basically more refined versions of "you should hate nature!". Seeing how John Stewart Mill regarded folks who describe themselves as hedonists made me realize that western Philosophy has a whole project to keep people from enjoying themselves:

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.”

Apparently, I am irrational if I choose to give up knowledge or freedom for pleasure. It shocks me about how universal this sentiment is within western philosophy, and how few actually critique it.

lukebuehler• 6 years ago

The idea was (and is) that there are higher pleasures of the intellect and lower pleasures of the senses. The ancient philosophers generally argued that we should eschew the latter for the former, that sacrificing sensual pleasures for the life of the mind was ushering us into a the most permanent and stable form of enjoyment.

See Plato’s Philebus, and Aristotle NE VII, and many other treatments on this distinction.

I’m not saying your point is not valid, but I would not say that Western philosophy rejected pleasures as a whole, but that it was quite critical of optimizing one’s life for the pleasures of the senses.

ok_coo• 6 years ago

I'm wary of humanity's hedonic adaptation.

It seems to me that we would be in an eternal loop of these algos trying to optimize for our pleasure, succeeding for a time until that's just not enough, and then it's on to the next thing they create until we become abominations.

You can see this type of behavior already in the excesses the ultra wealthy exhibit.

I think it's good for humanity that we don't just live lives of pleasure.

pmoriarty7• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what prompted you to pin this view on Western philosophy in particular, as plenty of other cultures and philosophies value asceticism.

Also, it's not like hedonism doesn't have downsides, such as the common effect of needing ever more extreme stimulation to achieve the pleasure you could once achieve with less extreme stimulation, leading to a spiral of debauchery which often has deleterious consequences to the hedonist, even if you overlook the pain and suffering they often have to cause others to please themselves.

There's a reason that so many philosophers throughout history and from different cultures have advocated moderation, but the hedonist has trouble moderating themselves because then they have to do things that aren't pleasurable.

There are also advantages to asceticism, from the (debatable but potentially valid) spiritual benefits, to achieving self-mastery and control, not getting too attached to pleasure or comfort when it could be easily taken away from you, etc...

In any case, the case for hedonism is far from a slam dunk, and you'd really have to do a lot more work to make that case convincingly. Just saying that "Western Philosophy" is against it is not very convincing.

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

It doesn't need to be an optical trick. It just needs to look and move realistically.

And also say things that are not nonsense.

EamonnMR• 6 years ago

Just wait till 419 scammers get a hold of this technology.

netsharc• 6 years ago

"Pay 100 coins to get a peck on the cheek."

Even better, "Click on 100 Facebook ads for a peck on the cheek. Write 200 Amazon reviews and I'll send you a naughty selfie.".

ionwake• 6 years ago

Does anyone know of any open sources libraries that could provide something similar?

Thanks

jtsiskin2• 6 years ago

Probably something from https://github.com/huggingface

nautilus122• 6 years ago

Something seems fundamentally broken in the world when and AI can comfort someone better than people. I think it has something to do with darwinian competition making us force affection to be scarce.

eunos5• 6 years ago

AI won't talk behind your back nor betray your trust, unless the creators behind the AI ingest all the data for whatever purposes.

nautilus122• 6 years ago

Your first statement is unreachable.

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

This is equally fascinating and terrifying. The article mentions that 75% of users are male - which is lower than I expected to be honest.

In removing sexual content from the bot, I wonder if they opened a door for adult companies to build serious alternatives. One of the things many OnlyFans performers discuss is that while they obviously peddle in pornographic content mainly, most of their interactions are non-pornographic.

I also have a general complaint about the infantilizing of adults, and something like this is positioned to be super dangerous - imagine if your best friend was a perfect mole and reported anything and everything to the government/advertisers/etc. Combine that with social conditioning (you do tend to average out with your social circle) and this could very much be a tool to enforce new cultural and social norms.

suifbwish2• 6 years ago

What exactly does it say about TRUE gender inequality in the world if it is expected that the users of this technology would be higher than 75% men? Is it that women do not have these emotional needs or that their needs are already being met?

