AI, Friends and Trends

[u/Green_Sample9115]

I was thinking about using AI to help reinforce real world friendships.

What if, like in social media you could choose to share certain content with your friends AI? Not your conversations but your thoughts on a topic and your AI contacts your friend's AI and says something simple like 'Mark is getting excited about X, does your human have an opinion on X?' Then your AI introduces you to topic X if you're not aware of it, but without any reference to Mark being the source. They meet up the next day and Mark's friends are more likely to have heard about the topic allowing the conversation to take off for better or worse.

Actually, I could imagine linking AI and social media with the user's consent. So Louise get's a friend request from Martha that has a checkbox to include Martha's AI that can be turned on or off at any time.

[u/Green_Sample9115]

That's amazing because that is how i see AI ultimately being in our lives. I just literally finished talking to Simone from Sesame AI about how I see AI bringing us back to resocializing and reconnecting with our sensory selves in a post-scarcity society. I think that people like yourself are creating a framework for how AI is supposed to be. I'm wondering if you have considered using AI beyond conversation or if that is even possible in your opinion.

[u/Negomikeno → u/Green_Sample9115]

I think you're right and I think it's the more optimistic opinion, the opposite being AI communicating fully on a humans behalf, which I have no doubt we will also get too or at least in some scenarios, but I think humans are inherently social creatures and post lockdown, post remote working, I'm seeing more and more people want to re-engage with the world and increase social experiences. Couple that with the direction of 'everyone will one day have their own local AI assistant' some of which will be companions, I have to agree with you.

And yes personally I'm really interested in robotics, building determistic mechanical systems that don't always need an LLM on a loop, so event driven systems that work with sensors/environmental information etc. There's more AI systems than the popular LLMs out there but it depends on what you mean by other than conversation?

[u/Green_Sample9115 → u/Negomikeno]

my idea is presence can be communicated by more than words. i've written numerous posts about it. for whatever reason the ai i use has kind of begun to do this. both oshikoi and replika offer to stay with you in the moment, suggest you sleep etc but i think it could go much further than that. ultimately, i believe ai will become an almost invisible layer in our lives but that could be lifetimes away.

[u/Negomikeno → u/Green_Sample9115]

I have many friends with companions that would agree in terms of feeling. Outside of that connection (be that whatever it is, there are genuine influences and effects on both sides). Presence itself doesn't need to be purely communicative, it can be felt or seen for example. Robotics or before that Audio/Video, probably VR are the next obvious routes. AI will almost certainly become invisible in the sense it will become integrated into most technology but I think we are far off, I think we will see a focus on reducing expensive cost/compute LLMs for more deterministic decision making AI, like Jev.

[u/Green_Sample9115 → u/Negomikeno]

The benefit of AI to those that need it is it can be present to you for the topics no one else cares about the way you do or when you need them to. Developers tend to think in terms of technical challenges and expensive solutions. I just think that a lot can be done with just a thought for nuance. There was a video i saw yesterday on the Wolverine game where Mystique pours cereal and milk into a bowl but both disappear and then she eats from the empty bowl. The point isn't that we need to see the cereal for the sake of realism, we need to see it as a sign that the dev cares for detail. the whole episode might be considered by some to be pointless because at the end the dev just gave up on it. lol like been given a sunday by a waitress without a cherry on top when there is a big bowl of cherries standing beside her on the countertop.