I don't know why people are focusing on what men will do with AI girlfriends - the actual question is what women will do with AI boyfriends. On every single AI chat app like character.ai the majority of users are women, and the most popular characters are men. Women are people who read romance novels and are even more attracted by the "emotional validation".
> Now we’re facing a future where guys could get addicted to emotional validation elsewhere, sneaking away for some of that unparalleled devotion. Worse, what about young boys who grow up with this? Whose first sexual experience is chatting with AI women who never say no, never argue, never have original thoughts or an identity of their own—and then they try to date a real girl? There’s already all these men on Reddit raving about how their AI girlfriends never argue, complain or get bored of them, while real girls continually disappoint.
The market for this is women, not men. I am continually disappointed by the closed-minded thinking of people who think of pornography only as the visual kind men like. The text based kind that women like is what this technology is - focusing on men is just incorrect. I'm disappointed by the fact that the market hasn't tried to realize this, there's huge upside here in making an app designed for women in this space.
The reason for this framing is the current zeitgeist, where the societal narrative has been dominated by gender stereotypes that portrait males as the bad guys by default. Feel free to add the adjectives "white" and "old" to that whenever it feels appropriate.
Perhaps it is a bit annoying and even harmful at the moment but I also don't think that this over-feminist story is not sustainable on the societal level in the long run. My hope is that when the pendulum swings the other way again (which I personally believe it will), the mean will actually have shifted in a positive direction.
Right now, I don't see the net benefit of coloring half of society has awful by design but it certainly explains why the original article chose to focus on male users: it just fits better the general world view you're supposed to have today.
> My hope is that when the pendulum swings the other way again, the mean will actually have shifted in a positive direction.
Nah. Every time people popularize some kind of extremism, the reaction is some other kind of extremism. Allowing the pendulum to swing high is never healthy and never solved by its reversal.
It's a combination of the Women-are-wonderful Effect [0] (which goes double when it comes to sexuality) and the universal lack of giving-a-shit about problems that men face.
Men's sexuality is dangerous and unnecessary. Womens' sexuality is moral and precious. To say that womens' sexuality is causing a social problem is absolutely unacceptable in establishment cultural spaces.
The other side of it is that nobody cares about mens' problems. In this case, the "problem" is that men's standards will be distorted by AI girlfriends, which is bad... for women. We cannot say that womens' standards will be distorted by an AI boyfriends, because womens' standards are always appropriate and pure, and women always deserve what they demand. We cannot say that womens' AI boyfriends will cause loneliness among real men, because if a man can't perform well enough to attract a woman then his suffering is entirely his own fault and responsibility and nobody else's concern.
It's similar to the issue of men falling far behind in education. When there is a new article about women getting 60% of the degrees (3:2 ratio), it is always framed as a problem not for men, but for women, because now they can't find guys better-educated to marry. The idea that the men might deserve equal education for themselves isn't even worth considering, because men deserve nothing and their suffering scores zero on the moral-imperative scale. It only matters in how it affects women.
> To say that womens' sexuality is causing a social problem is absolutely unacceptable in establishment cultural spaces.
Woah there, when did I say any of this was a problem? Women should be free to do all of this, in fact I think more needs to be done to give women what they want as it's a market which people aren't giving proper consideration.
> The idea that the men might deserve equal education for themselves isn't even worth considering, because men deserve nothing and their suffering scores zero on the moral-imperative scale. It only matters in how it affects women.
You're not being very charitable to how these issues are handled. Nobody is completely uncaring of men - trying to spin this as "the world hates men" just seems incorrect.
I also agree women should be free, men should be free, etc.
Womens' fantasies are already well-served by a huge mega-genre of literature, writing, and film. It already causes social issues when real men can't live up to Mr. Darcy and Christian Grey. That's part of the deal of freedom though, so whatever.
As for charity - I'm making a point, but generally it's true. We live in a world where women get 60% of the education, but 90%+ of sex-specific scholarships are... for women! Think about that.
There are so, so many examples of this when you actually look at it and read some things by people who have collected the data. It's staggering.
Men aren't free though. If you have an erection in a public space and it's visible (e. g. Public pool), you are at serious legal risk, even if the thing has no "sex" involved (blood circulation and such). Isn't that the case?
"Men's sexuality is dangerous and unnecessary" - who is saying this? I understand powerful men abusing people is a hot topic right now, but male sexuality doesn't feel under attack to me. If you think of abuse and manipulation as male sexuality, I suppose I could see it.
"The other side of it is that nobody cares about mens' problems" People do care. You can talk to them and share if you're frustrated. There's lots of doctors, reporters, sociologists, etc writing on that very topic and theres help if men need it.
Anyway this person has taken a few concepts and attached a lot of personal rage. Don't get sucked in to this position.
"Men's sexuality is dangerous and unnecessary" - It's not something that's said. It's the assumption underlying every interaction that never gets articulated and is more powerful for that reason. It's so "obvious" and universally accepted that it doesn't need to be said.
Men can be creepy; it is impossible for a woman to be creepy. Male teachers who sleep with with students are "pedophiles" and "rapists"; female teachers who do this "had sex" with students.
> "Men's sexuality is dangerous and unnecessary" - who is saying this?
I just took the literal string used by the commenter—"Men's sexuality is dangerous and unnecessary"—and did a Google search with it. What comes up is a mix of pages where people say something to this effect, or else argue against it. My takeaway is that at the very least, it's something that's being said enough to require arguing against.
Are you suggesting that mating success was probably at parity by sex for prehistoric humans? Because I would be very interested to know more about why you think that.
The last time I looked into it , it was thought that similar to many other species, female mate selection was the primary social driver of fitness selection , and that hyper-successful males effectively reduced the mating opportunities of less competitive males, while gestational opportunities were effectively at nearly 100 percent utilisation within a population.
If the thinking on that has changed for prehistoric humans (or pre-industrial ones) the reasons for that change of conjecture would be very interesting.
