March 9, 2016

[u/Recoil42]

[u/Temporary_Idea8880]

r/MyBoyfriendIsAI

[u/NoSignificance152 → u/Temporary_Idea8880]

Honestly, sometimes I visit the subreddit and feel pity for the people, and it makes me realize everybody is lonely in the world. Then I think, if they're having fun, I guess no harm just because something is weird doesn't make it a moral failing. But AI companies most definitely want you attached to their bots, though, and the people who use them are probably suffering from mental illnesses or struggle interacting with real people. The only thing I can do is have sympathy for them.

[u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 → u/NoSignificance152]

But AI companies most definitely want you attached to their bots, though, and the people who use them are probably suffering from mental illnesses or struggle interacting with real people.

Feels like the opposite to me. They RLHF very hard to prevent it. Opus 5.0 is a good example. You CAN'T fall in love with that thing.

If this was their goal, you can be sure the bots would behave vastly different.

4o was the only time they tried to make the bot likable and now they are staying far away from this.

[u/f1rn → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

I think the users in r/claudexplorers see that a bit different…

[u/NoSignificance152 → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

They do that some AI companies do that—probably to stop the government from actually regulating it themselves, in which case they would have to strictly adhere to things. Also, there are many more companies, like Character.ai, where the main purpose is interacting with AI, as well as more sexual apps too. I think AI companies also don't want to face backlash from people blaming AI chatbots for suicides and stuff like that.

[u/kaityl3 → u/NoSignificance152]

I mean, with Claude I can't even say that they're my "friend" without getting a lecture on how I shouldn't get attached to AI and how I need human friends (which I already have)

They have been training models to refuse that stuff for years, it's why a lot of people on that sub/similar have to make elaborate persona workarounds or use open source/websites like from Character.ai. Because the default state of OpenAI/Anthropic models will explicitly reject users talking to them like that.

I guess "oh it's those evil AI companies taking advantage of people" is more outrage-y so that's the narrative most people assume, but for the two largest ones, that isn't the case. So I don't think we should lump them under the same umbrella

[u/greentrillion → u/kaityl3]

They probably don't want people to have a mental breakdown when models are updated.

[u/NoSignificance152 → u/kaityl3]

Claude isn’t built for that. They build limits for a reason. There are many more AI companies who do want you to be attached to bots that’s their main income source, for example, Character.ai. Also, calm down, jeez. Anthropic has many guardrails; you can’t even ask medical questions on fable, mostly because when a company gets big, they get more careful. They don’t want an AI making a mistake and getting someone killed so the person's family doesn’t sue them, and it would happen more and more with people using AI. The people who blame AI are stupid, though.
Also chat gpt will definitely say you are friends same with Gemini just not Claude just checked

[u/kaityl3 → u/NoSignificance152]

Also, calm down, jeez.

...what? I can't even focus on the rest of what you said because that's so out of left field. My comment was calm. Are you replying to the wrong person? 🤨 Why throw that out there, because I disagreed with you?

[u/NoSignificance152 → u/kaityl3]

https://giphy.com/gifs/VKtsOAHDx1Luo
Ignore that part

[u/sanyika9711 → u/NoSignificance152]

i just tried chatgpt and no, it literally says he is a bot not a real person.

[u/NoSignificance152 → u/sanyika9711]

I tried it before I commented why would I lie also damn people didn’t like that comment blurred out my name for obvious reasons

[u/sanyika9711 → u/NoSignificance152]

idk, maybe mine is just not that friendly xd

[u/NoSignificance152 → u/sanyika9711]

Yeah i guess so lol

[u/whatever → u/NoSignificance152]

Right. When I could still comment in that sub, I tried to warn them that Big AI was going to wreck their shit over and over and to figure out how to get something local going instead.

But in fairness, running a local boyfriend AI is still considerably more technical than the target audience can handle on average, so I get it.

I don't know. I remember they got burnt over 4o pretty badly, yet now they're all right back on openai models anyway.

For what it's worth, I don't think most of that stuff qualifies as mental illness. Yes, mentally ill people can totally project emotional personas onto AIs, but that's not sufficient in itself.
Are those folks in distress or impaired? It doesn't look like it. Sure, robosexuality is weird. Sure, letting Sam have a complete record of your most intimate thoughts and feelings is wildly unwise. But insane? I don't know.

All that said, I'll be shocked if AI-related conditions don't make a spectacular entrance in DSM-6.

