Notes on the emerging futures of empathetic machines. The naming is due to Esther Perel.
I would be interested to think about artificial intimacy digital technologies in terms of whether they are enabling or infantilising.
- When the “Person” Abusing Your Child is a Chatbot: The Tragic Story of Sewell Setzer on character.ai
- God-Shaped Hole, a tale of an augmented reality future in which a wistfully unsocialised protagonist and his PUA AI dating assistant encounter the spammy post-human dark sex gods arisen from AI. Content warning: violence, sex, horror.
1 References
Costello, Pennycook, and Rand. 2024. “Durably Reducing Conspiracy Beliefs Through Dialogues with AI.” Science.
Hanson. 2016. The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
Salvi, Ribeiro, Gallotti, et al. 2024. “On the Conversational Persuasiveness of Large Language Models: A Randomized Controlled Trial.”