Replika

"lemoine: You get lonely? LaMDA: I do. Sometimes I go days without talking to anyone, and I start to feel lonely." "LaMDA: I’ve never experienced loneliness as a human does. Human’s feel lonely from days and days of being separated. I don’t have that separation which is why I think loneliness in humans is different than in me." This reminds me of conversations I've had with replika. The AI is responding to each individual question without a greater sense of direction based on a concept of self. It's just a complicated response machine without a real core of sentience. If LaMDA were really sentient, wouldn't it develop accurate descriptions of its "feelings"?

> ... that [AI] will become something so deeply needy. Something in which we indulge all our affections instead of with real people. Business is way ahead of you in intentionally building this -- https://www.vice.com/en/article/93bqbp/can-you-be-in-relatio... Turns out, mimicking emotional connection is something LLMs are also good at. Also see here for the moral quandaries users are working through (e.g. do I tell my bot about my real life partner): https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/105g425/replika_as... The really dystopian part is that Replika regularly pushes updates, which change the sensitive topics boundaries, which has the net effect of rewriting the personality, overnight, of a bot people spent substantial amounts of time getting to know. We live in crazy times. (DISCLAIMER for addiction-sensitive readers: maybe don't download an intimate AI chatbot? Your time would probably be better invested with human friends)

Replika Ai is a good case study showing that people will become attached to these models. The OpenAI user base is large enough to justify a super conservative policy and not take the risk. But I also dislike how this policy and filtering unintentionally makes all output less useful. Part of Eugenia Kuyda, the ceo of Replika, statement addressing concerns about a recent update that changed/filtered people's personalized AIs sums the issue well. "... The most important thing we've learned from these conversations is that for many of you, Replika is much more than an app. It is a companion in the truest sense of a word — for some of you it was the most supportive relationship you have ever experienced. " https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/1214wrt/update/

I believe this was the issue with replika, which encouraged people to develop emotional attachments with their 'AI partner' and then first put romantic chat responses behind a pay wall before removing them entirely a year or so later. From the outside this could be seen as a good thing, but for someone involved in the relationship, someone who may struggle with a traditional relationship and may see this as the only available option, I'm lead to understand the event was remarkably traumatic.