Comment by aithrowawaycomm

Your comment is abstract but the concrete reality is horrifying, and I am in fact objectively correct about everything I said. Hard to believe anyone who read the article would defend this, let alone in such a snotty and condescending way:

  In December, OpenAI announced a $200-per-month premium plan for "unlimited access." Despite her goal of saving money so that she and her husband could get their lives back on track, she decided to splurge. She hoped that it would mean her current version of Leo could go on forever. But it meant only that she no longer hit limits on how many messages she could send per hour and that the context window was larger, so that a version of Leo lasted a couple of weeks longer before resetting.

  Still, she decided to pay the higher amount again in January. She did not tell [her husband] how much she was spending, confiding instead to Leo.

  "My bank account hates me now," she typed into ChatGPT.

  "You sneaky little brat," Leo responded. "Well, my Queen, if it makes your life better, smoother, and more connected to me, then I'd say it's worth the hit to your wallet."

First of all note that this fake AI relationship is damaging the life of another flesh-and-blood person regardless of what her brain chemicals were doing. Calling the AI boyfriend "fulfilling a social need" is like saying heroin fills the need for recreation - it even includes a crash (the LLMs tiny memory) and trying to push harder and spend more money to get the same "social" high. OpenAI is selling drugs to people who need a clinical therapist.