believe that friend AI chatbots will actually cure loneliness and social isolation

i haven't seen this here, even the biggest ai boosters on the grad that i've personally seen have just spoken about LLMs being good at coding tasks and making agitprop
i would be very disappointed if that's the case

I remember there were some rudimentary online AI chatbots when i was growing up in the early 2000s, and frankly we all got bored of them after 10 min of messing around making them say curse words. They were a toy and not a very interesting one. Since then they've gotten better at pretending to talk like humans but fundamentally they are still the same stupid algorithms that you can game if you know the tricks. Useful for certain applications, sure – they can summarize search results and do your homework – but in no way a replacement for real human interaction.

"as a minor"

I take it's safe to assume you're still a minor or, at best, under 20, is that right?

So, what was the thing that got you hooked to it? The sycophant part?

some of our comrades subscribe to an openly genAI position and believe that friend AI chatbots will actually cure loneliness and social isolation

I....don't think anyone actually believes this??? At the end of the day it's a tool, something to be seized from the capitalists to benefit the people, like what China is doing.

Like, I personally have used DeepSeek during times when I need to process or organize my thoughts, especially when I'm having a depressive episode and don't have access to my therapist or anyone else at 2-3am. But I'm fully aware of what it is and that it's not going to solve all of my problems, and that it's not a substitute for my therapist.

At the same time, the wholesale anti-AI "just get rid of it all" crowd simply just has no solutions other than moral panic and shaming others into not using it, acting as if individual people are personally putting in data centers, and personally stealing from artists outright.

friend AI chatbots

LLMs are not friends, are kinda overrated tools

will actually cure loneliness and social isolation

that's not what they were made for in the west, they're more likely machines made for deepening your pre-existing bias

bad effects of using this technology especially as a child

well...they should be forbidden for kids in most cases

I remember in middle school running into some freeware cd from the early 90s, for background the rural af town I lived in had only dialup and sketchy or no cell coverage until 2012 and I was poor but at least had access to old tech, anyway I came across Dr.Sbatso, a sort of AI chatbot joke therapist. If that bot was big as chatgpt was now in the yee old days of the 90s, even bad of a joke as it was with (fun to get it to say parity error), it totally would have had people marrying it left and right.

You just got unlucky to have this generation of AI hit the mainstream since it needs a lot of work yet. Its a useful too yes, but the whole replacement of people is a joke. Its like saying graphing calculators will replace mathematicians. I tried to get chatgpt to play Dr.Sbatso one day I was super frustrated with my perpetual resume rewrites, it struggled to say parity error after I swore at it and cursed its mother. Alienation is so damn high and US hegemony has gone unchecked ,for just long enough the CEOs and other members of the big bourgeoisie are high on their own supply and don't remember what and most importantly who creates all things in our society.

Idk, old man rambling time I guess. How does it feel to live in historic times as a youngster?

The problem is real and alarming tho, I think last year there were cases of suicide bc a new chatgpt release made it unable to role play as a girlfriend or boyfriend

I respect anyone who can face the shadow, learn and grow. I'm proud of you, Comrade.

I don't think they will fix loneliness, but I do see them as a permanent fixture and are good as a starting query, as long as we verify information.

Qwen recently told me to use a melamine sponge to clean leather and I told it it's out of it's programmed mind if it thinks I'm using melamine to clean leather.

Gen ai to cure loneliness is a dumb solution, reminds me of those tech bros that proposed robot bees to compensate an eventual bees instinction. I don't know if the comparison is clear

I mean I am probably considered "pro AI" but that doesn't mean I support people using AI chatbots to cure loneliness and social isolation lol. That would probably just make a person spiral more into isolation and not get better, assuming they can even get better.

AI is useful for like technical stuff. My PS4 controller broke the other day so I pulled out a very old adapter for an older controller to work with PC, but it didn't work well and was glitchy in Steam. Rather than just accepting I need to shell out the money for a new controller, I just asked an AI bot to quickly whip up a daemon to translate inputs from the old adapter in a way that would be compatible with Steam so I could get back to my game, and it did it in a few minutes. Got back to my game in a few minutes and saved me money.

People like myself who find AI useful as a tool doesn't mean we support anything bad you can imagine about AI. I think most people would agree using AI as a "cure" for social isolation is not only a bad idea but probably dangerous as it could drive a person to delusion or insanity. They are technical / productivity tools, not people or friends.

I can't say much. I remember two or three years ago asking ai chatbot about rar compression library under python. Using rar.exe is a given, however maybe there is something from the developer itself. Just researching, but openai chatbot claimed there is a open source implementation of this archive format and described ways to use it. I had to argue with it, till it agreed to be wrong.

Today they all work better. But I still remember it, how they can all tell you stupid and incorrect stuff. Can't trust them, double checking is important - as always.

Maybe they can mostly encourage someone to seek help.