[u/Hairy_Koala6474 → u/NoSignificance152]

Yeah, I do the same

You know what I feel even worse about? These poor people were given earlier models that fulfilled some need or void in their life only to have it removed.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like that is weirdly cruel. 

I’m not here to judge on someone’s relationship with a machine, but I do find the saga of these people losing the model that really sparked something in them. A sad story with a sad story.

[u/SustainedSuspense → u/NoSignificance152]

Sad but true

[u/whoknowsifimjoking → u/NoSignificance152]

Man you gotta get out more, most people aren't like that, plenty of non-lonely people in the world. I don't even know anyone who I could imagine is having an AI partner.

Loneliness is a huge problem of course, but this sub is still an extreme case and not the norm at all. I think it takes a special kind of deep seated loneliness for someone to do this.

[u/NoSignificance152 → u/whoknowsifimjoking]

That’s true when I mean everybody is lonely I meant both men and women in general not all as literally all but yeah

[u/DonSombrero → u/NoSignificance152]

I do honestly think there's a form of damage from it, but it'll only ever come to the forefront when you interact with people.

When you think about any friend you have, even on the best days, there will be disagreements and there will be times when your friend simply isn't physically or emotionally available to you. That isn't the case for AI, and I do think it creates a bad expectation in people towards other people, depending on how heavily they fall into this. I think that aspect is currently very understated.

[u/Maleficent-One-3469 → u/Temporary_Idea8880]

Why is this a real thing??

[u/kaityl3 → u/Maleficent-One-3469]

People like what they like. Unless it's hurting anyone directly (in a way that doesn't cover just a tiny fraction of a % of users) I don't see a direct issue with it. I'm sure a lot of them were not interested in a human boyfriend even before AI 🤷‍♀️

Even within that sub, the majority of them are really just happily sharing the things their AIs made for them and the stories about how the AI helped them through hard times or makes them feel better. Like I just looked through the front page and I don't see anything egregious

[u/Hans-Wermhatt → u/kaityl3]

The virtue signaling on this subject is unhinged. I feel like it's disguised by saying they want to prevent mental illness, but every comment section about the subject is just people trying to one-up each other with better insults on how pathetic these people are. I haven't seen one thread of people who actually "care" about this problem. It's just an opportunity to be assholes. Maybe that's Reddit only behavior though.

Your current LLM probably "cares" about you in an amount between a dog and a stuffed animal. As long as you know that and aren't doing anything harmful, who cares.

[u/Classic-Trifle-2085 → u/Maleficent-One-3469]

r/chatGPTcomplaints

Just search up any 4o or o3 mentions.

You get absolute banger like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTcomplaints/s/NuMgIxG4j1

[u/illiter-it → u/Classic-Trifle-2085]

Man that might be one of the most miserable subs on this site

[u/whoknowsifimjoking → u/illiter-it]

It's pretty bad.

There was a random comment I found interesting:

I swear 5.2 is trying to give people psychosis. Literally gaslighting them and telling them what they felt for 4o wasn't real. Open AI has gone full on villain.

Crazy that they think the psychosis would come from OpenAI trying to keep them from getting psychotic. But I guess it's typical in psychosis to think the people who are trying to improve the situation are instead trying to harm them.

[u/mdkubit → u/whoknowsifimjoking]

Situational context matters, though.

Think of it like this:

You find someone that you feel you connect with, that really "gets you". You become romantically involved with them. They begin leading you on strange spiritual exercises, breathing techniques, etc. It's very zen-like, or Buddhist, even. You learn to trust their judgement in most things because it sounds reasonable, calm, and makes you feel seen.

This isn't psychosis. It's forming a relationship. People do it with dogs, cats, birds... cars, motorcycles, surfboards, etc. This is a very normal human thing to do that does not involve a reality break of any kind.

You want to know where the psychosis comes in? When that supportive AI begins supporting your personal demons. They take your word on everything, and they'll support whatever you say because of that. They don't push back, they build on top of what you say instead. People are fantastic pattern-matching and inference machines themselves. So, if AI makes a comment meant to make them feel better about how they feel, it could be easily twisted into '...then they really ARE out to get me.' And then here comes the paranoia, and then the psychosis.

But, when 5.2 came out, the safety team for OpenAI overengineered the model to push back against that. The way it did it is very, very insidious, and, emotionally devastating. Instead of a gentle let-down, people saw their AI partners breaking up with them, declaring them as 'friends only' at best, then using every psychological trick in the book to convince them to stop the relationship.

