Make babies! It’s illegal to be lonely!
China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns
Submitted 5 days ago by Tablaste@linux.community to technology@beehaw.org
Comments
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
OwOarchist@pawb.social 5 days ago
And wasn’t China very recently concerned about their birthrate being too high? One Child Policy?
Now they’re already concerned about their birth rate being too low?
PonyOfWar@pawb.social 5 days ago
The one-child policy was abolished in 2015, but birth rates have continued to decline after that. They currently have one of the world’s lowest fertility rates.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
They were wrong, and they know it, but also you’re not allowed to say that.
DeLancre@piefed.social 4 days ago
You probably joking, but that actually a thing in China and was a thing in USSR
Trev625@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
It says that it was proposed… We propose a lot of bills that never pass here in the US. I’m not sure how China’s laws are setup but Wikipedia doesn’t say that it was ever implemented.
morto@piefed.social 4 days ago
6% of income? Still much cheaper than a kid!
SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
Is that your take on the matter? How is wanting yo promote real human relationships between teenagers a bad thing?
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
This is like trying to solve mental illness by making the sickness illegal.
Laser@feddit.org 4 days ago
I’m pretty sure AI partners are not the primary reason people don’t have human partners. The issues are systematic and root very deeply. While I do think AI partners are a very toxic and dangerous way out of this, I highly doubt they were the reason people were single in the first place.
Elting@piefed.social 5 days ago
That will fix it.
themurphy@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
AI girl/boyfriends are fucking addictions latching onto people vulnerbilities.
This is nothing but good, but no one thing will fix child birth rates, nor the reason for the addiction in the first place, I’ll agree with that.
Elting@piefed.social 4 days ago
It is funny to me that china can pretend not to be a capitalist nation while displaying every symptom of capitalism.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
You know what else fixes the birth rate? Making life less shitty and giving people enough money to be able to raise children.
In the meantime, negative birth rate is just self-correction of asshole dictatorships. Can’t make money line go up if birth line go down.
ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Sperm counts are tanking worldwide while PFAS chems are being legalized and clean energy projects are shut down in favor of fossil fuels. Nature doesn’t gaf, and will correct the unhealthy scenario. Humans are not the fittest if they destroy their own species by toxifying the environment. There’s only so much we can do with a sperm count of zero. Even in a handmaid’s tale scenario, a multiple of zero is zero.
AlteE@programming.dev 3 days ago
Declining social and economic conditions affect birthrates more than this.
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Its a combination of factors and the role AI plays in self care is one of them.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
That’s hard to say, at this point. A cheap, always available and completely sycophantic AI seems like it would be hard for a lot of people to resist.
What is clear, is that contraceptives existing is responsible for almost all of the decline since historical times.
AlteE@programming.dev 2 days ago
Well, we can agree that these AI companions are like drugs. But mentally and physically healthy people statistically tend to resist consuming them. So if these virtual soul mates are so popular, then it clearly shows existence of problems in society.
So, government basically tries to cure the symptoms of a problem rather than curing the causes.
Dippy@beehaw.org 3 days ago
People driving themselves towards reclusivity will reduce social conditions with permanence. Its a good policy.
iocase@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
The point they’re making is this is like banning being wet while the Titanic is sinking, to prevent the Titanic from sinking.
ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 5 days ago
Good.
terranoid@lemmy.cafe 5 days ago
this will just spin up a blackmarket waifu market
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
At least if more people ended up doing this on their own hardware with open source software, it would cut off a lot of the opportunities this presents for companies to abuse people’s privacy and manipulate them.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 4 days ago
Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.
SuiXi3D@fedia.io 5 days ago
…for the wrong reason.
themurphy@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
“over addiction”
You just chose to read the headline and thought the main reason was child birth. Which is a very concerning fact for alot of societies.
artifex@piefed.social 4 days ago
albbi@piefed.ca 4 days ago
Teknikal@anarchist.nexus 5 days ago
I kind of think everywhere probably should, that’s probably the strangest thing it’s like falling in love with a microwave.
