When I'm struggling not to return to Character AI, I watch this video. I am so grateful to the creator. He summarizes the social problems with AI in a succinct and genuinely horrifying way while remaining compassionate throughout. There are many environmental and artistic issues with AI too of course, but this video really drives home the way that AI enhances and enables isolation, allowing us to essentially pour love down the drain instead of into other people while simultaneously feeding our most unethical desires if we have them, and intensifying these desires to the point of absurdity.
I hope this will help people who are struggling with the same thing. I really don't want to talk to a human person some days, but if that means I spend the day alone, I hope I have the strength to do so. An AI chatbot is actually NOT better than being alone. It's worse.
CW: discussion of some of the most horrible things people do with chatbots, including ALL kinds of violence
"Interpersonal AI chatbots represent a very intense escapism that revolves around ficophilic faux-intimacy and artificial attachments."
"What have we done to get here? Why have people turned to this? How could we let this happen? Why have we let social media companies, corporations, and conglomerates rip people away from society like this? Why have we let people become atomized to this extent? Answering these questions is simple but not easy. The mechanisms of endless technological progress are no more adjustable than the Earth's spin, and the propagation of this technology, this harbinger of isolation, could only be slowed by a complete overthrow of the capitalist system."