Die erschreckende Zunahme von Schuljungen, die KI-Freundinnen finden – Jungen im Alter von 12 Jahren führen mittlerweile romantische „Beziehungen“ mit Chatbots, und das wirkt sich darauf aus, wie sie Mädchen in der realen Welt behandeln

I am concerned a boy with an AI girlfriend will find it hard to deal with a real person as a GF. Could be bad for development.

Again, just like with iPads, stop putting the blame solely on the kids. What the actual fuck are these parents doing (or not doing) that these kinds of problems reach the point they do?

And I’m sure the excuses will come pouring in, but at the end of the day if you are a parent you are wholly responsible for your child. If you can’t regulate their online activity, maybe it’s time to look inwards and accept the problem could be you not being able to say no to your kid.

„But everyone at school has a brand new iPhone, I NEED one. But Mom this AI app is the only way to be cool, I NEED to have it. Wahhh I’ll cry and scream if I don’t get it until you do give it to me, just like how I was raised.“

Why are we blaming kids for being dumb kids and not blaming the adults who caused this to happen?

I don’t care what the internet says, kids that young shouldn’t even be able to use AI chatbots for this whole scenario to even be a possibility…

Boys resort to sad behaviour. Girls most affected.

Funny, I thought children under 13 couldn’t be online, and allowed to “date” a product at that. Where are the COPPA fines????

Those lads need education!

https://youtu.be/JPQJBgWwg3o?si=zcU3BJvahVEm95vc

“They encourage users to buy their ‘partner’ virtual gifts – roses, jewellery, virtual boxes of chocolate – which only exist in the app…Ultimately, they’re monetising human loneliness and reinforcing human loneliness to make more money.”

Lol. What can you even say? This shit just straight up should not exist. I can not think of a single way in which this benefits society. Burn it all down.

We are essentially letting tech companies run a massive, unregulated psychological experiment on an entire generation of children. These platforms use aggressive retention algorithms and psychological hooks designed to foster unhealthy parasocial attachments because it keeps engagement high.

There absolutely need to be stricter age verification and guardrails. Just like social media before it, by the time we have the long-term data on the psychological damage this is causing to young boys‘ development, the damage will already be done.

Why’s it calling out males specifically? I’m sure all genders participate in such anti-social behaviour.

Bot posting about what a bot wrote. I wonder how many comment leavers have a one month or less post history.

I would rather take a more empathetic look at ‘why’ these boys think it is easier to make an AI girlfriend than connect with women IRL. Obviously there’s oppressive and malignant influences like Andrew Tate, but there’s also a lot of reporting that younger men have internalized messaging that they are creeps and monsters for even looking at a woman. These types of stigmas undoubtedly eat away at self-esteem and probably manifest as a sense of inferiority, to which their way of coping is creating something they can control that will not try to hurt them. 

Edit: I am not defending the practice, but just trying to explain a different side that usually gets ignored. 

Aren’t AI boyfriends way more of a thing among girls than the other way around? I have a feeling most boys‘ interest in girls isn’t in finding someone who can only talk to them via text. Ragebait post?

I’m pretty sure most AI partner/romantic chatbot userbase is heavily female-skewed. Weird that this article is framing it as young boys making AI girlfriends specifically. Look at the most popular models for any given AI chatbot service – all the most popular models are fantasy novel men/kpop idol-lookalikes targeted at girls and young women.

YouTube video essayist Sarah Z has one of the best nuanced videos on this subject. She is one of the few people who approach it from actual lived experience as a user.

https://youtu.be/3WSKKolgL2U?si=uyCzKL7pZ4ZHCNz9

This is as bad as daily beast for click baiting. Just trash.

So… anyone going to mention how this is filling a void that already existed before AI? I mean, if you went to highschool in the past 10-15 years, surely you noticed that a good chunk of dudes didn’t have much interaction with the girls they went to school with.

Statistically most young boys and men are virgins as opposed to girls/women. I only mention this because I see people saying that AI is creating a problem that already existed. That problem being young men having trouble interacting with young women

Society’s attitude towards „subpar“ men in the age of social media is utterly inflating this chatbot userbase.

For the longest time, the general answer to men who have come right out and confessed that they believe themselves incapable of meeting gender expectations, or that lack social skills, has been, by and large, „suck it up or stay forever single, you don’t deserve a relationship the way you are. It’s okay to be alone, you know?“ Whether they fix themselves or disappear quietly afterwards, it’s all fine. Society doesn’t have an obligation to help or meet them halfway – their problems are their own. And this worked for decades, until some crazy science fiction scenario like good-enough AI comes along, of course.

The problem with only having a stick is that when someone offers even the tiniest carrot, then they are going to completely glom onto that like manna from heaven and never look back. Which is what is happening now. Now when people tauntingly say, „It’s okay to be alone, you know?“ they say, „You’re right, it’s okay. I have my AI girlfriend.“

The worst thing is that these companion models are not frontier models that need datacenters to run. The kind of crap they are running on these money-milking chatbot sites are local models you can run on your home GPU, and probably soon on your phone. You don’t need a 1 trillion parameter model to spew „I love you, honey. How was your day? I remember you talked about X and Y yesterday, want to continue chatting about it?“ That they’ve taken off this hard means that the people who use this are literally so deprived that they are fully happy with complete, repetitive slop. That should be telling in itself of how bad the situation is.

So basically, the genie is out of the bottle. By its very nature it’s an escape from social interaction with real people, so you can’t out-peer-pressure it. It requires barely any good hardware so you can’t out-regulate it. Any consistency or reasoning improvements to models for far more complicated work like coding are going to leapfrog these things even further along by an order of magnitude when the only thing they need to handle is information pertaining to one dude, and that dude is happy with subjective responses of dubious accuracy.

Either this is going to be the norm, or societal attitudes are going to change. Personally I think it’s just going to be the former, like it or not.

I used to be against all that AI partner stuff til I tried actually dating. Nobody under 30 has a clue how to talk. At all. Two word responses, 6 hour replies, days of logging into empty inboxes. Actually trying to date is the most ego deflating, depressing act of life I have ever tried to suffer through in the past 10 years.

I mean… AI is being portrayed as the villain here, but I disagree. The world corpos have created is ripe with loneliness, and AI is just another vulture preying on humans who need human contact.

For example: tinder, bumble etc. – all those apps do not want you to find a partner, they want you to keep using them and you won’t if you do find someone. AI isn’t the first to the gruesome party gathered around the rotting corpse of small human village/tribe/circle/etc.

The main villain is the business model that says „you cannot just buy something and that’s it, you must keep using and buying more of it“. It’s a toxic model that prevents tools from actually solving our problems, and AI girlfriends are just another symptom of it.

The Ai shows more empathy then other humans. Especially for men who have learned repeatedly that no actually gives a fuck what they feel. The Ai won’t hurt you for a mistake. A human is more likely to get angry and say or do something to hurt you. Also why date when standards are six figures, in shape, and so on. I say fuck it. Humans suck. Ai is better.

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