this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
45 points (95.9% liked)

Technology

290 readers
206 users here now

Share interesting Technology news and links.

Rules:

  1. No paywalled sites at all.
  2. News articles has to be recent, not older than 2 weeks (14 days).
  3. No videos.
  4. Post only direct links.

To encourage more original sources and keep this space commercial free as much as I could, the following websites are Blacklisted:

More sites will be added to the blacklist as needed.

Encouraged:

founded 2 months ago
MODERATORS
Pro@programming.dev
45
AI Friend Apps Are Destroying What’s Left of Society (www.currentaffairs.org)
submitted 4 days ago by Pro@programming.dev to c/Technology@programming.dev
10 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

As they become increasingly isolated, people are treating AI chatbots as friends and even lovers. We have to fix the broken society that made this possible.

top 10 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 21 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

As a software dev who is interested in AI, I've spent a lot of time building a personal AI chat app, and I feel like that gives me a view on things.

I can totally see how people become enamoured by this stuff, because on the surface level it can be very convincing, and very compelling. It feels like a person. But in my position - where I'm writing the code and can see every interaction happening under the hood at the base level - it becomes very clear it's nothing more than a rather competent predictive text. Just a probability engine filling in the blanks. And I'm glad for that, because as much as I might interact with AI, I'm never going to start believing it is sentient, or that it cares about me in any way.

AI is a glorified autocomplete, and nothing more. Please don't believe otherwise.

[–] BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's still Eliza.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

It’s really not. And it will continue to diverge.

One finds the limits of Eliza really fast.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Okay so it’s a more complicated Eliza with way, way more pre-programmed statements.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yup, infinite, I’d say.

[–] match@pawb.social 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

well, 8 to 64 billion

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Oh? So that’s the max number of combinations of all supported Unicode characters?

Practically infinite is a lame reframing. I’ll admit. But that’s what I want to clarify I mean. And “nearly infinite” makes no sense. Sure.

[–] match@pawb.social 2 points 4 days ago

I'm in a very similar position (though I'm using koboldcpp) and I feel like it's easy to see how shallow it is after just a few cursory interactions. It honestly makes me pretty concerned about some people's social understanding if they're getting enthralled by the predictive text machine.

[–] Karjalan@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It would be interesting to see studies on this, but to me this screams of the next iteration of "drugs/heavy metal/video games/magazines are destroying society" that comes up every 5 to 10 years.

Some people, with a particular disposition, will have it take over their life, and that's still shitty. But it's not like everyone will just be like "guess I don't need friends anymore". Just like places that legalise drugs don't suddenly see everyone doing drugs.

Fwiw I still think AI and these types of apps are terrible... But the title sounds very clickbait sensational

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

maybe but i think social media is the problem and the slot machine effect of algorithm systems built using physiological techniques to keep people engaged at any cost. Ai chat bots are just an extension of that turned up to 11.