It’s definitely not healthy, but this isn’t going to fix the birth rate.
Correlation <> causation meme
This probably won’t fix anything, but hopefully stops it from contributing to the issue further down the line
…meme
It’s clearly not a healthy thing to exist.
It is the worst of para social relationships, amped up by 100x. And is only going to get more exploitative.
But just on a level of building up the skills to have a relationship, it’s training kids to expect someone who always says yes, always affirms them, will never challenge them to grow…
Relationships are hard. You have to learn to love people and how to do that, and you have to learn to not be selfish, which is the opposite of what LLMs tend to encourage.
Most importantly, you have to love imperfect people. And confront that you are imperfect as well. And thats ok!
Make babies! It’s illegal to be lonely!
And wasn’t China very recently concerned about their birthrate being too high? One Child Policy?
Now they’re already concerned about their birth rate being too low?
The one-child policy was abolished in 2015, but birth rates have continued to decline after that. They currently have one of the world’s lowest fertility rates.
You probably joking, but that actually a thing in China and was a thing in USSR
6% of income? Still much cheaper than a kid!
It says that it was proposed… We propose a lot of bills that never pass here in the US. I’m not sure how China’s laws are setup but Wikipedia doesn’t say that it was ever implemented.
Is that your take on the matter? How is wanting yo promote real human relationships between teenagers a bad thing?
This is like trying to solve mental illness by making sickness illegal.
I’d say that’s more like trying to solve mental illness by making it illegal to exploit and profit from it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
Erewhon: or, Over the Range (/ˈɛr.ɛ.hwɒn/, ERR-eh-hwon)[2] is a utopian novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published in 1872,[3] set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.[4]
In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness. As a result, citizens are imprisoned for offenses like physical ailments, misfortune, or ugliness while those who commit conventional crimes like fraud or theft are seen more sympathetically as exhibiting symptoms of moral afflictions and prescribed sessions with a “straightener” (essentially a psychologist) for treatment.[5]
So I guess you’re pretty fine with the pedo/misogynist/nazi/bullying shit happening on Discord servers.
What do Discord servers have to do with anything??
What does the fact that leaving kids unsupervised can lead to bad shit have to do with the issue at hand?
“You hate hotdogs? YOU MUST LOVE BURGERS THEN”
What are you even trying to say?
I’m pretty sure AI partners are not the primary reason people don’t have human partners. The issues are systematic and root very deeply. While I do think AI partners are a very toxic and dangerous way out of this, I highly doubt they were the reason people were single in the first place.
I’m pretty sure alcohol is not the primary reason people don’t drive responsibly. The issues are systematic and root very deeply. While I do think driving while drunk is a very toxic and dangerous way out of this, I highly doubt they were the reason people were ebrious in the first place.
You’re joking, but people drive under influence not because alcohol exists, but because they have issues with self-control and responsibility.
So you do prove a point while trying to oppose it, imo
No, my point is you don’t stop repressing drunk drivers because there are more rooted issues that lead them to drink.
There’s a lot of problems with this, and declining birth rates of the most invasive species on Earth isn’t one of them.
Bro think about Chinese economy please. Economy needs to survive bro… Let go of your imaginery girl bro… Treating your actual girlfriend like human is not mandatory bro… Do it for patriotism bro…
Can’t the AI companies charge more while using the GPU heat to warm the in vitro babies they’re growing in vats?
I’m pretty sure these babies will get lots of love from their AI parents.
That will fix it.
AI girl/boyfriends are fucking addictions latching onto people vulnerbilities.
This ban is nothing but good, but no one thing will fix child birth rates, nor the reason for the addiction in the first place, I’ll agree with that.
It is funny to me that china can pretend not to be a capitalist nation while displaying every symptom of capitalism.
You can argue that you have capitalism if transactions are happening. Which means the word kind of looses it’s meaning because it’s so broad.
But people will often define it on how much market control the state displays.
You can then argue that China has market control on key aspects of important sectors. Which they do, but still with an approach, that they have private companies with government subsidies.
But most of all, the need for distance to the world capitalism is more a marketing thing. Unless they believe that capitalism is just a tool to achieve socialism, which also can be true.
I would argue a capitalist nation is any one that allows the conversion of natural resources into private (not personal) property by law, and facilitates the exploitation of those resources through a market.
You know what else fixes the birth rate? Making life less shitty and giving people enough money to be able to raise children.
In the meantime, negative birth rate is just self-correction of asshole dictatorships. Can’t make money line go up if birth line go down.
