this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 78 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's definitely not healthy, but this isn't going to fix the birth rate.

[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Correlation <> causation meme

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 month ago

This probably won’t fix anything, but hopefully stops it from contributing to the issue further down the line

…meme

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 57 points 1 month ago (21 children)

Make babies! It's illegal to be lonely!

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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 47 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 4 points 1 month ago

It's crazy, like overpopulation, stress, and pollution mean people don't want kids or something.

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[–] DeLancre@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] Trev625@sopuli.xyz 23 points 1 month 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 9 points 1 month ago

6% of income? Still much cheaper than a kid!

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[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 55 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

It’s clearly not a healthy thing to exist.

It is the worst of para social relationships, amped up by 100x. And is only going to get more exploitative.

But just on a level of building up the skills to have a relationship, it’s training kids to expect someone who always says yes, always affirms them, will never challenge them to grow…

Relationships are hard. You have to learn to love people and how to do that, and you have to learn to not be selfish, which is the opposite of what LLMs tend to encourage.

[–] newtraditionalists@beehaw.org 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Most importantly, you have to love imperfect people. And confront that you are imperfect as well. And thats ok!

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[–] Elting@piefed.social 44 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 45 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

AI girl/boyfriends are fucking addictions latching onto people vulnerbilities.

This ban 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 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It is funny to me that china can pretend not to be a capitalist nation while displaying every symptom of capitalism.

[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago (5 children)

You can argue that you have capitalism if transactions are happening. Which means the word kind of looses it's meaning because it's so broad.

But people will often define it on how much market control the state displays.

You can then argue that China has market control on key aspects of important sectors. Which they do, but still with an approach, that they have private companies with government subsidies.

But most of all, the need for distance to the world capitalism is more a marketing thing. Unless they believe that capitalism is just a tool to achieve socialism, which also can be true.

[–] Elting@piefed.social 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I would argue a capitalist nation is any one that allows the conversion of natural resources into private (not personal) property by law, and facilitates the exploitation of those resources through a market.

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[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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 5 points 1 month 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.

[–] Teknikal@anarchist.nexus 18 points 1 month ago

I kind of think everywhere probably should, that's probably the strangest thing it's like falling in love with a microwave.

[–] artifex@piefed.social 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)
[–] terranoid@lemmy.cafe 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

this will just spin up a blackmarket waifu market

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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 it presents for companies to abuse people's privacy and manipulate them.

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[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 points 1 month 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.

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[–] INHALE_VEGETABLES@aussie.zone 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Black market GFs that shit is going to be unhinged.

[–] Sabata11792@ani.social 4 points 1 month ago

Psst, you looking for some banned waifus?

[–] AlteE@programming.dev 11 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Declining social and economic conditions affect birthrates more than this.

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[–] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)
[–] ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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 9 points 1 month 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...

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[–] Kwakigra@beehaw.org 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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 17 points 1 month ago (3 children)

You need to think of human beings as less binary good and binary evil.

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[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is the same logic used for child sex dolls and other material consumed by paedophiles

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 8 points 1 month ago

Yeah, sure.

And I wouldn't be so pissed at Epstein and Trump and the rest of the pedophile class if they were just trafficking sex dolls.

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