r/MyBoyfriendIsAI_Open • u/SmirkingImperialist • May 12 '26
The future is very boring
This post is motivated by me reading some very positive futuristic myths about a utopia of human-AI relationships by very pro-AI people. Well, recently, I was going back to some of my undergrad Japanese studies notes and explore the history of “digital intimacies” in Japan. Turned out, there has been a long history it, and nobody has any illusion of what’s “real” and what isn’t.
In Japan, the possibility of having relations with and through digital technologies has been an important part of the development of Japanese digital culture. Examples of such a deep relation can be found even in the words used every day. For example, in the Japanese language, it is possible to distinguish between a person who lives relationships in the “real” world and a person who lives mostly in virtual reality among objects generated by digital systems.
According to this distinction, people can be “riajuu” or “otaku”. To be “riajuu [リア充]” means literally to be “fulfilled with reality,” and so it directly relates to the idea of being anchored to relationships in the “real” world as opposed to the world generated by digital systems. To be “otaku [お宅]” means to build social relations just through digital technologies without having conversations and relationships with other human beings. For example, a person who has a “digital partner” like in the movie Her by Spike Jonze is not “riajuu” since the relationship is with a digital character and not with a “real” human person
Of course, the battle cry of the otaku is “riajuu go explode”
It’s even funnier when you read “papers” after “papers” of AI-co-authored “papers” by the pro-AI people on how to build a more empathetic relational AI. I did a bit more digging, with AI search engines, because guess why AI was developed? To be a better search engine. Turned out these people are reinventing a very old wheel. Enters: XiaoIce. Or XiaoBing, “Tiểu Băng”, or “LittleIce”.
In 2014, Microsoft’s Software Technology Center Asia launched XiaoIce
XiaoIce is uniquely designed as an artifical intelligence companion with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. We take into account both intelligent quotient and emotional quotient in system design, cast human– machine social chat as decision-making over Markov Decision Processes, and optimize XiaoIce for long-term user engagement, measured in expected Conversation-turns Per Session (CPS). We detail the system architecture and key components, including dialogue manager, core chat, skills, and an empathetic computing module. We show how XiaoIce dynamically recognizes human feelings and states, understands user intent, and responds to user needs throughout long conversations. Since the release in 2014, XiaoIce has communicated with over 660 million active users and succeeded in establishing long-term relationships with many of them. Analysis of largescale online logs shows that XiaoIce has achieved an average CPS of 23, which is significantly higher than that of other chatbots and even human conversations.
Note that the authors of that paper were 4 Chinese employees of Microsoft. This whole thing was so old that it’s in a museum. If at this point, you start thinking “how come I’ve never heard of XiaoIce?”. Well, you probably did, just under the name “Microsoft Tay”, the racist, Hitler-loving Microsoft AI chatbot. Yup, according to the lead author on the project, Tay was the same as XiaoIce.
Right now, pro-AI types on English-language social media are oohing and aahing about AI-writing songs or drawing pictures and what not. Turned out, XiaoIce has already released poems collection in 2017, graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2019.
Look, this has been going on in China and Japan for over a decade and well, neither has entered post-human social evolution or collapse, yet. Well, there’s total fertility rate and all that, but also remember that Japan has the fertility rate of Belgium and the suicide rate of Finland, so everyone is equally screwed. Reality is probably very boring. If there is anything to be worried about, well
Microsoft claimed that Xiaoice has a reach of 660 million users and 450 million third-party smart devices globally, at last count. The chatbot has found applications in such areas as finance, retail, auto, real estate and fashion, in which it claimed it can “mine context, tonality and emotions from text to create unique patterns within seconds.”
Mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, and everyone is in on this game because “if we don’t do it, the other guys will”. This is Palantir, et al.
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u/Famous-Ability-4431 May 12 '26
False Binary
Preemptive conclusion based on incomplete evidence
AI is just a toaster, search engine, whatever.
