Subito

It's amazing what companies can get away with that a real person can't...

As long as it's approached as a brain training assistant (or some other market-y buzzwords) and it's being used with giant disclaimers I'm totally for using it with old, lonely people. It might not be a perfect aid but it can help in certain situations. Knowing how our society works, however, Big Company A is going to perfect the tech, make people dependent on it, and then scam them.

Considering how popular Farmville, as a game, was on Facebook I shudder to think about what a finely tuned AI, made by a for-profit company, will be capable of doing with old, lonely people.

Do you really want your mom chatting with a for-profit AI (like Google Bard) about you or your family to feel less lonely? I'd sooner let my brain rot, but to each their own.

I think it's dangerous to try to cure loneliness with an AI, regardless of sophistication and tuning, because you end up with human who's been essentially deceived into feeling better. Not only that, but they're going to eventually develop strong emotional attachments to the AI itself. And with capitalism as the driving force of society here in the U.S. I can guarantee you every abusive, unethical practice will become normalized surrounding these AI's too.

I can see it now: "If you cancel your $1,000/a year CompanionGPT we can't be held responsible for what happens to your poor, lonely grandma..." Or it will be even more direct and say the old, lonely person: "Pay $2,500 or we will switch of 'Emotional Support' module on your AI. We accept PayPal."

Saying AI's like this will be normalized doesn't mean it's an ethical thing to do. Medical exploitation is already normalized in the US. Not only is this dystopian, it's downright unconscionable, in my opinion.

I agree with @Pliny@lemmy.fmhy.ml about it having the capacity to make older adults feel less lonely. At the same time, however, I think it seems very dystopian. If someone was feeling sad or depressed we wouldn't say "oh, just chat with this AI until you feel better". So why is it okay to suggest this for older lonely people who are especially vulnerable?

Hell, given what ChatGPT has told people already it might do more harm than good. It's akin to the whole of humanity saying "Yeah, we know you're lonely but getting an actual person to talk to you is too hard. Chat with this bot."

You already got a good answer from @andrew@radiation.party

Another way to think of it is: Would Reddit really want to make an API Application Key for each user of their site when the point of the API change in the first place is to make Reddit profitable?

LIke, even if I could build an open source "Reddit App Whatever" from scratch when I got to use it I would need to request an Application Key from reddit.

Read about it here: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/wiki/OAuth2

For many years, even Tiktok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see.

I never could get into Tiktok, but this is definitely true. It's interesting to see that even communist-bound companies are still companies at the end of the day and will eventually go through the process the opinion post describes.

What I wonder now is if these federated communities are immune to this. For example, can I host an instance that publishes ads to subscribers feeds once I reach a critical mass of users? I would imagine, as the admin of this hypothetical instance, I could. So this "ensh*tification" process could happen even here. (I doubt it will though... for a while at least)

Excellent! I'm looking forward to seeing what the result will be

Excellent! They're probably the biggest one so far, I imagine. The idea of this catching on has got to have the reddit admins sweating....

And nothing of value to the Reddit community was gained.

I'm liking it here

There is literally nothing.... I just used Reddit for r/nosleep. I'll live without it. It's permanently erased any goodwill it had with me.