People in 2024 aren’t just swiping right and left on online dating apps — some are crafting their perfect AI match and entering relationships with chatbots.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, recently shared his concerns about young men creating AI romantic partners and said he believes that AI dating will actually increase loneliness.
“This is a good example of an unexpected problem of existing technology,” Schmidt said in a conversation about AI dangers and regulation on “The Prof G Show” with Scott Galloway released Sunday.
Schmidt said an emotionally and physically “perfect” AI girlfriendcould create a scenario in which a younger male becomes obsessed and allows the AI to take over their thinking.
“That kind of obsession is possible,” Schmidt said in the interview. “Especially for people who are not fully formed.”
I have been saying for a while, I think hyperealistic vr and believable AI personalities are going to be the ‘great filter’ that limits advanced civilization.
Given the chance to have your sexual and emotional fantasies fulfilled in a satisfying way, many many people will take it. Especially when ‘real life’ is getting harder with everything from the cost of living making the dream of ‘married with home and children’ less obtainable to hyper competitive online dating disenfranchising increasing proportions of both men and women.
Having a believable relationship with AI is far closer than we think. It doesn’t have to perfectly replicate real life, it just has to be satisfying enough in a few key ways that people begin to prefer it.
There are AI girlfriends in japan long before chatGPT… It does not seem to bad to me. Sad, but not bad.
I think the part that feels ‘sad’ to you is what’s going to change socially over the next 50 years. I think it’s going to become extremely normal to at least have a “mental health AI friend” who knows you really well and keeps you going through the day, is someone to talk to, someone who’s always there, someone who’s the first to detect that you may be in danger. Overall I think society’s going to receive that as a good thing. And it will, I think, be normal because it will be so believable, and so useful, and for a large number of people, keep them well and feeling good about themselves. In that context some of those attachments turning romantic, or people just being sexually into whatever that assistant can say or do will be increasingly normal. It will also feel really good, let’s not forget that. We’re really only at the very start of what immersive VR is going to be. Once AI becomes not a little better but 50-100 years of innovation better I don’t think we can really underestimate how much it’s going to feel like you’re actually interacting with [insert fantasy here]. Once tactile feedback sees similar improvements we’re about 75% of the way to what people would use an actual holodeck for anyway. I can’t see how that doesn’t have a dramatic effect on how people view human-human romantic relationships. Over time the proportion of people who can have a believable experience of their absolute sexual fantasy is only going to grow over time. With how ubiquitous that will be I can’t see how in most relationships people know they’re “second best”. I think that has a profound effect on how people make attachments to one another. I think once “having a real girlfriend” is seen as the secondary way to get your sexual needs met, that that will have a terminal effect on how many young men even want to be in relationships let alone stay around to be a father.
keeps you going through the day, is someone to talk to, someone who’s always there, someone who’s the first to detect that you may be in danger
That’s you. You need the skills and attention to reassure yourself and introspect.
You just gave me a new reason to dislike LLMs, they allow people to refrain from maturing.
Given the chance to have your sexual and emotional fantasies fulfilled in a satisfying way, many many people will take it.
Obviously. But I haven’t yet seen anything from an AI that could fulfill either.
The problem is that a lot of men find real women scary.
Their idealised partner is, more or less, already a sexbot. A woman who dwmurely laughs at their jokes, listens intently when they talk, and showers them with praise.
They’re not looking for intelligence, humour, independent thought, creative expression; those things terrify them. They’re looking for a sexy lamp that asks them how their day went. If it can cook, clean the house, and do all the other things mommy used to do, so much the better.
I don’t fuck with AI chat bots but I got a he’ll of a lot less lonely when I stopped giving a fuck if I had a girlfriend or not. Giving people alternatives to the toxic dating culture of today may not be such a bad thing.
Yeah, I fuckin love being alone, living alone, not talking to people. I’m alone a lot, but I’m not lonely. There’s a big difference
Guys is there a way to use complex filtering on the Boost app. Maybe a regex? I wanna be able to filter all headlines that include the phrase Google CEO unless it also contains the phrase ‘head explodes’.
I think it spells more trouble for young women
well, considering dating is usually couple’s activity, it spells trouble for all of them.
Are the young people who can afford dating in the room with you? Can they hear us? Lol
How?
They are more prone to emotional and mental disregulation than boys.
casually looks at male suicide rate
Not all mental illness manifest as suicide. I would have thought that obvious.
The data on OCD, anxiety, self harm, eating disorders are all there for anyone who is interested and if anyone wants to discuss mental health in young people, especially in women, I’m here.
If you want to make it a game of boys v girls downvoting, you can all fuck off and come back when you’ve grown up.
When a mental health issue affects men and women equally you end up with more women at the doctor and more men dead.
But that’s besides the point. Schmidt is calling out his concern for young men in particular because I think he knows a thing or too about what people google and what obsessive behaviours they can fall into especially regarding sexual fantasy.
He already has a front row seat to stats on porn addiction and how this fuels male isolation in particular. If you read the article you’ll see it cites an example of a young boy committing suicide through his romantic interactions with a chatbot.
Women are exposed to impossible beauty standards and have higher anxiety, OCD and other disorders than men. But Schmidt isn’t referring to that.
Men are lonely, have lower life satisfaction, and are far more likely to get sexually addicted to increasingly sophisticated immersive porn.
Have you heard of the manosphere?