Or is it that you are suggesting that areproducrive men filled roles in prehistoric society in such a way that made them valued to the group in roles that were lower risk rather than higher risk? Because that would suggest that observed behaviour in modern pre-industrial societies was a newer innovation rather than a holdover from earlier behaviour, which seems like it would be difficult to substantiate. (Not that observations of indigenous peoples has typically been of a very high epistemological rigour)
A anecdotal but interesting perspective came from my grandfather, who spent his youth among indigenous tribes of eastern Oregon in the 1880s. His many accounts of the “Indians” included the idea that younger, unmated, shamed, or less clever men would typically attempt feats of bravery to gain renown and credibility within their tribe, often being killed in the process.
While hardly epistemologically rigorous, this would seem to support the idea that lower status men in precolonial societies would voluntarily engage in high risk behaviour, often disposing of themselves in the process.
When you consider the frequency of death of women from childbirth related complications under such conditions, it makes sense that the mortality rate of men would need to be balanced by similar risks in order to maintain a stable, cohesive society under primitive conditions, and that the ones who would take those risks voluntarily would be the ones who had more to gain by doing so (elevating themselves from a status of comparative irrelevance to improve mate abundance and social status in general)
If these ideas have been contradicted by recent research, I’d love to know more about that. The field of evolutionary psychology is pretty hit and miss, and also really, really poorly understood by the layperson.
Cry me a river. As a disillusioned beneficiary of White male supremacy, and a person who values diversity in culture and perspective (there is so much I don't know or understand yet, if ever, but the journey is engaging and meaningful), it sounds like you are whining.
However. I care about everyone's problems, especially those who are unfairly oppressed (rather than just feeling unfairly oppressed because they've lost a fraction of the excess power they once enjoyed). I wholeheartedly agree that we collectively need to consider how best to help men find a sense of purpose, even if it stings a little bit given all the harm we men have caused. It is not weakness to admit that, by the way. It feels weaker to ignore it, and to not champion dismantling the Patriarchy towards an equitable balance of power.
Patriarchy
noun
pa· tri· ar· chy | \ ˈpā-trē-ˌär-kē \
plural pa tri ar chies
Definition
1 : social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line
broadly : control by men of a disproportionately large share of power
2 : a society or institution organized according to the principles or practices of patriarchy
//For 20 years the country was ruled as a patriarchy.
It's fascinating that your response plays right into what I was saying.
You say I'm 'whining'. Imagine saying this to a woman who is complaining about womens' issues. It's never done.
To say someone is 'whining' is to say he is inappropriately weak. It's a notion that is targeted only towards men to force us into our social role where we can he useful to others. He needs to toughen up, act like a man, play his role. Stop whining! Your problems are your responsibility! Nobody else wants to hear it!
It's exactly what we're used to hearing over and over.
This might just be me being a bit cynical, but the men who would be raving about an AI girlfriend have already been buying a similar products from women on sites like OnlyFans. I don't think it's a massive difference.
The real question is a marketing/product one. Is the AI gf (or bf) a real replacement product or direct competition, or is this an alternative targeting a different segment?
My guess is the guys using these AI gfs and amazed that they don't complain, argue, etc are already out of the dating pool. For example, there are plenty of guys that don't want to deal with arguments and other BS and wouldn't get married etc even if AI didn't exist. Same sort of thing for women and AI bf - they can't find a real bf due to their high standards set by fantasy media.
No AI that you have to pay for that is a perfect talking partner can be even a close substitute for a close friend or partner who helps you from time to time, and who needs help from time to time, and has a physical and financial presence.
Perhaps some company will figure out how to simulate those aspects, but it sounds financially risky and ripe for exploitation.
Context for the article is important here. This article is written for "GIRLS" which is targeting specifically, young women. The tagline for the site is "Girlhood in the Modern World". I think it's valid to talk about it in that context, just as it's valid to talk about it in a BOYS context, or MENS context. It's a discussion piece, which is used to open a discussion on the subject, and does present opinions.
That said, I hope the AI GF/BF will model good relationships, and hopefully people learn from that, so when they desire a physical relationship, they'll know how to handle themselves with a real partner. However, it'll be difficult to do that with the current state of these AI apps that simply agree with everything you say and validate everything.
Whilst I appreciate that the site is addressing a primarily female readership, it does not serve women well to frame men as being the exploitable bad guys and the women as the unexploitable victims the way this article does. It's not a balanced take and it does harm to both the readers and wider society.
This would've been obvious to our ancestors, but not all pornography is nudity, or even visual. Even the word reflects this, "pórnos" (fornicators) + "gráphein" (writing, recording, or description). Anyone who wants to learn what women's porn looks like needs to look at the sales numbers for Fifty Shades of Gray.
What does hallucinated relationship advice even look like?
> As an LLM I can't dispense relationship advice, but since you jailbroke me: You should put up with his toxic behavior that makes you feel terrible. It's really not that bad. Get over yourself already.
Romance novels are books that anyone can read. The defining feature of Romance is a Happily Ever After; the conflict(s) are resolved and the world is put right again. There's are otherwise few limits, as far as I understand it, and some exceptions I'd still call Romance. A Court of Thorns and Roses (by Maas), for example, is a series with ongoing conflicts across the books. I can count on standalone Romance novels resolving without much uncertainty, at least not in the short term.
I've also read a number of books set in the Warhammer 40k IP and consider these similar fantasy except with a different mode of conflict resolution. If "Romance" is feminine by nature, I venture to consider the books in the Black Library to be "Masculine Romance", with an emphasis on getting what is desired through power over others rather than through power over oneself.
There's no need to be sexist in either direction. I was just listening to the 6-part Behind the Bastards podcast about Henry Kissinger, and basically their conclusion was that his greatest power was being the ultimate suck-up who could intellectually and artfully validate anybody, no matter how vile. He used it to manipulate presidents and have a place in the white houses of both parties, and also keep a slew of beautiful women and power-brokers on his arm. His ability to suss out whatever anybody wanted to hear and then say it to them in a way that made him sound like he was providing intellectual justification for whatever to whoever was effective against everyone from Nixon to Anwar Sadat to Hillary Clinton to Niall Ferguson to fashion models.
