this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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I don't like Zuck, but he did not misunderstand humans. He's just 2 steps ahead of you. Kids go on https://c.ai right now and playfully chat with AI posing as various pop culture characters or professions. While this generation grows up, Zuck will have a portfolio of made up characters ready and waiting for them on FB, where the humans can live their life without ever befriending another real human and sharing everything with Meta, to be monetized.
you don't have to understand people to make this move. just market trends
Metaverse tells me that he doesn't understand kids or market trends.
Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of "youth these days"?
The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren't capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).
The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it's same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that's not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.
Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck's horror show.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. 99% of the human-written stuff in IM chats, or posted to social media, is superficial fluff that a fine-tuned LLM should have no problem imitating. It's still relatively easy to recognize AI models outputs in their default settings, because of their characteristic earnest/helpful tone and writing style, but that's quite easily adjustable.
One example worth considering: people are already using fine tuned LLMs to copilot tabletop RPGs, with decent success. In that setting, you don't need fine literature, just a "good enough" quality of prose. And that is already far exceeding the average quality that you see in social media.
Tobacco company selling cigarettes to kids. More at 11.