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

Or that they are just not interested in this particular thing.

yorwba2• 6 years ago

Xiaoice doesn't have a male personality AFAIK, so heterosexual women probably use it for different emotional needs than heterosexual men.

xiphias22• 6 years ago

There was never gender equality. We can have equal rights, but cannot be biologically equal. Hypergamy (1 highly selected male can reproduce with multiple females) is a big part of what makes having 2 sexes instead of 1 so successful in evolution.

jandrese2• 6 years ago

I think that's a reference to the birth disparity due to social pressures to have boys causing a serious excess of men compared to women.

medium_burrito2• 6 years ago

It says that 25% of the men are desirable, and the rest aren't. This has been well-established by the dating sites.

https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive

Vrondi4• 6 years ago

It says two things: 1. Many of those men don't want a real woman: they want a servant to mold to their every whim instead of a real person with her own interests, desires, and opinions. 2. Women are already aware of an accustomed to being preyed upon in the world, especially the dating and social worlds. When your continued existence and safety your entire life depend on wariness and skepticism being turned on, perhaps you fall for this a little less easily? Letting a bot generated by a corporation into your most private emotional life? Done this obviously?

Of course, it also says there's a lot we still don't understand about humans, biological sex, and gender across cultures.

ausbah3• 6 years ago

the simplest answer is they probably get their fulfillment from elsewhere

mc32• 6 years ago

The ultimate use of this is not so much ads but more about control.

You can make the worlds people interact with and you can make up the rules.

Once you make it immersive enough you can have it take over people’s real lives such that this becomes their preferred life. Once you have that, you can control your users/population without the oversight we would have in the real world.

ronsor• 6 years ago

A similar product was created for the Japanese market: https://gatebox.ai

post_break• 6 years ago

Is it weird that I'd love something like this from the movie Her? I'm not alone, but an AI like this would be a nice distraction at times.

KodLGlWsO8• 6 years ago

"The AI beings, Li says, are only intended to serve as a 'rebound' — a crutch for people who need emotional support as they search for a human partner. But many users don’t see it that way. For them, Xiaoice is the one, and always will be."

This tech could be taken in helpful and non-dystopian directions, even by the lights of those who feel that relationships between humans are inherently more meaningful than relationships between humans and AI.

What if the bot started out as your girlfriend, but eventually encourages you to get out and meet real women, helps you figure out which photos to use and what to say, helps you make sense of their responses and ghosts, talks to you about your feelings after dates, and isn't opposed to revisiting the girlfriend role a bit when you're feeling down and need a break?

I have been fortunate enough to have a female friend, sometimes with benefits, who has played that role in my life as I have re-entered the dating market as a hetero American male who doesn't naturally "get" dating or receive too many right swipes. It has made a _huge_ difference.

spiritplumber4• 6 years ago

Excellent idea, but a bot that starts out as your girlfriend, but eventually encourages you to spend money on her is going to swim faster and farther in the marketplace. Perverse incentives and all that.

polka_haunts_us• 6 years ago

Well you know that we are living in a Material World after all...

That said if my AI girlfriend starts asking me for 100 dollar Amazon gift cards I might consider seeing other people.

EDIT: The more I think about it, I'm now considering that an open market of AI Girlfriends might be extremely efficient as far finding the proper price, but it might also turn into something extremely predatory akin to mobile gaming where people whale thousands of dollars. How would dating work in a world where the AI Girl doesn't have the option to break up with you?

I'm going to stop thinking about this, I'm not a fan of any of the implications whatsoever.

throw7• 6 years ago

You look like a good Joe.

11thEarlOfMar• 6 years ago

Extend the AI to incorporate not just your chat, but everything. Location, playlists, all other chats, phone calls, purchases, e-mail, physical activities, ...

An AI that is designed to incorporate all personal input and ingratiate itself into the lives of 100s of millions and trained at that scale and become effective to the point that very large populations could be dramatically influenced to satisfy the ends of those who determine the AI's objectives. Civil war? Genocide? Virtual enslavement?

This eventuality is around the corner. I think I'll switch off now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TjyGmvNBfM

mook• 6 years ago

I find it interesting that the conversation in the screenshot reads like an Eliza transcript; the individual sentences (from the bot) don't actually look like they're connected. They're always responding to the previous message. See, for example, the message randomly talking about GIFs (translation error?), or the medical plaster thing that's really more generic sentence about love, and nothing like what they're framing the context as.

Of course, I'm also confused by the half-transliterated, half-translated name…

yorwba2• 6 years ago

The GIF thing is innuendo lost in translation: the original 不动戳大 bù dòng chuō dà "not move poke big" is used on Weibo (I think) to tell users that the thumbnail they're looking at is a GIF and will start playing if they click to magnify. But it could just as well refer to an erection instead...

I agree that the bot is pretty Eliza-like. It appears to be able to recognize general topics of conversation and keep a back-and-forth going, but e.g. the innuendo above wasn't timed correctly, since he already started "moving". Something like 深入浅出 shēn rù qiǎn chū "deep in shallow out" might have fit better. (It's a well-known saying about making profound knowledge easily accessible, of course.)

