Comment by keithwhor
7 months ago
I think it's likely we learn to develop healthier relationships with these technologies. The timeframe? I'm not sure. May take generations. May happen quicker than we think.
It's clear to me that language models are a net accelerant. But if they make the average person more "loquacious" (first word that came to mind, but also lol) then the signal for raw intellect will change over time.
Nobody wants to be in a relationship with a language model. But language models may be able to help people who aren't otherwise equipped to handle major life changes and setbacks! So it's a tool - if you know how to use it.
Let's use a real-life example: relationship advice. Over time I would imagine that "ChatGPT-guided relationships" will fall into two categories: "copy-and-pasters", who are just adding a layer of complexity to communication that was subpar to begin with ("I just copied what ChatGPT said"), and "accelerators" who use ChatGPT to analyze their own and their partners motivations to find better solutions to common problems.
It still requires a brain and empathy to make the correct decisions about the latter. The former will always end in heartbreak. I have faith that people will figure this out.
>Nobody wants to be in a relationship with a language model.
I'm not sure about it. I don't have first or second hand experience with this, but I've been hearing about a lot of cases of people really getting into a sort of relationship with an AI, and I can understand a bit of the appeal. You can "have someone" who's entirely unjudgemental, who's always there for you when you want to chat about your stuff, and isn't ever making demands of you. It's definitely nothing close to a real relationship, big I do think it's objectively better than the worst of human relationships, and is probably better for your psyche than being lonely.
For better or for worse, I imagine that we'll see rapid growth in human-AI relationships over the coming decade, driven by improvements in memory and long-term planning (and possibly robotic bodies) on the one hand, and a growth of the loneliness epidemic on the other.