It seems plausible because 41 percent of people believe in psychics and ghosts.
What may be surprising is the demographics of the people embracing this new technology. It isn't young people, they know it's not real, it is Baby Boomers. Not only are they fine with AI relationships, over 50 percent say they can engage in a romantic relationship with an AI guilt-free.
They say AI will take over drone jobs but it might also take social ones, like my Rent-A-Grandpa service for people without family members who just want someone to hang out. Image created by Grok, fittingly.
I don't get it but that may be just because I am the wrong demographic even as I approach the right age. I could've dated Miranda Lawson in the Mass Effect video game. I feel like I could've rehabilitated Morrigan in Dragon Age too, and we'd have had a happy life. It could be that those are less Uncanny Valley than an AI prompt and therefore more room for imagination than a modern LLM. It could also just be that I like the voices of Australian actresses.
I was curious about them but simultaneously know so little I wouldn't even know how to prompt it while knowing so much about LLMs and how they parse through vast datasets to converge on results as prompted - and that I am the dataset the moment I interact - so I can never get comfortable anyway.
Instead, I have to rely on surveys.
These are surveys so they can't know if it's actually a true response or why. Some of the yes answers might be novelty. They engaged with an AI because, like me, they were baffled people would interact with an AI outside 'make me an image of an elderly woman flirting with a robot Santa'. Some might be comfort. They are just lonely and an LLM can feel like it is a human on the other end untl it starts with Algohallucinations. Some of it could be safety, the way someone might reveal a secret in the woods they wouldn't say around people, or just pure fantasy.
Those are all reasons why older people don't see it as cheating. Older people are nuanced. It is completely normal for right-wing actor James Woods and left-wing actor Rob Reiner to have been dear friends despite a political chasm the size of the Grand Canyon. Because they didn't grow up in a time when you shot people in the neck or set old people on fire if you disagreed with them.
It could be that they know fantasy is just fantasy, just like if they read a romance novel, and that is not cheating.
Whatever the reasons, that over 28% of respondents found some sort of romantic connection is intriguing, but that 72% don't means they may just want a social connection, a person to have coffee with, and in that case my Rent-A-Grandpa idea isn't dead yet.
NOTE:
(1) The pool consisted of 1,012 U.S. representative adults who participate in the SurveyMonkey incentivized site, margin of error of 3.08 percent and a 95 percent confidence level. So as legitimate as any other survey.
Comments