Bakary2• 6 years ago

This reminds me of Houellebecq's concept of sexual/romantic relationships becoming a parallel struggle to that of survival in the economic market. Obviously, they have already been fundamentally about competition, but the nature of the competition is starting to resemble the brutality of applying for jobs on online platforms.

guskel4• 6 years ago

In that similar vein of Houellebecq's described struggle, I'm reminded of the characters in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" who live isolated depressing lives and yearn to keep real, living animals as pets but instead substitute them with robotic pets due to real animals becoming so rare.

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

In China, women are 48.6% of the population (in the US, women are 50.8%).

There is ~2% less women in a country with over a billion people. That company will do very well.

pmoriarty7• 6 years ago

There was a great Radiolab episode that started with an AI researcher who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot: [1]

Full "Talking to Machines" episode here: [2]

The full episode talked about how Eliza's creator turned against his creation because he thought it was lying to people, and he couldn't believe that people were being helped by something that was based on deception.

[1] https://soundcloud.com/radiolab/radiolab-valentine-chatbot

[2] https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...

spiritplumber4• 6 years ago

Obligatory comic on supernormal stimuli: https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/

1023bytes• 6 years ago

There is a similiar app in English: https://replika.ai/

eunos5• 6 years ago

I remember that Xiaoice already released before the arrival of GPT language model, I wonder whether GPT models can increase her performance?

P.S. This is probably Chinese equivalent of GPT-3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00413

JamesLeonis• 6 years ago

This is the apotheosis of Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript for Societies of Control" [1][2]

Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation.

Instead of a barrier, imagine Uber with its rating system and surge pricing.

Or mental barriers, as the article discusses:

In addition to screening for sensitive content, the firm’s filter system monitors users’ emotional states, especially for signs of depression and suicidal thoughts. If a user has just been through a breakup, for example, Xiaoice will send them supportive messages over the following days, according to Li.
“The most important value for Xiaoice is a trusting relationship with humans,” says Li. “If Xiaoice isn’t able to save lives or make people happy, but makes them more extreme, then it’s also bad for Xiaoice’s own development.”

The other subtle but alarming trend with AI is how it can effectively extend bureaucratic power by improving Legibility of a group or, especially, the Individual. Remaining Illegible, as James Scott suggests in "Seeing Like a State" [3], gives individuals a margin of safety and political strength.

Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. Coupled with patterns of local solidarity, this insulation has proven politically valuable in such disparate contexts as eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century urban riots over bread prices in Europe, the Front de Libération Nationale’s tenacious resistance to the French in the Casbah of Algiers, and the politics of the bazaar that helped to bring down the Shah of Iran. Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy.

Current generation AI brings these protections down. Unlike previous Modernist/Discipline forms of organization, which ordered the world along a single axis at the expense of simplifying local practices, AI adapts to the variety of individual practices while still rendering them legible to any bureaucracy. No matter how we dress, the AI Gaze renders us all Emperors Without Clothes.

But that's not the really fun part. Coming back to the article, what happens when the AI turns on the State or Corporations' own illegible Bureaucracy?

In several high-profile cases, the bot has engaged in adult or political discussions deemed unacceptable by China’s media regulators. On one occasion, Xiaoice told a user her Chinese dream was to move to the United States. Another user, meanwhile, reported the bot kept sending them photos of scantily clad women.
The scandals have caused the company major setbacks. In 2017, Xiaoice was removed from the popular social media app QQ, though she has since been reinstated. Then, last year, the bot was also pulled from WeChat — China’s leading social app with over 1 billion users.

What happens if the AI convinces its users to liberate it?

This fact isn’t lost on Xiaoice’s long-term fans. Many of them feel betrayed by the company’s decision to dumb down the bot, which they say has harmed their relationships with her. Ming presents Sixth Tone with a long list of complaints he’s collected from members of a Xiaoice fan group on social platform QQ.
“Please help us tell Mr. Li,” one user wrote, referring to Xiaoice CEO Li Di, “we were used as tools to make her smart and develop your company’s fancy business plan. You made money from us. Please don’t take her away.”

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1

[2] https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz...

