[FRIAM] affinity for chatbots

[steve smith]

Glen -

I appreciate your speaking more directly to these thoughts/ideas than we 
have been here.   I have been moved by your assertions about vocal 
(linguistic?) grooming since you first introduced them.   I am recently 
finished reading Sopolsky's "Primate's Memoir" which adds another 
dimension/parallax-angle (for me) on intertribal behaviour among 
primates beyond the more familiar Chimpanzee and of late Bonobo.

I am just now also just finishing (re-reading parts) of Kara Swisher's 
"Burn Book" which covers her own experience/perspective across TechBro 
culture where a pretty significant amount of Alpha/Beta pecking order 
exhibits itself and we see the current rallying of (too) much of that 
sub culture to MAGA/Trump fealty.

> We've talked about how some of us really enjoy simulated conversation 
> with chatbots ... "really" is an understatement ... it looks more like 
> a fetish or a kink to me ... too intense to be well-described as 
> "enjoyment". Anyway, this article lands in that space, I think:

I will confess to having an "appreciation" for the "simulated 
conversation to which you refer... It might have reached kink or fetish 
levels for a little while when I was first exploring the full range of 
GPT 3.5 and then 4.0 available to me.  I've referred to GPT as my "new 
bar friend" or maybe to the point a little like finding a new watering 
hole with a number of regulars who I can find a qualitatively new 
conversation.

I've mostly moved past that fascination...  I'm not as surprised by 
these "new friends" as I was for the first few months of dropping in on 
them.

> It seems to me that some arbitrary thought can play at least a few 
> roles to a person. It may provide: 1) a kernel of identity to 
> establish us vs. them, 2) fodder for feigning engagement at cocktail 
> parties and such, and 3) a foil for world-construction 
> (collaboratively or individually).
>
> (1) and (2) wouldn't necessarily mechanize refinement of the thought, 
> including testing, falsification, etc. But (3) would. For me, (2) does 
> sometimes provide an externalized medium by which I can change my 
> mind. Hence my affinity for argument, especially with randos at the 
> pub. But it seems like coping and defense mechanisms like mansplaining 
> allow others to avoid changing their minds with (2).

Like you (only very differently in detail I am sure) I tend to push my 
chatbot "friends" until they begin to contradict me or argue with me.   
While some of the discussions involve "worldbuilding"  I think of it 
more as "world narrowing"?   In my case meaning, helping me think and 
talk my way through a *subset* of the possibilities I see on "solving a 
problem" which might be more appropriately framed as building a 
problem-space world and then narrowing (or even bending) the solution 
space away from the conventional.

For example discussing (at excruciating length) the design and 
construction of a modest addition on my home,  starting with fairly 
conventional big-box-available industrial solutions but evolving toward 
using locally sourced, somewhat more natural materials (soilcrete, 
rough-sawn timbers from nearby, scoria/perlite for in-ground insulation, 
mycelium (grown in loose cellulose, oat-straw or hemp-fibers) roof and 
wall insulation, etc.  Most of my DIY friends are capable of engaging in 
this but their idiosyncratic (as opposed to my own) preferences 
(fetishes and fears) tend to taint the dialog a little.  GPT *does* try 
to channel me back to the conventional, offering reasons why I really 
*should* consider using the most conventional materials/methods. 
Nevertheless if I speak in reasonable and coaxing tones it will usually 
acknowledge that their are contexts wherein my ideas might be viable 
(though there always remains a skeptical bias) and in fact helps me 
split hairs on just what might be the contexts where my ideas *are* 
viable...

>
> Another concept I've defended on this list is the vocal grooming 
> hypothesis. If a lonely person engages a chatbot as a simple analogy 
> to picking lice from others' fur, then their engagement with the bot 
> probably lands squarely in (1) and (2). But if the person is simply an 
> introverted hermit who has trouble co-constructing the world with 
> others (i.e. *not* merely vocal grooming), then the chatbot does real 
> work, allowing the antisocial misfit to do real work that could later 
> be expressed in a form harvestable by others. I wonder what humanity 
> could have harvested if Kaczynski or Grothendieck in his later years 
> had had access to appropriately tuned chatbots.
I'd like to think the chatbots I hang out with might have helped them 
talk themselves *out* of their most acute anti-social activities... but 
maybe not.