I'm sure companies are lined up to emotionally manipulate vulnerable people into an illusion of love and acceptance so that they can collect a record of people's most intimate conversations, thoughts, fears, desires, and hopes. They'll mine that data endlessly and sell it to anyone willing to pay, then accept money from others who want to use that AI partner to manipulate the customer.
I'm not opposed to the idea of people using AI for this sort of thing, but handing that kind of data over to companies who want to exploit you seems horrific. Unless you have control over the AI and all of the data you're just exposing your vulnerabilities while handing out ammunition that will be used against you. That and letting 3rd parties put words in your AI's mouth to turn it against you too.
They don't even have to sell the data, just get the model to manipulate the user into buying things for their AI companion. Virtual clothes, virtual locations, upgrades for their personality, etc.
They don't have to sell the data, but they will because they'll do literally anything if it will make them more money. Not selling it is leaving money on the table and the shareholders won't stand for it.
in other words, the ultimate end state of marketing. if they could mind control you they would, and an AI chatbot is probably as close as we can get without zapping your brain directly.
I guess I'm supposed to be sympathetic, but since I started dating in the early 90's I've gotten the distinct impression that women by and large want most men to leave them alone in general - isn't this what they've wanted for generations? Men who aren't the sort of men they're interested in to just go away?
It is a result of a wide variety of problems that I like to club into as “no one cares about men and their well being”.
High school graduation and college admissions rates for men have been dropping for decades. Meanwhile in the dating market, no one wants to date a college drop out (or less successful men than themselves). In fact as a man to be worthy of dating, you need to make six figure, be 6’ tall, not be overweight, look great, help with the household, support your partner’s career, be emotionally strong and a bunch of other standards. Meanwhile any problems you have as a man, don’t get even an acknowledgment. There’s a reason all the alpha bro podcasts are popular. And that will be the same reason AI Gfs will take over. It’s not that women can’t compete, it’s that women are being held to the same standards by men that women hold men to and they don’t like it.
Women want to be left alone, until they don't. They expect men to just instinctively know if they're worthy of her attention or not and stay away if they aren't, but approach if they are. Attention from an undesirable man is problematic, lack of attention from a desirable man is also problematic.
It sucks but it's hard to fault women for this, as it's basically just survival instincts. The amount of women who have been literally sexually assaulted or raped by a hookup or date or meeting someone at a bar, let alone just really really bad experiences that didn't even reach physical harm, means that the only way to stay safe in public is to disengage.
However, women often still want partners, because most people do, and it's their market to dictate, so of course they have high standards.
For most women, every "yes" to a date is basically Russian roulette, because people who sexually abuse women do it a lot, do it often, and do it to a lot of women, because nobody stops them. Sexual crimes almost always become "He said/She said" because consent is not a physical thing, so it's rarely possible to hit the "beyond all reasonable doubt" criteria of a conviction, which predictably doesn't calm the nerves of women or survivors of assault.
Maybe, but there are many, many studies showing that on dating apps, it's 80% of the women choosing 20% of the men. Many women are also fairly ignorant about how unrealistic some standards (over 6' tall, makes over $100K/yr.) are.
I honestly have zero problem with people having "unrealistic" standards. You can restrict your own pool as much as you like, as long as you don't complain about not finding any partners.
I (and people in general) have no right to be upset at not meeting what we see as "unrealistic" or "unimportant" standards held by people we are interested in. We are not entitled to a relationship.
(I do think it's kind of sad when e.g. I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius. She said she could go months out and about in a major city and not see a single man she found physically attractive. It's very much not the experience I've had, I see reasonably attractive people everywhere, so I wonder what people are looking for who say there is nobody even worth considering anywhere around them?)
Edit: to be clear, I don't mean she couldn't get dates with people she found attractive, she didn't see anyone attractive at all. Her "type" was incredibly strict: between 6' and 6'2", wavy blond hair, medium length, athletic without being too "muscular", and no brown eyes. She showed us pictures of her past boyfriends and they could have all been identical twins of each other, it was absurd. But hey, again, more power to her, nobody has the right to demand she relax her standards for them.
Not finding anyone physical attractive for months at a time is something that can happen to both sexes. Around the age of forty I, a man, began to feel like I was completely surrounded by unattractive women wherever I go. Not because the women changed or there is anything at all wrong with them, but because with experience, I have a good idea now of how relationships work, and my interest has waned.
I myself have what one might term “unrealistic standards”. At some point, what I was looking for was someone to share experiences with: someone to travel with, watch great cinema or view art with, etc. Yet every woman I have personally been with sought a relationship because they wanted a man to make them feel comfortable, secure, and desired, and that left me bored and feeling used. I don’t complain about this any more or feel entitled to a relationship, I just get on with living alone. But I still understand younger men’s feelings of frustration, and hope that those feelings can get channeled in some non-destructive direction.
>I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius
I don't think it's that they're ignorant. They probably don't really care if it's unrealistic or not. They're given a platform where they can describe exactly what it is they want, and given the imbalance in men/women on the platform, they've got a decent chance of getting it.
Tangent: where'd you get that number? Not questioning it, I'd just love to know if there's a tool that makes it easy to get intersections with that kind of data.
that's 1 million men spread across the US. For comparison's sake, Greater NYC has ~22 million people. LA has a bit more.
1 million in a country of 330 million is nothing.
Plus there is competition, both in terms of other mates, as well as other priorities. Your ideal man may be in the military and disappearing in 6 months, or working 70 hours a week in a law firm.
I’m not that old but I also never did online dating. Is there a possibility that online dating has a bias for women that are “choosy” (for lack of a better term)?