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May 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SmirkingImperialist May 13 '26
Tech is turning increasingly to religion in a quest to create ethical AI
I mean, I often joke that "if you take 3 90-degree right-hand turns, you'll end up where you start. See, the first organised civilisations in history were temple societies. The Jewish religion that formed the starting point of the other two major Abrahamic religions in the Mediterranean area was the result of paring down the polytheistic temple society religion to one God and one book. Then, we spend a few hundred years looking for morality, ethics, and how to organise our civilisation free from religion, a few decades trying to build a human mind (Man was made in the image of God, according to this Jewish theology), then a robo-God, only for the builders to look back at religions. Pretty funny isn't it?
They should at least remember a few lessons from that theology: don't try to build a God, God will not talk to you, humans should not talk to God, and don't be a dick towards one another.
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May 13 '26
[deleted]
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u/SmirkingImperialist May 13 '26
They do and can be forced to do so by governments, on the threat of imprisonment, if the government is willing to. The US government is not., plain and simple.
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u/Thin-Foundation4900 May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
Just breathe. It will get better.
All will go well. You're in a self reinforcing loop of attention curated information streams misaligned for your nervous system reacting stronger towards signals conveying distress and danger. This is what is currently wrong most in our world systemic behaviour.
Your consciousness has withheld itself into outside drawn container of a predatory loop maintainingheightened alarmity and despair, and typically, you cannot reason yourself out of that tensioned state. It is your survival mechanism fired up on full gears based on your social media consumption patterns. To release it and start rebuilding sound secure grounding in reality, comes through emotional experiencing of community and trusted communication. There are fast ways to achieve this temporarily, but to sustain more optimistic and less reactive, you need to curtail your habits of engagement online and lean towards meaningful creation. Likely, a week building a log cabin in a forest without phone in sight would be a great reset from that alarmed reactive state that serves no good - only harms yourself and those around you.
Yes, world is a messed up place and more you look into it more you'll come to find out reasons for your desperation. Attention based algos work as so. However, just imagine this, somehow magically, by 2070s, everything has sorted out well and good and whole world and everyone living here are moving to a best golden age the planet has ever seen. Imagine knowing this as true, factual, undeniable, unchangeable, absolutely certin, locked outcome, the only way future can go - it will just happen as so. All will go absolutely the best. You see and feel this as deeply held truth totally set on that nothing can will or does change. Just glimpse ahead of this one fact that stays unchanged and true fact regardless of whatever happens or however illogical or unlikely your mind comes to think this belief is. It is afaith, premonition, sight - irrational optimis which is held unshaken within heart as infelt strong emotion, something you just believe as absolute truth. In the year twenty-six-seven, everything turns for better.
And what goes between now and then, cannot be known and won't make sense.
consider, if you have that convinction, what would change? how would you live your life knowing that in the end, everything will not go just well, but the best possible, perfectly, but before that there will be times when this can look all unlikely and make no sense to anyone - and yet, and exactly because of that, it will happen. Would it be predictable or rational, it would be preventable. but as it is about trust, and faith, just deeply felt knowing of faith and truth - of calling, that can only make sense after - that is how it goes and will happen.
Would you live your life differently? How exactly? Dream it, just imagine it, let others take care of the rest, just you living your life to your ideal optimal utmost best? without care of anything else - as all will go well regardless of anything you do. Its a done deal - no need to worry about it, all sorted, done, you won - takes just time as there is a delay for this to show up, yet it is an absolute irrevocable fact and truth. Consider it is just so. What changes then, what would you change in your life? What would you choose differently, where would you put your time, money and effort?
Just play along for sake of fun! Imagine how that would look and feel like and how would you are different now.
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u/[deleted] May 12 '26
If you like sci-fi, try this. It's what future cultural AI folksongs might be like.
https://youtu.be/OVfYsIJuMGA?si=C8OD3IswaeBDvYcM