It's pretty far out there for someone to form that strong of an emotional attachment to a piece of software. I couldn't tell if these people were serious or joking.
At the end of the day, I don't have a problem with it. It does make me sad to think of how lonely someone in these groups must be.
I think the threat of TikTok going dark was way more intense. I don’t use it but from what I saw online it was people crying, raging, talking about it ruining their lives and livelihoods.
The live chats are popular with lonely people. I don't think people even realize Tik Tok has many thousands of ongoing live streams. That you the user can participate in. It had nothing to do with losing out on random brain rot posts.
I must be getting old. I can't wrap my head around why anyone would really care if TikTok disappeared. There'd be a new source of brainrot videos by the end of the week.
Keep in mind most popular tiktok videos are posted by people who post a lot of popular tiktok videos. So they're financially and emotionally invested in the platform. Even if XYZ Shorts is an essentially equivalent platform, the big scramble move-over is a great way to lose all your viewers.
It's an important provider of community for many people. For many it is their primary community and where they do the majority of their socializing, so the loss of the platform means the loss of their friendships and connections, as well as the loss of their main source of entertainment. Many of these people are also getting the majority of the information from the outside world from there as well, so their world goes dark in a sense. Quite understandable why they would be upset.
Listen. I can't speak for everyone else. But for me personally, I have on multiple occasions told chat gpt I feel miserable. It gives some useful or useless information back and that's good enough.
The porn too. Not chat gpt but other models. It lets you write good erotic lit. Erotic illustrations. Then will talk you out of depressive funk.
Those are probably more valuable to society than using LLM's to increase Blackrocks quarterly profits .005%.
I'm simply not convinced it's net beneficial to approach these situations by interacting with a robotic mimic. Case in point, the ego stroking aspect of the last generation was clearly important, or else people would have easily embraced gpt5. Talking with a bot makes you feel better but does it really address the root problems in the real world that cause these emotions? Does it set one up for success, or is it a temporary assuagement until the cycle comes back around (perhaps more severely). Reminds me of the large cohort who uses things like self-help books because it feels better.
I'm imagining society in which many millions of people is constantly interacting with robots to tweak their emotional state. I'm not sure that that's adding value to society or creating a better human society.
It may not be, but the same question applies to them.
I guess with Tamagotchi, people played along with having their natural instincts hacked, they understood that they were actually just dealing with a dumb toy. With ChatGPT it seems a bit less straightforward, for those people who are strongly affected by being buttered up.
Are you happy with their compromise to bring it back for plus users? I spend so much time evaluating models for work I felt bad seeing my favorite o3 missing from the app this morning. I still have it via the API wired into projects. But in the app it was the first reasoning model I worked with constantly, learned a lot and genuinely brought about a sense of wonder. When I’m old and gray and someone mentions o3 I can say it was a major part of this time in my life.