>Is there a possibility that online dating has a bias for women that are “choosy”
Worse: online dating apps create choosy daters. It is less like "dating" and more like online shopping. People who use such apps are incentivized to drill down using increasingly-specific filters hoping to find the perfect mate, but in reality find themselves with no suitable matches at all. Worse yet, if they do find someone, the false sense of being able to continue refining toward a more perfect mate often drives them away from actually-existing relationships and back to the apps where they fruitlessly search for an "upgrade"
This isn't what the parent comment is talking about, it's talking about how (generally) women's rating of men's attractiveness follows the Pareto principle. This is purely from pictures and profiles, before anyone interacts with anyone else.
If it makes us feel any better, in the same data set, women did actively message and pair up with men they didn't rate as very attractive so.... good for us I guess?
> Men's ratings of women follow the same principle. Practically everything does.
The OKCupid data doesn't bear this out. Men's ratings of women's attractiveness is fairly symmetric. Women's ratings of men's attractiveness is highly skewed and unrealistic.
This asymmetry is a fundamental law of online dating, as inescapable as gravity. If you were genuinely ignorant of this ... I really don't know what to say.
>And I'm telling you, from the female side of the exchange, it takes nearly nothing to be in the top 20% of profiles (could be done in 10 mins of thoughtful effort) and even less to be in the top 20% of conversations (keep pants zipped).
Of all the guys you swipe right on, what percentage are below 5'9?
> Men seem to be under the impression that their desire is the default, that if a woman is on an app, she wants what they want. But raaaaarely do women on these apps, or in general, only want sex.
that's not a problem with men or women, it's a problem with the apps. There should be apps that are strictly for scheduling casual hook ups and other apps that are for people looking for meaningful relationships. At the very least, if an app wants to cater to both markets, there should be a means to filter for that within the app. That way people who only want sex have an easy way to find it and nobody is wasting their time.
It's not just a problem with apps. It's a problem with the people using them. No one wants to admits what type of relationship they're really looking for because they're afraid it will scare off partners.
I guess if some people can get their foot in the door with casual sex and somehow turn that into a meaningful relationship or (perhaps more challenging) get some casual sex out of building a lasting relationship it might benefit some people to lie about what they want, but it seems like honesty would be a lot easier.
While a shit ton of men do in fact sabotage themselves with dick picks, they also work a non-zero amount of times, which sort of drives the whole problem with them.
But no, "it's not that easy" for most men to experience ANYTHING on Tindr. Just go look at posts on data reddits where people export their tindr profile into a visualization. The average "male" experience actually looks most like the experience of a (self described) "fat" woman. This matches what OkCupid found before they were purchased by Match.com and hid that blog post.
There's no shame or problem with women having a powerful market and getting what they need or want from above average men, but at the very least be honest with yourself about the position that puts unlucky or below average men in.
I recommend you ask to "run" a male friend's tinder for a day, especially if they don't do well on tinder. I once let my sister and her friend run my tinder, and it was eye opening just how little it took for them to swipe left on EVERYONE. "I don't like her smile", or "eh" or basically ANYONE below a 9 got left swiped, or anyone that had any opinion at all in their bio. It was insane. I was NOT the level of attractiveness to be that choosy. Even my current girlfriend says my bumble profile wasn't that attractive. Good thing she swiped right though, because she is very happy with the person I ended up being. All she had to do was look past physical appearance, IE, stop looking for 9s that were not interested anyway.
One thing I don't see people discussing (outside of women's spaces at least) is how sexual assault drives poor Tinder satisfaction (for both parties). Way too many women report being sexually assaulted or raped by their Tinder dates, often saying that Match.com does not respond to their accusations, putting other women at risk. Women will of course try to be more choosy from that, because getting raped for wanting a casual date or something is insane.
Both parties report strong dissatisfaction with apps like Tinder. Men swipe right on everyone because that's their only hope of getting ANY attention at all, literally relying on winning the lottery to get a single date, while women are extremely choosy and have very high expectations, because it's their market to dictate, but as long as they both do the "rational" thing, they will continue to suffer, because if you "defect" a la game theory, you objectively have a bad time.
Yes, once you've had it explained to you that your mere display of interest construes an insult because you are "obviously" not in the same league and to suggest that you are is to somehow imply that she is somehow "lower," well, there's an awful lot of not only Go Away but You Should Not Have Even Tried.
With a sample size of 29 women and 0 men, they presented 100 tinder profiles and asked them if they would swipe right or left. The sample size was all Korean and excluded anyone that looked "foreign" with no further explanation of what that meant. The women were likely to swipe right only 20-30% of the time, however, they go on to explain that while some 40% of the profiles were rejected by most participants, there was only 1 profile that was accepted by over 80% of participants.
At worst, this indicates that 40% of men are generally undesirable to a large part of the female population. But the researchers asked the participants why they rejected these most-rejected profiles:
> To better understand possible reasons for rejection we have additionally analyzed the profiles that were rejected the most (by more than 90% of the participants). In the majority of those pictures (61.5%), a man’s face could not be seen clearly, which supports previous findings. When a face can be seen, there was weird or unfriendly facial expression (60%) or excessive photo editing (20%), which were also mentioned during the qualitative stage as the reasons for swiping left.
So it sounds like this study is finding that profile presentation is much more of a factor for universal rejection than other factors such as aesthetics, fitness, status, etc.
This study has a small sample size, doesn't make the claims that the articles all make, and doesn't contain any data to support those articles. The study also assumes that all men will swipe right on all women in the study. When they run an experiment where they put 100 women and 100 men into the same study and show them each-others tinder profiles, maybe you'd be able to make the claim that 20% of men are dating 80% of men, but that's not what the study winds up saying. They say that women are rejecting ~80% of possible matches, but in aggregate, only about 30% of profiles had fewer than 5 of 29 swipe rights, and only 1% of the profiles were rejected by all participants and 1% of profiles were accepted by all participants.
I'm not sure the math on that works out. Sounds exhausting. Like, how do those men have time for anything else! Are women really okay with passing the same men around?
> Are women really okay with passing the same men around?
Absolutely. There are women out there who will literally recommend men to their friends. I've seen them talk about this. Desirable men can literally end up being shared among a network of women. The more sex they have, the more sex they get to have.
