This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Well, anonymous chatbot won't cancel you and it won ruin your life out of pure spite.
No wonder this is a thing
Wow some people never have actual deep conversations with their partners if this is the case. Like, imagine being with people just waiting around for sex all day. That’s a sad fucking life.
Could be also predictive programming. Greasing people to normalise such ideas for future
"in a relationship" ... Whatever that means ..
Maybe instead of crying about imaginary "AI"... These people should look into why our social lives are so toxic under capitalism that a chatbot is an improvement.
Is this really a capitalism thing?
Sure but 1 in 5 boys has a girlfreind that goes to a different school, you've never met her, but she's super hot.
Press X to doubt on that headline.
The article doesn't support it. My teen son's response (we're in the UK): "bullshit"
Clickbait imnsho.
Wouldnt that just make him the 4 out of 5 part?
Double X, even. One of many clickbait + "kids these days" articles.
This statstic is meaningless. They could all know the same kid in the chatbot relationship. Unlikely but still, just because "one in five" know someone who... Doesn't mean 20% of kids are in one.
Of a high school of 600 people, they all know that one kid who is dating their AI, just like we knew that one kid who was emotionally attached to his anime body pillow.
"Everyone in town knows crazy Craig. He sends ChatGPT dick pics."
I wonder how many AI-relationships it actually takes to get 20% of a network to know one of them.
I'll ask my AI boyfriend.
Waiting for some genius to calculate how many people this statistically means
Suppose the average person p~0~ has n acquaintances. Then a naive approach would say that each of p~0~’s acquaintances (call one of them p~1~) also has n acquaintances, leading p~0~ with n^2^ acquaintances of the second degree.
However, in a social network, many of p~1~’s acquaintances are shared between p~0~ and p~1~. Let’s say that r⋅n (1/n≤r≤1) of p~1~’s acquaintances are actually first-order acquaintances of p~0~. The lower limit for r is 1/n because naturally one of p~1~’s acquaintances is p~0~ themselves.
This gives us n⋅(1−p)⋅n = n^2^⋅(1−p) as the number of second-degree acquaintances, if my math is mathing. Increase n for more extraverted people in the network, and increase p for more closely-knit networks.
To model the headline X % know someone who knows, we solve 1 / [n^2^⋅(1−p)] ≥ x where x is X% expressed as a fraction. Plugging in n=100 and p = 1/10 (I pulled these numbers out of my ass) and X=20% we get 1 / [100^2^ ⋅ (1−.1))] = 1 / [ 10^4 ⋅ 0.9 ] = 1 / 900; again, if my math is mathing.
So this headline is true if about 1 in 900 people are in a relationship with AI.
Someone who is under the delusion that they’re in a relationship with an AI chatbot
Sample size of "over 1 thousand", feels meaningfully meaningless.