Sperm counts are tanking worldwide while PFAS chems are being legalized and clean energy projects are shut down in favor of fossil fuels. Nature doesn’t gaf, and will correct the unhealthy scenario. Humans are not the fittest if they destroy their own species by toxifying the environment. There’s only so much we can do with a sperm count of zero. Even in a handmaid’s tale scenario, a multiple of zero is zero.
I think a lot of world problems would be solved if these things were encouraged instead. If someone needs their romantic partner to be a mindless sycophant, I would rather them have that with a machine than try to abuse a human person into serving them as would be more traditional. More children being born in situations other than exploitation and manipulation could only be a good thing.
You need to think of human beings as less binary good and binary evil.
I’m sure people who abuse their family members have plenty of good qualities as well. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to what I said.
And for every 1 monster you remove from society by locking them in an AI mind prison, you’ll ruin the lives of a hundred innocent people.
This is the same logic used for child sex dolls and other material consumed by paedophiles
Yeah, sure.
And I wouldn’t be so pissed at Epstein and Trump and the rest of the pedophile class if they were just trafficking sex dolls.
I kind of think everywhere probably should, that’s probably the strangest thing it’s like falling in love with a microwave.
Good.
this will just spin up a blackmarket waifu market
At least if more people ended up doing this on their own hardware with open source software, it would cut off a lot of the opportunities it presents for companies to abuse people’s privacy and manipulate them.
Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.
…for the wrong reason.
“over addiction”
You just chose to read the headline and thought the main reason was child birth. Which is a very concerning fact for alot of societies.
I’m a bit confused as to why this is related to 1984. I understand banning AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” could be seen as a form of censorship, though. But I also think it’s kind of a good thing; some people genuinely believed these AI were their real relationships and might avoid any real relationships.
It was in jest
It is a sarcastic observation of the shallow and reductive take that “nineteen eighty four is when the government does something i don’t like!”.
I find it less likely that anyone who uses lemmy would sincerely think it is actually good that people become parasocially addicted to a hallucination box that has been finely tuned to lie to them as convincingly as possible.
However, I admit this inference is doing a lot of gravy lifting; this is, after all, why Poe’s Law exists. There are so very many excessively dim, narrow-minded, and ignorant people who WOULD indeed unironically cry “1984!!” whenever any government does anything that such a person being right here, right now, is always a statistically significant possibility that cannot be dismissed out of hand without risk.
I am giving the person to whom you are replying a generous benefit of a doubt, to be fair…
username checks out
All ‘China news’ produced by the West are bullshit propaganda. Stop giving these globalist warmongering ass-wipes more attention than they pay for.
I read this comment, then closed the post.
Then I thought to myself “I didnt see, but I’d bet myself $100 it was a .ml user”
Then I opened it again to much entertainment.
So… China didn’t ban relationship bots? Or are you saying that the article is written in a way to condemn China’s decision to ban them?
more that the “explanation” being about birth rates is an easy, consumable and somewhat ironic concept that the western palate will eat up. not fucking true tho.
From what I can see (and via translation), their published reasoning is, among other reasons, to protect national security and social interests.
So what are the risks that China is worried about to social interests? Well, we can find that in their AI Safety Governance Framework. Jumping specifically to the risks regarding anthropomorphic AIs (ethical risks):
(d) Addiction and dependence on anthropomorphic interaction
AI products based on anthropomorphic interaction foster users’ emotional dependence and influence their behavior, creating ethical risks.
They conveniently list some of their concerned outcomes from influencing their behavior, including disrupting conventional views on childbirth:
(e) Challenges to existing social order
The development and application of AI brings profound changes to production tools and relations, accelerating the restructuring of traditional industries, disrupting conventional views on employment, childbirth, and education, and challenging the established social order.
So did China ban these AIs over birth rates? It seems to have been part of the discussion, at the very least. Like all things in life, it requires more nuance than just “birth rates” to explain. However, the concerns stated by Matt Sheehan (who seems to be the source for the “birth rates” claim that the news outlets are going with) provides more nuance in his explanation as well:
“They don’t like the idea of a large portion of their population being in deep emotional relationships with chatbots that could take them out of the marriage market, that could have negative psychological impacts on them, that could lead to addiction, dependency and a whole bunch of other social ills,” said Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank.
All this to say that yes, the explanation that it’s about birth rates is an easy to consume concept for Western audiences.
But also, yes it’s a true concern that the Chinese government has specifically linked to anthropomorphic AIs.