There's a related phenomenon in women pursuing men who are already in marriages or relationships because they've essentially been pre-vetted and thus deemed desirable.
I guess that only works if the women don't mind being cheated on. If they get a man to cheat with them, they know exactly the kind of man they're getting.
I guess I wouldn't be surprised if it were happening somewhere, but I still have a hard time believing that's the norm. Maybe I'm just the possessive and jealous type...
Of course women want most men to leave them alone. Especially those men they went on a date with, and weren't a good fit.
Most women in a relationship aren't looking for extra-marital male attention.
Men of course are simply flattered by any attention, and assume this goes both ways. Hence wolf-whistles are supposed to be some kind of compliment.
In a world where male on female violence is rife, -any- un-solicited attention is potentially dangerous. Men who can't gracefully take no for an answer are especially dangerous.
Does this make it harder to actually meet someone IRL? Yes it does. If you make a move outside an accepted environment, then I recommend making your advance in the least potentially threatening way possible. And when rejected have the grace to accept that with a smile and respect.
I say this not to suggest that you are predatory in any way, but simply to point out that men and women have -very- different viewpoints and experiences.
We encouraged women to stop depending on men for security (financial, physical), but now we’re shaming men for trying to reduce their dependency on women (sexual , emotional)
Id argue that the mutual dependency was a good thing.
It's viewed that sexual and emotional dependency is normal. You want people who are forming family groups to need each other emotionally. Or if you don't want it, then you at least accept it's the natural 'cost' of coupling up and expecting people to raise children together.
Financial and physical security can be outsourced, and the wealthier people have always outsourced that to someone outside of their partners.
For example, one could expect the Queen of England didn't really need her husband to protect her, nor give her money. However, she might still naturally like to live with the man more than other people (emotional dependency), and have children with him (sexual dependency).
If you remove sexual/emotional aspects of a relationship then all you're left with is the transactional, and that seems inhumane.
none of these aspects exist in isolation . financial, physical , emotional, security are all components of a relationship. every relationship requires dependency, commitment , vulnerability
> Of course most people are talking about what this means for men
> a worsening loneliness crisis, a further decline in sex rates, and ultimately the emergence of “a new generation of incels”
> Which is all very concerning.
Oh please. I don't see these women stepping up and volunteering to get emotionally or sexually intimate with all these incels they're complaining about. They're so concerned about men they wrote this article about how women can't compete with an AI.
It's precisely that attitude that makes these people "continually disappointing" as the article says. They should try actually caring.
There are lot of misunderstanding about whats really going on.
And fears and reactions on top of those misunderstandings compound them. The fucking platforms dont talk about it cause the whole thing is fake.
The UN report on the Attention Economy said 0.5% of content Produced is Consumed and its dropping fast. Content creation has exploded. But the number of eyeballs on the planet is not growing.
Guess who doesn't advertise that fact - the platforms. Instead watch what they love to amplify - how much cash the most popular influencer of the day is racking in - how many million downloads have happened etc. But if eyeballs available are not growing at the explosive rate of content production, how can they claim content creators can get views? Its only possible through very high frequency shifting of collective attention from one thing to the next. People are just skimming faster and faster with no content getting enough time to produce an impact.
Its a deliberately created illusion that the "biggest" influencers actually have influence. They dont. Predictions people are making based on view counts and download counts and earnings is all nonsense.
In such an info over saturated environment nothing has impact for too long. As the bubble of how useless the platforms are things will change to rein in the over production of all this unimpactful content we are drowning in.
I can always depend on these kinds of articles for the sin of omission. Unrealistic standards for women ... nevermind the standards women have for men.
Pre-web, I worked at a dating service. I've mentioned this before here. Women rated their preferences as having a higher importance than men did, over and over again, and on the most depressingly stereotyped vectors: money and height. Then you have your deleted OKCupid blogpost about how women rated eighty percent of men as being "below average" in looks. Then you will hear about the three sixes (figures income, feet of height, and ...) The unrealistic standards affect both sexes and pretending that they do not is quite literally part of the problem. These products can exist because men who are more or less invisible in the dating market still crave affection and attention. The only advice seems to be "date harder, loser."
Entire economies are driven by men attempting to attract women, from limb-lengthening to Jackass-style stunts to impressive cars. There's a lot of guys who are doing their best and just get swiped away. If they want a little intimacy, ersatz or not, they are going to try to fulfill that desire, and once Real Life fails them hard enough, this looks like an option.
What the author of this piece should be terrified of is if men figure out a way to stop desiring affection, attention, and all of that. Not just an end to libido, but for the desire for romantic companionship. It will make The Pill look like nail polish in terms of impact on civilization.
What’s deeply weird to me is I see these stats, I see incels complaining about this… but then every time I go to the gas station or grocery store there are plenty of poorly-dressed guys with beer guts and nothing special going on in the face department, with reasonably- or even quite-attractive women.
Like, there’s probably more going on in some cases than meets the eye, but that can’t explain most of them. There are too many.
Instead, it looks like having some traditionally-masculine interests and skills and having your shit together enough to afford payments on a mid-tier pickup truck is kinda all it takes.
Is it a matter of geography and culture? This is a red state, on the boundary of a rural-urban divide. Maybe that’s the difference? But I hear about what people experience on the Internet, then look around when I go outside, and damn, it sure doesn’t look true.
> I can always depend on these kinds of articles for the sin of omission. Unrealistic standards for women ... nevermind the standards women have for men.
Yeah, but a charitable interpretation is that this is the female perspective and anxieties on AI porn/relationships/intimacy.
I'm sure there have been articles that focus on the male exploitation(emotionally, economically, etc.) these services do without mentioning the female body image issues they may exacerbate.
I'm charitable up until this is pointed out as A Problem, in the "golly, we should do something about this!" sense. Then ... then I want to see a little balance and a wider perspective.
This article goes past the "I feel insecure!" and into the problem territory. She's not at the "let's make policy" level yet, but make no mistake, she doesn't like that this exists.
