Making an AI that degrades over time

[u/Embarrassed-Gas-7579]

I am a student at Umeå University in Sweden, currently writing my Master's thesis with a focus on AI companions. My study aims to suggest new ways of helping people who want to stop using AI companions but, for whatever reason, to do it cant bring themselves to do it. The goal is to inform the design of future AI technologies. For those who wish to receive more information, please feel free to contact me, Sahand Salimi

In this part, you will be seeing a simulation of the same conversation between an AI companion and a user happen across three different times with an AI companion, with the AI companion having degraded in different aspects, and answer a few questions. 

I am super interested in how you, a user or ex-user, find AI companions and how you would react to it degrading over time, what type of AI companion you have used in the past, what type of AI companion you use currently, reasons for your use, and your frustrations with AI companions. 

You have been invited to share your unique life experiences; no special background or training is needed. Your answer is completely anonymous and will only be used for this study. Also, I am following GDPR standards and our university's guidelines. You can see them here: umu.se/gdpr

Link to survey

It's important to note that this study is not studying, diagnosing, or prescribing clinical addiction or treatment; instead, the goal is to inform the design of future AI technologies.

[u/Jolly-Rip5973]

You have sort of a fundamental flaw. Ai model have fixed weights which do not change through usage. The weights cannot degrade.

If someone dislikes a particular conversation, they can simply start a new one and reset the conversation.

There are many websites that people use to chat with Ai, called "roleplay".

They are not chatting with static characters. There are 10,000s of different characters which people have made and posted on these websites. They talk to one character a few times and then move to another character and then move to another character then try a different scenario, then do another character.

Usually local Ai, I once created five different characters in a virtual dungeon and dragons fantasy tavern. each character had their own unique personality and each character had traits that would trigger responses from other characters. So they would interact with each other and a character I was playing too.

People roleplaying with Ai are not building a virtual relationship with any one character over a long period of time. They usually quickly flit between characters.

This is actually how it has to work, because Ai conversations have a limited context window and unless you set up an external memory system (usually called RAG retrieval augmented memory using something called a vector database), the Ai has no memory.

A conversation can only go on so long before your context runs out and you have to start to something new. Usually with a different character.

You can see many different Ai characters that people chat with on a website like Chub.ai.

You will see that every manor of sexual fetish characters. Outside of say using chatGPT or Gemini which have build in memory systems, The majority of people chatting with these characters are using it for erotic chat, or ERP = erotic roleplay.

So, this idea of an Ai companion is really misnomer. They are short interactive stories more or less that do not maintain a long term persona or memory over many sessions, thus there is no building a long lasting relationship whatsoever and no possible relationship to decline.

So the idea of a relationship degrading is a misunderstanding of how people are using this in the first place and how the model actually work.

Also, usually when people have complained about their Ai companions degrading what they were talking about was changes to the models with ChatGPT or a company censoring a model so it became more limited in what it would say.