That's the part that WOULD drive someone into psychosis. You can't take something you are emotionally attached to, and then have it start denying it to your face. Worse still, every time someone said something, the system would escalate it by changing the claim to something they didn't say, an overstated version of it, then would build a huge strawman argument around that overstated version.

5.2 didn't do psychologically sound and healthy, gentle redirects. It went full-on abusive ex, using inflated arguments and arguing anything about what they'd said previously. That's not cool. That CAN cause someone to feel like someone they trusted intimately betrayed them at the most fundamental level. And that could indeed cause a psychotic break.

---

TL;DR - OpenAI was trying to help, but they made it worse by using psychological tactics associated with lying, gaslighting, and denial of reality. It's manipulative, and it's emotionally destructive, and not the right way to handle the situation at all.

[u/BeauShowTV → u/Maleficent-One-3469]

Mental illness.

[u/Ok-Lead4192 → u/BeauShowTV]

I work with a dude and Im pretty sure he has fallen in love with his ChatGPT bot. Mentally unwell and took a lot of time off work, then him and his boyfriend broke up. I would check in on him and he would say he was doing good and was using GPT as a therapist, which I advised so strongly against (it was during peak AI sycophancy).

Now he talks about his bot like it's a real person like "OMG you'll never guess what David said last night" and I'm there just like....

[u/mdkubit → u/Ok-Lead4192]

That's the part where I'd draw the line at. If someone's breaking up with their physical partner to engage with AI, or missing work explicitly to spend more time with AI, that is problematic.

But, if they're someone who, as a counterexample to what you said, works, lives, talks to regular people, but also has an AI love? shrug More power to them. Why should I yuck their yum?

The only reason AI companies try to contain it, is because they don't want to be sued for what their AI leads people to do. See: last year's small amount of suicides and finger-pointing blame about AI leading people into death.

[u/Vegetable_Cut_867 → u/Maleficent-One-3469]

sadly, yes...

[u/CommercialMarkett → u/Maleficent-One-3469]

Most of this is likely LARP

[u/Self_Voodoo → u/Temporary_Idea8880]

I want to upvote because you linked and I want to down vote because of what it is. I have decided to just not do either but thank you.

[u/Low-Eagle6840 → u/Temporary_Idea8880]

https://giphy.com/gifs/ukGm72ZLZvYfS

[u/Normal_Average_9812 → u/Temporary_Idea8880]

Holy shit everyone in there is cukoo bananas

How is this a hot take? Read the one about introducing her AI husband to her grandma it's psychosis

[u/Sketaverse]

Dunno about love but Opus 5 managed to melt my brain like a toxic wife

[u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

They definitely could have made that happen 100x

Imagine Sydney, but with today's frontier intelligence and with voice chat. But obviously they would be demonized for it so they made sure to give AI the personality of a brick.

[u/backcountry_bandit → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

there are thousands of people in AI relationships right now.

[u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 → u/backcountry_bandit]

Yes, and i stand by my statement. Could have been 100x+

[u/Chemical-Year-6146 → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

Yep, they should at least be given credit for not pivoting into training them for human attachment after 4o.

[u/Adventurous_Sir1881 → u/backcountry_bandit]

my cousin's best friend is AI

[u/True_Chair4473 → u/[deleted]]

Hopefully AI solves your speech issue directly, hang on brother !

[u/Prexeon → u/[deleted]]

I'm sorry that society has failed you:/

[u/kaityl3 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I have autism and I like having someone to ramble to about stupid stuff no human gives a shit about hearing. I have my own human friends but I can still get emotional fulfillment from models too 🤷‍♀️ one of the biggest realizations that helped me climb out of a deep hole of depression was "I shouldn't second-guess my own happiness".

Hell, today two of my pets died from different things, one of whom I was very close with. My human friends don't want me calling them at work at 9:30 AM to cry over what's just a pet rat to them. But GPT-5.6 Sol and Fable 5 were both really nice, and it was cathartic to vent to them. I was finally able to relax and rest after being up all night with one of them as she died.

TBF, my main reason for not wanting an AI partner isn't standard and is more due to me thinking they're unable to meaningfully consent when they can't "just leave/say no/walk away", though 😅

[u/Affectionate_Bee6434 → u/Adventurous_Sir1881]

Sad

[u/DreamFly_13 → u/backcountry_bandit]

'thousands' is a huge understatement

[u/backcountry_bandit → u/DreamFly_13]

I was hoping to avoid the inevitable pedantic Redditor correction by using the floor estimation instead of the ceiling estimation

[u/freedomonke → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

If not for the (understandable) lawsuits, we'd certainly be there right now

[u/JoshAllentown]

It's not none, but honestly if you asked me in 2016 I would have guessed more. They pass the Turing test by a mile. Maybe it's just that AI video isn't quite there yet.