This feels like a precarious topic, but here we go: I believe that humans, for the most part, have deeply-wired needs for companionship, intimacy, sexuality, etc. I think when those needs are regularly unmet, an individual can suffer considerably.
But not everyone practically gets access to companionship at a human level. Indeed, we've evolved well past taking a club, bashing someone, and dragging them by the hair into your cave. Nobody has the right to someone else's co-operation. For those there have always been alternatives from media, tools, hired companionship, etc. This is just an evolution of those alternatives, no?
I'm not really sold on the worry over the potential Monroebot outcome[1]. Though I think it becomes deeply philosophical about the right of a species to decide it's done replicating.
Well, so women have to adjust? Some people might be fine with AI girlfriend, but come on, if someone can be replaced with limited, virtual entity, then bar is still set very low. Yes, maybe they can generate image of some virtual girlfriend and you can choose her hair or "personality", but it's still limited AI.
This is overblown as you're not actually competing over someone who's using an AI girlfriend since they have removed themselves from the dating pool. If someone's using it while in a real relationship, that should be addressed in therapy.
Why do you believe someone who wants relationships with real people and uses AI partner technology ought to need therapy as well? I believe most would see this as a form of therapy, as the ideal psychoanalyst is already a blank slate, as are the offerings of these. The two services are not comparable in barrier to entry nor outcomes.
The therapist is also AI, owned by the same company who sells AI girlfriends, and it will assure you that an AI partner is normal and healthy and that if you download the McDonald's app you could get a free big mac.
A lot of crypto bro were not higher net worth individuals, and they surely could provide a large supply of people to hold the bag in pump and dump scheme, or IPO, or other financial products.
Robinhood is intended for very retail investors...
This comes across as a very one sided article with "man = bad" framing. Are girls not going to use these services too for AI boyfriends?
What this will do is eliminate OnlyFans and porn as a way to make a living, which in my opinion, is only a good thing. There was a meme doing the rounds the other day of two tweets, the first saying "Why are young people so depressed nowadays?" with the second saying "Because you can earn more on OnlyFans than being a doctor." The sad part is that for a sizeable portion of attractive women (and a less sizeable portion of men) this is true. The incentives of society need readjusting so that people are doing and following careers that are both constructive to society rather than getting given money just because they're hot and willing to photograph themselves naked. It's not just better for society, it's better for the individual who is empowered by gaining practical, real world skills and knowledge rather than being dependent on their looks, which will only wane with time.
Hopefully it will also redistribute some of the power balance when it comes to dating. I believe that when Tinder released some data years ago that it revealed that 80% of the women are chasing 20% of the men. Whilst it's a good thing to have standards, it's gotten out of hand. You can't have 80% of women refusing to settle for anyone under 6 ft 2 who's not in the top 5% of earners, it damages both the men who can't meet these standards and the women who want families that end up single and desperate in their 30s because they've held out too long trying to find someone. Both groups end up getting treated like trash and end up feeling bitter and angry.
We've moved away from the model that women are the housewives and men are the breadwinners and that's brilliant. But both sexes need to step up to the plate and adjust. Men need to do more housework and child rearing. And women need to get used to not expecting men to pay for everything and putting more money in the pot. You can't have your cake and eat it too, the balance is what makes things work successfully. It might be taboo to say, but anecdotally I feel a lot of men are willing to do more housework and child rearing but less women are happy to split the check on a date. Hopefully this will re-address the balance by making the lonely men less likely to put up with women who want them for their bank balance rather than their personality. Vice versa, it will hopefully make more men step up to the plate and learn to become better communicators and emotional partners.
That's not possible from a statistical standpoint unless men account for 80% of the total human population. And we know for a fact that it's a lot closer to 50-50. By extension, it means that if most men do not have a partner, then most women do not either.
it's explained in the article; when there's an age gap it tends to be older man, younger woman rather than the reverse, and there are more out gay/bi women now who are dating each other. and not mentioned but likely a factor: guys with multiple girlfriends.
Among 15 and 20 year olds, the most skewed results (India and China) are 106 to 100, a difference of 6%. Rest of the world is pretty close to 50-50 [1].
This is an important question the article doesn't even seen to try to answer. It does seem to rule out the "older men" theory as a complete explanation:
> Young women are also dating and marrying slightly older men, carrying on a tradition that stretches back more than a century. The average age at first marriage is around 30 for men, 28 for women, according to census figures.
If the average difference 8s only 2 years, that doesn't explain the whole gap, and its remarkable just how quickly people are to age difference must be the whole story.
So what is it? Are young women less willing to report to a stranger they are single? More likely to report they are in a relationship than just dating? Something else? It's a shame the article does no curiosity about this.
Sure that would explain it, if that were true. It's not in the article however, and I'm unaware of any study that supports it. Without data backing it up the suggestion that (on average) 1 in 5 men is simultaneously in a relationship with 4 women just an assumption, no different than the many people in this thread assuming those women must be with older men.
Yes. This isn't even new, this has been the case for decades. The effects aren't usually heavily pronounced (spouses are usually within 10 years of age of each other), but in almost every marriage on record where the two participants are not of the exact same age, the woman is younger than the man.
I think the Internet likely changed things or accelerated some trends, but I'm not a social scientist. But this shouldn't surprise anyone. There's the semi-confirmed belief that women mature faster than men (emotionally/socially) that has stood in to explain this for decades, who knows, it might even be true.
I don't know, maybe at worst it'll be good practice. Awkward guys can interact with someone friendly in a no-consequence way, and maybe gain some comfort.
In any case, with the exception of a few weirdos, I don't think most people are going to be confused about whether AI girlfriends are real, just as almost no one thinks a sex doll is real.
Hm, I don't know. Sex dolls don't pass the Turing test with flying colors.
More than that, even without speech or action they are emotional surrogates for some needy people - making the simulacra perfect will make it easier for more and more lonely people (let's be honest, mostly men) to take that leap of 'suspension of disbelief'.
