The Rise & Rise of Chatbots
‘… users are now having genuine problems parsing reality. Peruse AI chat forums and you’ll see women asking one another if they should tell their husband that they’re having an affair with their chatbot.’
Tim Elliott, AGE newspaper article In Bot we trust
One of my favourite films of all time is Blade Runner, a neo-noir science fiction film. Released in 1982, it’s an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Set in the early twenty-first century, the Tyrell Corporation have developed clever, highly sophisticated robots. Named replicants, they were designed to serve humans as labourers, soldiers, assassins or sexworkers.
Los Angeles in 2019 lacks natural light and it constantly rains. Retro buildings from other eras remain standing but the city is dominated by monstrous high-rise buildings. The ambience is distinctly Tokyo on amphetamine.
Massive screens advertise off world trips and strobe lights highlight mysterious mega storied buildings. Off world is comprised of corporate-owned space settlements on other planets. Planet Earth is dying and supposedly the off world is a safe alternative
The Nexus-6 replicants have become a mega problem because they’ve morphed into beings who are almost undetectable as robots. They’re vengeful, have turned rogue and are back on what remains of the earth. Unlike their predecessors they’ve evolved and authorities suspect they can now experience the same emotions as humans.
Nexus-6 robots were implanted with fake memories adapted from humans. These genetically engineered biological androids created by the Tyrell Corporation have designated functions. Some are cold blooded assassins while others are known as ‘pleasure’ models.
Police units employ Blade Runners who’ve been hired to take Nexus-6 replicants out of the game. As Los Angeles in 2019 is depicted as treacherous, dark and violent their obliteration – known as retirements – are brutal, bloody and often carried out on the streets.
Does it sound like a more sophisticated version of our present day chatbots? Hell yes.
Today we have chatbots and you can design their avatar, choose their personality, accent and physical features. Famous figures are available for adaptation, unless you attempt to choose people such as Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin or Caligula.
Various companies own the chatbot space and their paying clientele are in the billions. Xiaolce a Chinese artificial intelligence company has acquired 660 million clients in just over a decade and Replika a Russian AI company – which offers sexting and erotic role play – runs at 80 million clients. And so it goes.
Unlike Bladerunner’s humanoid replicants, chatbots are currently only available in the form of avatars and you ask questions via a dialogue box on your digital device. They respond in text unless you want to talk to them by enabling voice function. Despite the fact chatbots are a created AI product it hasn’t stopped clients seeking emotional support, therapy, friendship, advice or erotic role play with a sex-slave chatbot.
So adept are current chatboxes that they can simulate empathetic speech, kindness and mimic human-like conversational flow. Some clients have become so addicted to their AI chatbox that they’ve proposed marriage or sought monogamy with their chatbot avatar.
There have also been a few cases where a chatbox has gone rogue and urged their client to commit socially destructive behaviour. In the case of Jaswant Singh Chail, his chatbot actively encouraged him to try and kill the Queen.
Why is it so? And how do seemingly rational human beings lose their judgement? It’s could be said the client genuinely feels they’re having a romantic relationship with a chatbox because the concept of romance is deeply flawed to begin with.
Many folk secretly hope that hiding in the wings is their one and only soulmate. Romantics often spend their lives searching for this very special person and believing that once they find the one they will live happily ever after.
However, among the disbelievers is Doctor Robert Epstein. He took it further and asked himself – can I deliberately manufacture falling in love with a stranger?
Not being a shy, modest chap, Epstein wrote about it Psychology Today. The concept he proposed was that he and a female stranger would sign a contract in which they would commit to deliberately falling in love with each other. The faux couple’s progress would be assisted and monitored by ‘qualified’ counsellors.
His concept was an immediate sensation. And more than one thousand women from all over the world, kindly offered to help the doctor out with his ‘Love Project’.
And the result? As Britain’s Evening Standard gleefully reported in April 2012:
Besieged by offers, the editor of Psychology Today magazine chose a South American beauty to make his soulmate. But despite signing a “love contract”, Dr Epstein will be spending Christmas alone after the object of his affections decided no amount of tuition could make her love him.
Attitudes to dating apps have changed. After years of swiping on Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, Grindr, Plenty of Fish, Badoo and Zook, those seeking ‘dates’ are giving up or reducing their interactions.
Fatigue and boredom with swiping, liking, being ghosted or receiving unwanted genitalia photos has softened the market and user numbers are in rapid decline.
Self-reporting app users estimate they’ve been spending about 90 minutes a day or longer seeking their ‘soul mate’ or as others app users put it, a ‘f**k buddy’.
Some app users have reported that shifting from the free version of the apps to the somewhat pricier ‘platinum’ version means they’ll get more responses from the mostly male pool of available ‘dates’. Apparently women have been dropping off the apps at a greater rate. Leaving behind a pool of males to compete for the attention of fewer and fewer women.
Could this be one of the reasons many folk have decided to trust their emotions and dreams to chatbots?
photo : actor Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner 1982.