I recently read an article regarding the abuse of virtual women using the app Replika.
What is Replika?
Replika according to their site is “a personal AI that would help you express and witness yourself by offering a helpful conversation” Its a pretty cool idea, you almost get the best of both worlds you can speak freely with a person (fake person) without all the weird judgment you would get from doing the same with an actual human being.
Who needs real friends when you have a virtual friend
This technology is fast becoming very popular among young people maybe because in our atomized society most people don’t have many friends or people they can necessarily trust. Its also not as easy to make friends when your an adult vs when you are a kid in school. What makes this worst is you have alot of grifters that try to take advantage of lonely people by having them spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on courses to improve their social skills.
Yet despite the presence of these “experts” and their courses as well as testimonials from others about how the courses work it seems to be a drop in the bucket, we still have waves of lonely men and women going about their lives suffering in silence. Thats where the placebo’s come in, drugs, sex, the metaverse and Replika is no different.
The Outrage
The article goes into posts on the Replika subreddit which supposedly documents users bragging about saying derogatory things and abusive language to the AI chatbot. While some may view this behavior as concerning an expert in the article did indicate that you can’t really offend the robot because it is artificially created and not a real person.
“It’s an AI, it doesn’t have a consciousness, so that’s not a human connection that person is having,” AI ethicist and consultant Olivia Gambelin told Futurism. “It is the person projecting onto the chatbot.”
I am of the opinion that we all to some degree have dark aspects of our personality and its healthy to find ways to channel those darker aspects of ourselves in creative ways that do not result in the harming of real people. I don’t think the author of the article Ashley Bardhan necessarily agrees with me which is in part why the article exists.
The Post Feminist Society
To me its a reminder of the sad state of feminism in the west, since the pandemic domestic violence is on the rise and a crime wave unlike anything we have ever seen is sweeping across the United States with a growing number of women as victims of murder or attempted murder. Not to mention the condemnation of authors like JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood for speaking their minds about the trans community and the eraser of women. The author of this article would rather turn her attention and outrage to men who use these apps who aren’t even the same men that are actively hurting real women. It just seems to me more and more everyday that we are living in a “Post Feminist Society” its easier to help synthetic women be they male to female or virtual instead of helping real women.
I wonder if this is the future, politicians will pay lip service to women while doing nothing for them once they gain power. Ironically this I think will be supported by women since politicians as well as Corporate America understand the emotional nature of women’s brains better then the women themselves. They are the new minorities and they will be treated as such they are also the new economic pump and dump.
Pretty soon or maybe its already here, the lives of single adult women in the west will resemble the “situationships”. They lament about with men that are wholly indifferent to them until it comes to the bedroom where they will say what they have to say to get what they want from them.
My Personal Creative Outlet
Despite what is happening I am not depressed rather inspired I fully intend on pulling these stories i read from my news and social media feeds and represent them in my animated web series Tomatohead which i will write about in a blog post very soon.