I am almost continuously reminded of a tumblr post I saw about a college professor that brought in a pencil with googly eyes, did a little voice, then snapped it in half and told the class (of whom at least some gasped in shock) “we’re at that stage of AI right now”. And that post was years ago now. I know people are apes that pack bond and imprint on anything, but it’s getting ridiculous how many people don’t recognize it.
What an impeccable combination of image with username
Legitimately thanks for that. That had stood out to me as “one of these things is not like the others” but my mind only went to sex workers, I did not think at all about men who bought prostitutes.
Why is that your question?
Kinda hate to show my whole ass on this topic, but I lived through this exact thing 5 or 6 years ago when AI Dungeon accused its entire userbase of being pedophiles.
It’s math like this that convinces me that you can contribute more to the ecosystem by paying even a single dollar to a creator’s Patreon (even when Patreon takes 30% off the top) and watching w/ adblock than paying a monthly subscription to YT.
I may have expressed myself poorly, then, because my point was that people were anthropomorphizing the pencil with googly eyes just the same as they are now with AI. It’s not that I blame people for doing what they are innately, biologically programmed to do (form social bonds), it’s that people are so blindly against AI that they’ll accept wildly incorrect assumptions like (quoting a friend here) “they made an AI work a retail job and it wanted to kill itself” without examining what’s at play, like the people who were momentarily horrified that the professor snapped the pencil in half.