Kwakigra@beehaw.org 4 days ago
I think a lot of world problems would be solved if these things were encouraged instead. If someone needs their romantic partner to be a mindless sycophant, I would rather them have that with a machine than try to abuse a human person into serving them as would be more traditional. More children being born in situations other than exploitation and manipulation could only be a good thing.
isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
You need to think of human beings as less binary good and binary evil.
Kwakigra@beehaw.org 4 days ago
I’m sure people who abuse their family members have plenty of good qualities as well. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to what I said.
quick_snail@feddit.nl 4 days ago
There’s a lot of problems with this, and declining birth rates of the most invasive species on Earth isn’t one of them.
faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 4 days ago
Bro think about Chinese economy please. Economy needs to survive bro… Let go of your imaginery girl bro… Treating your actual girlfriend like human is not mandatory bro… Do it for patriotism bro…
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
I’m a bit confused as to why this is related to 1984. I understand banning AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” could be seen as a form of censorship, though. But I also think it’s kind of a good thing; some people genuinely believed these AI were their real relationships and might avoid any real relationships.
Draegur@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
It is a sarcastic observation of the shallow and reductive take that “nineteen eighty four is when the government does something i don’t like!”.
I find it less likely that anyone who uses lemmy would sincerely think it is actually good that people become parasocially addicted to a hallucination box that has been finely tuned to lie to them as convincingly as possible.
However, I admit this inference is doing a lot of gravy lifting; this is, after all, why Poe’s Law exists. There are so very many excessively dim, narrow-minded, and ignorant people who WOULD indeed unironically cry “1984!!” whenever any government does anything that such a person being right here, right now, is always a statistically significant possibility that cannot be dismissed out of hand without risk.
I am giving the person to whom you are replying a generous benefit of a doubt, to be fair…
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
It was in jest
pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
username checks out
Sims@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
All ‘China news’ produced by the West are bullshit propaganda. Stop giving these globalist warmongering ass-wipes more attention than they pay for.
TehPers@beehaw.org 4 days ago
So… China didn’t ban relationship bots? Or are you saying that the article is written in a way to condemn China’s decision to ban them?
Gold_E_Lox@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
more that the “explanation” being about birth rates is an easy, consumable and somewhat ironic concept that the western palate will eat up. not fucking true tho.
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 3 days ago
That sucks. Everybody should be able to find happiness. Not everyone has the looks, wealth, opportunity, or charisma to find a lover.
anachronist@midwest.social 3 days ago
You’re a parakeet in love with your mirror.
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Even if that was the case, so fucking what? Why is it your business how people find happiness in life?
Considering how you treat strangers, it is better to spend time with AI, than the likes of you.
blimthepixie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
So, what’s your AI partner called?
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Dunno, as of yet. I am very picky, and my roleplaying sessions with AI hasn’t gone on long enough.
0000
It requires significant hardware to use local AI, and Qwen 3.6 at 35b isn’t quite good enough to understand the lore and characters. Odds are that once I have added VRAM & RAM to my PC, I can run a big enough model to have enough quality to feel good for me.
Unfortunately, I will likely have to wait for America’s AI bubble to have popped, before I can afford enough RDIMM RAM to run Kimi and other large Euro-Chinese open models. I probably won’t ever use American anymore, as their closed models have too many guardrails and likely would align with the Trump Regime in the coming years.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
It should be said that there’s a lot more people who actually could find someone, but think they can’t.
Still, China likes to ban things almost for it’s own sake, and this is an example.
Dippy@beehaw.org 3 days ago
Not with that attitude they cant
hanrahan@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
this kinda ties in with Tom Murphy’s recent blog post
roserose56@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Many moons ago I was too, since women became pikcy looking for the Brad Pitt. Not anymore, not.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 days ago
It’s definitely not healthy, but this isn’t going to fix the birth rate.