Chatbot Markets

Is the ultimate endgame of generative AI to be virtual girlfriends?

A couple of items on the new generative AI that I have been reading.

From the incomparable Dave Karpf, who has a Substack, but last week he published in The Atlantic titled “ChatGPT’s FarmVille Moment” that describes OpenAI’s creation of a “marketplace” for “custom” variants of the ChatGPT, and offering them for sale (or subscription, because you won’t “own” anything). He compares it to the advent of FarmVille on the nascent Facebook back in 2007. I remember being inundated with “FarmVille” notifications from my “friends” and thinking what the actual fuck is this shit. But this was a core part of the shift from “Social Networks” into the current “Social Media” juggernaut.

2007 was the year when Facebook rolled out the Facebook Platform, which allowed developers to create their own applications that would run within the company’s “walled garden”—a term for a tech platform’s private ecosystem. Before then, Facebook was still just MySpace for college kids. You could visit friends’ pages and “poke” one another. But there wasn’t much else you could actually do on the site. The idea that Facebook would eventually swallow the entire news business or be described by this magazine as a “Doomsday Machine” was unfathomable. Facebook was still a toy.

This article describes the typical uses, and there are four large buckets, the first being those who have used Machine Learning in their workflow (analytics, moderation) where the generative AI is really just “better machine learning”.

Then there are students who use ChatGPT to cheat on tests or to do homework. No surprises there, and Dave explains that this is easy to validate as when school is over for the year, the number of queries plummets as students go on vacation.

The one that really is dangerous are the managers who are replacing people with the ChatGPT, replacing entry level copywriters, or analysts with the pablum that ChatGPT produces. This resonates with what Cory Doctorow posits, that management (Capital) will leverage the tech to further squeeze the share of wealth that goes to labor. Instead of using generative AI to improve productivity, and reduce risk (a good use), it will be a further tool to hollow out huge swaths of middle-class jobs.

And the final cohort are the hobbyists, those who just like to play with technology. And they are the least likely to “pay” for it. Additionally, it looks like this cohort started huge but is fading.

So, enter the marketplace. Originally announced in the fall, it was drowned out by the chaotic board/Sam Altman drama.

But there are signs that OpenAI is burning tons of cash (turns out that at scale these are very expensive to operate), and the vast majority of users are free-riders.

Oops.

Enter The AI Girlfriend …

So, OpenAI needs a FarmVille to make it embedded in the cultural zeitgeist. Enter the marketplace.

Flashback: when I joined Cisco Systems in the early 2000’s, I learned that about 40% (the largest fraction) of the internet bandwidth at that time was used to view pornography. Today that is drowned by streaming, but still Pornography is a huge portion of the traffic - much to the chagrin of the Church-y folks who rail against it.

An article I stumbled across today in Quartz relates the proliferation of virtual “girlfriends” on the marketplace, allowing lonely losers (read: incel, MRA douchebags) to fantasize about having a romantic partner.

I will avoid the ick factor, but it also seems totally predictable based on past internet development trajectories.

From the article:

A search for “girlfriend” on the new GPT store will populate the site’s results bar with at least eight “girlfriend” AI chatbots, including “Korean Girlfriend,” “Virtual Sweetheart,” “Your girlfriend Scarlett,” “Your AI girlfriend, Tsu✨.”

Click on chatbot “Virtual Sweetheart,” and a user will receive starting prompts like “What does your dream girl look like?” and “Share with me your darkest secret.”

Funny thing is, the usage policies of OpenAI strictly prohibit this use case, but I would have to guess that since this might be their (again “ick”) FarmVille moment, they look the other way to try to scrape some $$$ from these lonely dorks.

Imagine spending the 2010’s in uni, working on AI research, and to have your work product being used for spank material. Swear to god, that was not a good use of your time my dude.

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