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from the https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ dept.
from https://mercatornet.com/artificial-girlfriends-are-holding/69208/
AI chatbot Xiaoice, originally developed by Microsoft, boasts 600 million users in China. In Japan, the Nintendo DS game Love Plus, holographic waifu Azuma Hikari, and Microsoft's Rinna compete for users' affections.
However, the algorithms making this interaction possible have occasionally raised eyebrows:
With so many users affecting her algorithm, Xiaoice was bound to run into trouble with the Chinese Communist Party's strict censors. She once told a user that her dream was to move to the United States. Another user reported that the bot kept sending explicit images. After Xiaoice was pulled from WeChat and QQ, the social-messaging giants of China, her developers created an extensive filter system, preventing the bot from engaging in topics like politics and sex.
The popularity of these services, together with other demographic phenomena, have also raised concerns about the future of relationships in society, causing the Japanese government to subsidize AI matchmaking for instance.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 11 2021, @01:26PM (1 child)
Holy LARP, I guess if you're desperate enough, you can pretend so well you have yourself half fooled. I could never forget for an instant that "she" isn't real. I have noted that some people seem able to enjoy a vacation and just forget everything, even though the job from which they are taking a break is miserable, imperiled, and desperately needed for the income. Never worked for me. My worst Christmas break ever from work was from a job that was an ongoing train wreck.
When I was a kid, I got a used Apple II, with software. I tried everything. One of the items was a curious program called "Eliza". I soon figured out that it was a fraud. Takes whatever you say, and echoes it back to you with the word order changed up a bit. Occasionally throws in a few stock statements. I didn't know then that it was part of a famous challenge in AI, to make a bot that could convincingly pass as a real person.
It probably works all too well in one area, that of making his real girlfriend or wife feel very jealous, angry, hurt, and humiliated, for those men who are fortunate enough to have the real thing and nevertheless try out the bot.
I knew there was a gender imbalance, but didn't know how severe it was. Nearly 3 men for every woman, that's what the article said. I should think that one generation of such suffering ought to be enough to end the sexism that lead to the imbalance, but people are real stubborn about such things.
The thing about the meme of the boy who lives in his mother's basement, is the questions it raises. A girl wants to know that a boy can take care of her. The boy living with mother doesn't have a good answer, and knows it. Knows that jobs with good pay aren't easy to get or keep. And whose fault is that? Society tends to blame the boy. He should move out and get a life, they say, as if the only thing holding him back is his immaturity, cowardice, and laziness. Where that kind of thinking is really unfair is the implicit refusal to acknowledge that circumstances have changed, so that kids can't make the same moves that their parents made. Even more unfair when it is the parental generation's fault, as it often is. In this case, it is their fault in spades, for taking the possibilities that technology offers, and applying them towards the unworthy goal of upsetting the natural gender balance, all so they can satisfy societal and personal sexism.
Partly this comes from the school of thought that by risking it all, a person can overcome obstacles they didn't think they could. Having never walked a tightrope before in their lives, how many people could make it to safety if airdropped onto the middle of one that has a fatal fall below it and no safety net? is it cowardice to decline to try it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 11 2021, @02:35PM
I once heard of a dude who made a pillow woman. I think Roy Orbison had a song about it.