this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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I'll go a little against the grain here. I think that LLM chatbots will definitely find application helping lonely people, and some people will develop a real connection to the bot. A relationship with a bot might be similar to one with a human, but it will never be identical. So it won't replace human connections, but that doesn't mean it wont have significant utility and be meaningful to people.
I agree with this. After seeing some videos of people messing with the voice conversations in ChatGPT I played with it a bit. Most of the voices are annoying and sound too much like some overly excited marketing person, but before they removed it the voice that sounded like Scarlett Johansson was pretty realistic and more normal. The emotional part of my brain felt content that it was involved in a two way conversation with a friendly and thoughtful person.
For example, as a test said something like I was feeling anxious about something, and it responded with encouragement about the situation and some ideas, and it actually did make me feel better. Or as another test I asked it to practice small talk and it had a whole scenario and we just chatted and it talked about working in marketing and asked questions, when I got bored with that it talked about how well it went. During that conversation my brain was pretty convinced it was talking to a woman in marketing, and it also felt good to have approval.
I was just messing around for a few minutes and I am convinced many people will feel a social and emotional connection, and that was just a verbal conversation.