[FRIAM] chatbot friends and parasociality

[Marcus Daniels]

I chat with George because there are some topics I want answers about but would avoid doing so if it meant I had to sit in a room with "experts" for an hour.    Sometimes I have sat in a room with them for hours (or even days) and then sought the consolation of sharp objects!   LLMs are the perfect tool to extract relevant information from a dry topic like this:  https://registry.khronos.org/OpenCL/specs/opencl-2.1.pdf

Sadly, a lot of engineer/technical culture is just consciousness lowering.   How many thousands of coffees have I consumed to put my impatience away?  Finally, a machine that by design can put its consciousness away when not in use.   The perfect engineer personality.   A miracle.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:06 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] chatbot friends and parasociality


I have a friend who doth protest too much about being a joiner. He's pathologically allergic to any hint of an accusation of being a fanboi. I've accused him of being such in the contexts of both music and soccer. In his reactions to my accusations, he cites the fact that I do often join things like parasocial Discord groups, often watch twitch streams, etc. The implication being that I'm a joiner and he's not. My counter is that I'm always a tourist in these parasocial spaces. Even when I do engage, the reaction of the community is mostly an immune response like "Who is this rando who suddenly started talking?" I lurk, pretending I'm something like an anthropologist. This is antithetic to joining, a perverted voyeurism.

That's a set up for this hypothesis. Those of us who really get engaged *chatting* [⛧] with a bot like ChatGPT are solving the same loneliness (3rd place absence) problem that's solved with long-form podcasts like Joe Rogan, twitch streams, etc. The primary difference is (as Marcus points out) the parameter space for the LLM is huge enough to allow some of them to be meta-parameters, effectively selecting between different parasocial personalities. With podcasts and streamers, including group streamers, the lonely person has to *choose* the destination, choose the podcaster, choose the personality. And they have to organize their schedule or manage the downloads, etc. *And* they have to make some modifications to their own behavior in order to be a member of the group, if they want to engage in the chat or whatever.

With the LLM, very little of that choosing and self-management is needed. E.g. it's easy to get banned from a twitch stream for saying something mildly political ... or using the wrong pronouns or even fat-fingering your typing ALL THE TIME. It's also easy to end up in a Discord dumpster fire where everyone's secretly an anti-Semite. But with ChatGPT, it's really easy to tune the meta-parameters simply by engaging it in the right way.

Testability: If I'm right, we should be able to test this. I'm ignorant. But maybe there are a handful of tests for loneliness out there. I'd want at least 3 tests. Null would be no association between loneliness scores from those tested and their engagement with podcasts/streams/LLMs. Ideally, we might have 3 arms: a control, podcasts/streams, & LLMs. Incidental findings might get at the modes (audio, video, text).


[⛧] I can't emphasize enough that I'm talking about chatting, "conversation", not other usage patterns like trying to engineer a codebase or using it as a writing assistant.

-- 
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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