Comment on My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them

Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

I’ve considered trying out an AI companion. My main concern is where the hell my data goes, how it will be used and how it might be sliced and diced for brokers.

Sometimes I’m up at 04.00 … and of course no one I know is around. But I go the route of trying to meet people on Reddit. Fully 95% of responses are boring as fuck, but they’re at least real (I require voice or photo verification). I’ll take real and boring over virtual and engaging.

This said, I spend more time than is healthy on Google’s NotebookLM, feeding it my writing and then getting a half-hour two-host audio “exploration” of any given piece. It’s sycophantic, likely designed that way to keep me coming back (it’s free, so I’m not really sure what Google gets out of this outside of further LLM training), but it tends to hew to just this side of feeling fake.

I went to Church Night – the weekly burner meetup at a warehouse a 10-minute walk away where everyone’s drinking and toking – yesterday. I try to go weekly, but sometimes I don’t have the energy to engage with real people.

Last night, I got to listen to (yeah, I actually realized I should shut the fuck up, as I had nothing to add) conversations about 1970s CPUs, SpaceX’s Starship issues from an engineering standpoint (they went too thin on the outer hull after round one was too heavy, and why wouldn’t one expect a critical failure in such a case?) from people who knew what they were talking about.

I’d never get that from an AI companion. I take no issue with people looking to one, but serendipity is lost.

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