[FRIAM] chatbot friends and parasociality

Fri May 9 15:02:37 EDT 2025

I thought of that, but decided I didn't believe it.   Hayes, Maddow, O'Donnell spend a lot of time talking over the legos they find in the news and attempting to build stuff with them.   Some of it is motivated reasoning -- these are political shows -- but it is also an attempt to do sensemaking, esp. with Hayes and Maddow.   Sensemaking is compositional.  Like playing with combinators trying to figure out which ones are useful.   With someone like Lex Fridman, I don't really get that.   He's just hanging out.   It's the hanging out property that seems related to loneliness.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Friday, May 9, 2025 11:44 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] chatbot friends and parasociality

OK. I like that. But it's not really *un*structured so much as [re]composable. A helpful distinction exists between leveled or "linear" versus "open world" video games. Open worlds tend to put control surfaces on lots of things in the game so your "path" through it is composable from individual actions. Levels or linearity consists of a more narrative structure where the game designer sets the objectives and some finite number of paths to them.

A conversation is akin to starting with atoms, a grammar, and axioms and then forming whatever sentences any participant wants to form. A narrative works backward like a constraint system. Maddow has an objective/narrative she wants you to grok. Rogan has a set of values from which to start a (nearly) random walk. The problem with the *sensemakers* as a group is that what seems like (or is intended to be) a random walk is biased toward (or always ends up near) some narrative. E.g. medicine is dangerous or university research is a planned economy (Hossenfelder [sigh]).

It can feel lonely (or like cancel culture) if *your* sentences are elided or suppressed ... or not even *expressible*. One of the ways we might feel lonely is if there are no languages/games where we can say the kind of sentences we want to say. It's really interesting when you see someone finally gain access to a language or game where they can, at long last, well-formulate sentences they always *thought* should be formulable ... they just didn't have access to that language/game in the past.

On 5/8/25 12:10 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I think your hypothesis is that Unstructured means less lonely?   In the Joe Rogan case because thoughtless impulses are embraced (thus the incel is not alienated and less lonely), and in the case of ChatGPT because there is a correspondent that will “hear” the lonely person?
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> Structured
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> Unstructured
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> Unidirectional
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> Rachel Maddow
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> Joe Rogan or Joy Reid
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> Bidirectional
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> Computer Game
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> ChatGPT
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2025 10:21 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] chatbot friends and parasociality
> 
> Yeah, but that doesn't sound like chatting to me. That sounds like you developing an iterative query to a database. Chatting is open-ended. Maybe you start talking about OpenCL but end up talking about what kind of dogs you like best. E.g. when you tune in to Joe Rogan, you're not really looking for Joe to pointedly extract information from his guest(s). You're looking for the chat, the casual wandering over an unscripted landscape of topics. What it sounds like you're doing is more like a consultation. I suspect the same of Nick's use. Nick's tendency to grab onto some topic and wag his head around like an aggressive puppy is *not* chatting. (That doesn't mean Nick's attraction to ChatGPT isn't based in loneliness. It's prolly *epistemic* loneliness.) I'd guess SteveS' use is more like chatting, given his posts wander around so much. Small-talk is a particularly vapid form of chatting.
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> Behind my hypothesis is the idea that many people don't trust outlets like mainstream media, university lecture[s|ers], civil and monitored political debates, etc. is because they have a very deep desire for the chat. I think that sentiment was pre-adapted to some extent by reality TV, which we all know isn't real. But at least it's better than some cabal of writers, directors, and producers crafting a narrative to infect you with a mind virus.
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> Of course, I'm nearly incapable of chatting. So my image of what it is and how it works is prolly biased ... but that's also why I can't stand Joe Rogan's show ... or The View ... or Morning Joe, etc. What a waste of time.
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> On 5/8/25 8:34 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
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>  > 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 <https://registry.khronos.org/OpenCL/specs/opencl-2.1.pdf>
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>  > 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.
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>  > -----Original Message-----
> 
>  > From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of glen
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>  > Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2025 7:06 AM
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>  > To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
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>  > Subject: [FRIAM] chatbot friends and parasociality
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>  > 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.
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>  > 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.
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>  > 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.
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>  > 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).
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>  > [⛧] 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.
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