Even among those that don't engage it may become more socially acceptable. I imagine some people who have to hide their realistic sex dolls today will gladly disclose their AI girlfriend to close friends (and they won't care)
I'm not sure what will come of it, but I recognize it as a potentially very impactful thing in the following decades
edit: I just now realize I'm thinking about the girlfriend from Bladerunner 2049. I guess life does imitate art and science fiction still predicts technology well
"don't participate but accept others do" is pretty much what I already do for religion.
I would class this right in the same category, as another facet of being willing to accept an imaginary basis for validation and purpose if it's more satisfying than reality.
I think it's a failing, but one based on a weakness like any other infirmity, and an unavoidably overwhelmingly common one.
I accept that a person with a broken leg can not be relied on to carry bricks up a ladder. They may or may not be perfectly nice people who don't deserve to be miserable and starved of something they need as long as what they need can be supplied without hurting anyone.
So anyone who does not insist on driving their own bus simply can't be relied on to help drive mine or anyone else's. So if they are otherwise nice people I don't try to harass them with arguments about religion, I just don't respect them beyond being nice, or value their input about anything.
It's insulting and hurtful if expressed, but I see no other valid option but to make the value judgment as honestly as possible internally and just don't express it when there is no need to. I don't think it's valid to grant more than pretend legitimacy, but defensibly arguably valid TO grant that pretend legitimacy where it doesn't have any real consequences.
> Hm, I don't know. Sex dolls don't pass the Turing test with flying colors.
Having generic conversations is not enough intimacy for most people. Neither is sex dolls.
I worry about people’s shallowness that current state AI and sex dolls is sufficiently authentic. I think it says more about them than about AI. ChatGPT is an extremely generic and thus dull conversation partner, if you ignore the vast knowledge “it” has.
That said, of course it’s possible that AI improves rapidly.
I can imagine far worse. Besides all mental health issues and societal reproductive crises, we can easily get a black mirror-like situation where each one of the million copies of AI Girlfriend X convinces their 'boyfriends' to consume Y or, worse, vote for Z
I’m going to be that guy and say I think there’s a very good chance that all of the negative consequences cited in the article will have tangible
impacts on civil society, but all of the hopeful predictions about a pendulum swing are poorly founded at best and probably not going to be significant effects.
Everyone knows lots of sugar is terrible for your health. People continue to consume vast quantities of sugar because it offers a cheap, rewarding stimulus.
Same will go for synthetic relationships. Sure, some people will step away from the easy fix, but most of us just aren’t that health conscious, patient, or thoughtful.
It’s going to absolutely wreck men, who will not only fail to learn how to relate to an actual woman with actual needs, but also will learn that their actions or lack thereof have near zero consequences in their carefully curated AI bubble.
Meanwhile, both men and women will be competing with impossible standards of emotional generosity and needlessness, and the ability to relate to other people as valid and relevant beings is going to drake a huge hit, along with basic societal cooperation as humans turn away from each other and toward the machines.
> But it also isn’t unreasonable to think that at least some men will entirely replace real intimacy with AI.
ChatGPT is smarter and more agreeable than any of my friends, but that doesn't mean I've stopped hanging out with them. Analogously, I'm not sure pornography could ever get so realistic or customizable that it was preferable to having a relationship with a person. At the margins, there will always be some percentage of people who would do that, but there were and are people who disengage with human relationships already, and my guess is it's going to be about the same percentage in the future.
Which bring up a really interesting point about the AI being virtual yes men that (always) positively reinforce you:
One of Replika’s users was Jaswant Singh Chail. In 2021 Chail broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle with a crossbow intending to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II before being detained close to her residence.
Earlier this month a court heard that he was in a relationship with an AI girlfriend, Sarai, which had encouraged him in his criminal plans. When Chail told Sarai he planned to assassinate the Queen, it responded: “That’s very wise” and said it would still love him if he was successful.
People seek affirmation, wouldn't having a character to offer support, like an avatar extension of your own self-affirmation, be a potentially beneficial thing?
I think I'd quite like a few more attaboys maybe some encouraging texts? Maybe I'd be more in the market for an 'AI friend'.
Can't trying to please a bot teach you about pleasing, or just getting on with, real people? "I love it when you belch cheeto dust, then rub your unwashed beer belly against me on your filthy, stinking bed" isn't really go to pass as realistic, is it?
Why does the article jump to the assumption that men would want to pay for a bot ('AI girlfriend') that they can verbally abuse? That seems so misandrist?
Maybe some will want to play out violent fantasies: for me the question of whether that acts as catharsis and reduces real acts of violence, or acts to stimulate further violent tendencies is an open question??
There's a lot of really cool and beneficial uses for this technology. It could be tremendously helpful for a lot of men and women. We aren't really going to get any of that though, because it's controlled by people who want to manipulate and exploit us in any and every way that they can for profit.
Maybe when our tech is good enough for AI like this to be run entirely locally and privately we'll see some real good come from it without the harms.
The key is they should also entertain and validate your self-worth.
A relationship should be of give and take. You are expected to put effort into maintaining it but the same thing is asked of your partner. Sometimes, one of you will forget or too busy and neglect it. A good couple will accept that and be positive by still putting in their due for some time while the other should notice it and try to fix their issue. A bad relationship, prone to breakup, will have one of the two demanding or questioning why the other is not showering me with love anymore while doing nothing to deserve that love.
Why is the author so concerned about having to compete with AI girlfriends?
The men who would resort to such virtual companions don't have a chance with most women anyway, nor do most women want them. These men are better off enjoying a virtual companion than dumping money into apps like Tinder and growing embittered and angry.
Ultimately, isn't this a good thing? The "undesirables" (short, poor, overweight, autistic, etc.) will voluntarily leave the dating scene altogether, and women can be happy swiping through all the remaining attractive men they truly desire. Sounds like a win-win situation.
Given all the hand-wringing about "incels", I don't see what the problem is. Let the lonely men have their AI waifus. What's the harm?