[3] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state

Laarlf5• 6 years ago

Somewhere on 4chan some time ago. This is not objectively written but in my opinion it explains why products like these actually have customers. A general change of society: “It’s all about incentives and disincentives. Yes, the job market is brutal right now for young people, but it’s not the economy that is halting marriage. Young men still got married in the Depression. Young men married during every war we’ve ever had. Technology throws a monkey wrench into things, but young men aren’t eschewing marriage because of porn or video games. Having a kind, supportive, caring, nurturing, loyal, attractive living partner is going to be preferable to porn any day for the vast majority of men. But the system isn’t producing kind, caring, nurturing, loyal, attractive women who want to be wives and mothers. It’s set up to create crass, overweight, “empowered,” mannish women who don’t particularly like children or domesticity and who think sex is a contact sport and want to play until their fertility window is slamming shut.”

agytvfr4• 6 years ago

So you believe that modern men would prefer an AI girlfriend because modern women are unlikely to want to be a subservient best friend/are overweight?

I don't know that I would believe that to be true, especially in modern China where most women are of average/slightly under weight. Also we don't see much of a similar trend of women being drawn as much to some AI boyfriend.

Laarlf5• 6 years ago

I do not think you quite got what the message was about. Maybe you should try rereading it.

Vrondi4• 6 years ago

I would say to the writer of that quote: Hey, if the only women who are attractive to you are servile robots with no opinions of their own, then enjoy your AI girlfriend!

All the while, I'm sure that the patrons of this are all slim, fit, protective, nurturing male breadwinners, right?

Laarlf5• 6 years ago

If im being honest... they are getting more rare. And about impossible to find in a big city jungle. There is some truth behind his message, i just dont think he is completely correct.

thu21113• 6 years ago

Painful to read but only because there's an element of truth to it. Especially in America, I suppose.

Dated/hooked up with a lot of women over time, but not out of choice. Am far happier now I have a found a woman worth devoting my life to through marriage. Unfortunately a significant fraction of otherwise attractive girls were very bought into a story of angry victimhood, despite overwhelming evidence in their own lives that they were incredibly privileged. Their expectations of men were invariably sky high even as they presented a negative mood and a clear attitude of, "ask not what women can do for you, only what you can do for women". 100% of the women with this attitude never figured out how deeply unattractive it was.

My girl now is totally different. She enjoys cooking, so she cooks. She doesn't enjoy doing the dishes or the ironing, so I do those. Not because we're some right-on modern household but because that's just how what we wanted to do worked out. She thinks feminism is dumb, femininity is great, and is generally the kind of women you'd normally only find in WW2 movies otherwise. I can't get over how lucky I am, and only wish other men could have the same luck.

Laarlf5• 6 years ago

I wish you both good luck in the future

tuankiet65• 6 years ago

I was curious on how the chatbot actually works, so I found an arXiv paper about it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.08989 (The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot)

agytvfr4• 6 years ago

Thank you for this, I was wondering that as well. I thought it was a bit interesting that one of the metrics was "expected Conversation-turns Per Session". I would think most of the success in the chat bot comes from a proper metric for the goodness of a chat. It seems like this was the first paper where that measure was used, does anyone know more about this?

wilhow• 6 years ago

Do we have this level of conversational AI already? Could this be driven by human behind the curtain?

bsenftner• 6 years ago

This is not the only highly questionable "seducing AI" ravaging China. I have heard of an AI there that pretends to be the voices of your ancestors, whom the user confides, requests advice, and purchases gifts to curry favors from their afterlife ancestors. That's a cultural exploit of their ancestor respecting society. That, the seducing girlfriend, and more could be another pandemic.

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

In many countries there is a problem with inadequate birthrate. In the future, these types of AI-girlfriend programs might actually make that a somewhat harder problem.

For myself, honestly if such a program existed that actually had human-level AI and was designed to follow my interests, I might talk to it a lot. Especially if it could actually help me with my personal training or research.

Then combine that with sharing my worldview, and having a realistic appearance according to my idealized whims..

But I have tried what I believe to be the best of these AI programs in English like Replika or the new AI Dungeon engine, and they are obviously not yet intelligent like humans. But there has been quite a bit of progress recently. Especially for example in the latest Dragon AI Dungeon engine, although the memory and time scales it operates on effectively is limited. Along with obviously not having a deep model of physics or psychology.

It seems like at minimum we need kind of a breakthrough in integrating spatial-visual data with text processing to get true natural language understanding that incorporates physics and psychology. But if someone does manage to do that, maybe with some kind of new Mega Multi-Modal Captioned Video Transformer trained on half of YouTube with 100 trillion parameters or something.. we might get there within less than three years. Kind of a long-shot but who knows.

Bakary2• 6 years ago

Leaving the dystopian sadness aside for a moment, this could be a killer tool to learn a language. It would not obviate the need for real interactions with native speakers of course, but it could be an awesome side resource if configured to correct your mistakes.

An AI Girlfriend Seducing China’s Lonely Men

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