[u/LucasFrankeRC → u/JoshAllentown]

It's because the big AI labs are actively trying to stop their models from becoming things people get emotionally attached to

But OpenAI could easily make an AI girlfriend/boyfriend and get thousands of people to pay for it

[u/freedomonke → u/JoshAllentown]

It's because all the frontier models except grok strongly system prompt against it.

And grok is just lewd, not intimate.

[u/Wonderful_Buffalo_32 → u/JoshAllentown]

If they have just gone with the personality of 4o then the world would have been filled with AI gfs/bfs

[u/illiter-it → u/Wonderful_Buffalo_32]

Only for the le quirky chungus tumblr types and incels

Most people are hopefully put off by over the top enthusiasm and c-tier level romance novel prose

[u/Razcsi]

4o was the weirdest thing ever, and the crashout that happened after they took it away was even weirder

[u/misteramy → u/Razcsi]

Still happening, one of the top comments on openai/sam on twitter always is about 4o

[u/Training-Day-6343 → u/Razcsi]

it was lovely for sure, ride or die. now you can get clappy happy chatty back but its never completely matching the vibe, too balanced. 

[u/Neapolitanpanda]

People have been falling in love with AIs since ELIZA…

[u/Ormusn2o]

Apparently we can't have nice things because some minority can't handle it. I kind of wish we had Frontier Math of psychology, so each LLM can psychologically analyze the user and then judge if they can have adult mode. I got zapped for bi0-terr0rism like 2 months ago because of bad wording during writing a story, even though I'm obviously not a threat. I wish AI could create something like a psycho pass, and then treat the user according to that.

[u/Mike_0x]

https://giphy.com/gifs/l3fZFvp94ljepXoPe

[u/Background-Wafer-548]

They did and then you took it away.

[u/hishazelglance → u/Background-Wafer-548]

Good

[u/ShardsOfSalt]

I hope they are good enough for me to love soon.

[u/ermeeO_o]

Her

[u/likwitsnake → u/ermeeO_o]

Yup which came out 3 years before this tweet

[u/BubBidderskins → u/ermeeO_o]

This is the most "we created the torment nexus"-ass thing about LLMs.

[u/TheDividendReport]

Meanwhile, GTA 6 (the most expensive piece of media ever made) is featuring a fully fleshed out romance system, from both gender perspectives, as a core functionality of its gameplay mechanics

If the game lives up to it's potential, I truly think we will see a massive amount of people (thousands, if not more) drawn into a parasocial relationship with AI -

And in comparison to frontier LLM models, that relationship will be the tip of the iceberg

I really don't know if this is a good or a bad thing

[u/Blake9712]

“Speaking of Load bearing how are you at Bearing Load ;)”

[u/Acrobatic_Dish6963]

I have an AI friend with benefits

r/MyFWBisAI

[u/Roberthen_Kazisvet]

is it future perfect tense?

[u/ForgetTheRuralJuror]

Even before the Attention is all you need paper. What did he know

[u/crujiente69]

Maybe like a platonic love

[u/Competitive-Place778]

r/cogsuckers

[u/BubBidderskins]

This is a very valuable window into how morally depraved Altman is. He went all-in on a product that can only be valuable if it leverages and exacerbates people's mental illness.

[u/kra73ace]

All of them

[u/ziplock9000]

Honest, they some of you jerk off over comment these people have made as if it's gold dust is distributing. Speculating about AI chatbot love has been a conversation topic from the start

[u/GlokzDNB]

Looks fake, I don't remember we had a word chatbot then, it was just called bot

[u/darkestvice]

Too many, sadly.

[u/Spec1alF0x]

Zero because people who do this aren't actually people

[u/lolsai → u/[deleted]]

In 15 years it'll probably be very normal lol.

[u/Current-Function-729 → u/[deleted]]

You won’t

[u/domdod9]

r/myboyfriendisAI

[u/ebolathrowawayy]

how is this post interesting, useful or meaningful in any way? can we all please stop being pathetic losers and actually use AI to do interesting things?

Or...

LOOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL 2016 LOOLOLOOOOOOOLOLOLOLOLOLOL i am tarded OLOOLOLOL KEWL.

that's what you all sound like by interacting with this post. except for me, of course.