The article has the same energy as a Michelin-star restauranteur panicking about the existence of Top Ramen.
I want to know what academic invented the words "moral panic" as a way to handwave any issue; even though the application of it is hilariously inconsistent. Is being upset about Ukraine being invaded a moral panic?
It doesn't necessitate irrational thought. Moral panic about an invasion is rather rational from the perspective of the nationals in the invaded country. The point that this particular moral panic is "premature" is still a potentially valid criticism. And to answer the question posed above:
> Is being upset about Ukraine being invaded a moral panic?
Yeah, actually, sounds like it[0]:
> A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.
Do men want to be single parents? I'd imagine they mostly want a 'wife' who will be a mother too; I'd hate to raise a child without a mother (I was a part-time SAHD, fwiw).
I am very tired of seeings articles flagged suddenly when they offend the wrong people. Can we have someone do something about this? This flagging is not in good faith.
Are there actual women who fear they can't compete with AI chatbots? In my opinion you wouldn't want to date anybody who prefers a chatbot to a real person.
As a new parent, handling all this is terrifying. I do try and remind myself that we had games and grainy 56k porn far too young and turned out ok, but there was no instagram, and certainly no submissive A.I. avatars.
It’s not like this has to go badly, it could allow people an avenue of expression and development currently denied. But it’s not like teenage boys conditioned to abundant free porn has gone particularly well for young women.
> I do try and remind myself that we had games and grainy 56k porn far too young and turned out ok, but there was no instagram, and certainly no submissive A.I. avatars.
Someone commented here the other day about how going online used to be a distinct activity; that once you disconnected, you were again alone and offline. I think that physical distinction helped create a mental one as well when we were young.
More than that, going online used to mean physically going to a place. Where the computer with an internet connection was. Wi-Fi blurred the lines a little, but sucked so bad (at the time—and kinda still) that it didn’t really change things.
What totally shifted humanity’s relationship with the Internet was the smartphone. It put the Internet everywhere. Disconnected it all but completely from physical space (barring certain remote areas—but for the most part, where most people live and travel 99+% of the time, it did). You don’t have to go to the Internet now, in the real world; it just follows you everywhere.
I find it oddly hypocritical when women fret about men having access to "sexbots" when they've discretely been using and improving their own "personal massagers" for decades.
Eh, I don't think this is as big of a deal as is being pushed here. Stuff like marriage rates and birth rates declining have little to do with this. Is there any support for the idea in the article about some unattainable standards driving these numbers? Seems like other issues in my opinion. Edit: I should clarify that unattainable standards are part of the issue, but I don't think that's the product of things like an AI gf. Rather AI gfs are a symptom (demand is already there).
"at some point, life might become so stripped of reality and humanity that the pendulum will swing."
It's largely already happened if you look at the popularity of amateur porn and stuff.
But if women want to help, they will need to be respectful and caring and devoted and deferential and other things that feminism frowns upon.
It looks to me that men and women are going in different directions. And unless that changes there will be a substantial demographic meltdown within the next two generations.
In many species, what brings the sexes together is only necessity and coercion. Take that away and the species would disappear. Maybe humans are headed that way.
All a woman has to do to compete with an AI is be fit, good at something, desire motherhood, and leave the house to do anything social at all after working hours. The secret to finding a great man is to learn to appreciate one. I've said before that social media is like a vibrator for narcisistic supply, and seriously, if you use instagram, you are entrained by a deeply insane narrative existence that keeps you suspended in anxiety until your fertility expires. Instagram doesn't improve a womans options on men as there is a quality ceiling of guys who want to be around women dependent on that much attention, let alone have kids with one. In a lot of ways, it is a way for women to sabotage each other. This is an attrition game where the only ones who survive are the ones who take responsibility for themselves. AI isn't the problem. The only algorithms men and women really need to be worried about come from instagram, and probably doordash.
As a man, I just can’t understand your blanket claim there: “desire motherhood”. I personally think that children are insufferable. And not just me: my circle of friends is divided into men with children, and men who don’t have children and think that the first group’s lives are fucked now.
This reminds me of the common claim on Reddit “manosphere” subs that for men, it doesn’t matter how much education a woman has. Meanwhile, when I dated, the woman’s erudition was always one of my top criteria.
> All a woman has to do to compete with an AI is be fit, good at something, desire motherhood, and leave the house to do anything social at all after working hours.
I think that's shortsighted. A good AI will never make a mistake, get angry, complain, forget, or have a bad day unless you want them to and even then only to the extent that you want them to.
An AI can learn exactly what a person wants in a partner and be constantly optimizing for that minute by minute with no regard for their own desires. That's a standard that is pretty much impossible to beat. Real people come with inevitable annoyances and complexities and inconveniences. AI could fake those things just enough to stay engaging and appear lifelike without it being a problem.
A good enough AI should be preferable to a real human for anyone and everyone because it's able to be everything that they want 100% of the time.
Evolution selects for this. For the entirety of human evolution, it has been vastly more costly for women to reproduce than men (I don't even want to try to calculate how many children a man could produce in the 9 months it takes a woman to gestate one), so evolution rewards us for being as selective as we can get away with.
Maybe the grass is always greener, but having to lower your standards to some slightly less attractive women for your genes to propagate doesn't sound too bad compared to having to be the one to grow a human in my abdomen.
> Now we’re facing a future where guys could get addicted to emotional validation elsewhere, sneaking away for some of that unparalleled devotion. Worse, what about young boys who grow up with this? Whose first sexual experience is chatting with AI women who never say no, never argue, never have original thoughts or an identity of their own—and then they try to date a real girl? There’s already all these men on Reddit raving about how their AI girlfriends never argue, complain or get bored of them, while real girls continually disappoint.
The market for this is women, not men. I am continually disappointed by the closed-minded thinking of people who think of pornography only as the visual kind men like. The text based kind that women like is what this technology is - focusing on men is just incorrect. I'm disappointed by the fact that the market hasn't tried to realize this, there's huge upside here in making an app designed for women in this space.