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Good Friday Morning! Except to the man who decided to make a crazy DoorDash order from McDonalds where he ordered a “triple cheeseburger with everything removed.” And by everything, I do mean everything: “no ketchup,” “no pickle,” “no diced onions,” “no 1/10 Lb beef,” “no mustard,” “no regular bun,” “no American Cheese,” and “no salt“ (total price: $5.39).“
He received an empty box with a taped-up bag (I appreciate the extra security on that one, McDonald’s). He complained that they got his order wrong because they sent him the McChicken box, not the burger box. He did tip his DoorDash driver—$ 20 for an empty box.
There are no empty boxes here, ladies and gentlemen. This week, I’m analyzing something new in the AI market: relationship chatbots. They’ve proliferated in the last year beyond even what I expected. I’ll dig into that below and the aim of the companies—links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- The New Yorker is one of the more high-brow liberal outlets out there. If you want to know what coastal liberal elites are thinking, it’s a solid place to stop. Isaac Chotiner published a piece there interviewing the rosiest of Democratic Strategists out there, Simon Rosenberg. You may even see your Democratic friends post things from Rosenberg because he throws out plenty of red meat for the average liberal social media user. It is the worst interview on Biden’s chances I’ve ever read. Rosenberg threatens to leave the interview, proclaims every criticism false, and declares Trump uniquely flawed. Chotiner is a worried liberal writer and comes away even more worried watching Rosenberg ignore every facet of reality on polling. I read it with my mouth open. That’s how shockingly dumb it is.
- Biden’s “Gaza Pier,“ a place he proclaimed would be a humanitarian aid distribution center for Palestinians, is a complete disaster. Three soldiers were injured on Thursday in non-combat injuries. The pier has been attacked multiple times by terrorists. The icing on the cake: the Pentagon told reporters on Tuesday that none of the more than 569 metric tons of humanitarian aid sent to that had made it to the Palestinian people. All of it had gotten stolen. In short, we’re likely re-supplying Hamas, which is turning around and selling that aid. That allows Hamas to turn the aid into cash, which it then uses to re-supply missiles and other military arms. NBC News reported last fall that though Palestinians were mired in poverty, Hamas was rich in cash and resources. Bill Roggio at the LongWarJournal summed it up nicely, “The Gaza aid pier may be the most expensive piece of performance art ever created. This was destined to fail. Our tax dollars hard at work. For Hamas.”
- Justice Samuel Alito is in the crosshairs of the journalistic left. The New York Times published a breathless piece with four journalists on it scaremongering around Alito’s beach house flying George Washington’s “Appeal To Heaven“ flag. This goes with another flag at Alito’s house, all of which added up to a January 6 conspiracy theory for the journalistic left. According to these people, Alito’s other sin was selling between $1,000 – $15,000 of Anheuser-Busch stock in August 2023. He replaced that stock with Coors, which is supposed to be a sign he joined the boycott. I agree with Peter Hasson’s characterization of this: it’s high-brow QAnon for leftists. There’s no difference in these conspiracy theories among liberals than your crank ranting about how Trump is still President. The only difference is that one is published in an anonymous blog post, and the other is a lead story in The New York Times. What’s also fascinating is that the left sees any use of historical American symbols as inherently conservative and evil. For decades, conservatives criticized the left for having a level of hatred for America. Liberals would respond that was ridiculous. But it’s harder to argue against when owning a historic symbol attached to George Washington is now a sign of right-wing evil.
- Nikki Haley endorsed Trump and said she’d vote for him in November. Keep an eye on her from here on out. The outrage around her campaign has cooled, and Trump’s VP beauty pageant doesn’t have a clear leader. I’d watch for her to re-emerge as a VP contender.
Where you can find me this week
Please subscribe, rate, and review my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Play — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me in the algorithms. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter.
Good Riddance To Ebrahim Raisi (1960-2024) – The Hangman Of Tehran – Conservative Institute
Joe Biden Continues Barack Obama’s Apology Tour – Conservative Institute
Recession Or Not – Biden Is Correctly Blamed On Inflation – Conservative Institute
The Emerging World Of AI Relationships
I play a few mobile games that rely on ads to pay the creators. Usually, the ads are for other mobile games – I’ve seen a lot of Candy Crush, Royal Match, and Clash of Clans ads. Typically, I don’t mind the ads because I’ve seen a few games I downloaded later.
I started getting a new ad over the last few weeks: AI Chatbots. I was going to skip the ad when one of them advertised it as highly rated: 219,000 reviews at 4.5 stars or higher. I knew these existed, but I didn’t think they were that popular – I was wrong. For reference, I’m not talking about AI prompt chats like ChatGPT. I mean an AI program that “chats with you” like a person and acts as a friend.
So I pulled up the App Store and started looking at the top-rated ones (Apple Store, though most of these have Android versions, too):
- Character AI: AI-Power Chat — 216,000 reviews. 4.8 stars out of 5.
- Replika – AI Friend. 219,000 reviews. 4.5 stars out of 5.
- Chai: Chat AI Platform. 115,000 reviews. 4.5 stars out of 5.
For reference, the main ChatGPT app has 816,000 reviews. There are far more chat AI bots in stores with under 100k reviews. It’s a new field, and everyone is jumping on board.
These apps vary in their approach. Some come pre-loaded with a “chat character” that aims to mimic your speech. This approach allows the app to learn about you and work from there. It gets your likes, interests, and more and bases a profile around that. Other chat programs build a character you interact with, and the character’s profile determines the flow of things.
As one review put it, it’s the friend who’s always there, immediately, one text away. That was what helped me figure out why these programs were popular: it’s no different than texting with a friend. We’ve shifted into text-heavy communication as a society. A chatbot can do the same thing and won’t look any different on your phone.
Some of these programs are built off of ChatGPT, and some aren’t. The cheaper bots that aim at an adult audience use free/open-source AI models with fewer restrictions (Meta’s Llama AI is a popular one, but there are others).
NBC News did a story on Replika in 2019, discussing users who were addicted to the platform. One of the wealthiest tycoons in Asia, Gautam Adani, says he’s addicted to ChatGPT. You can find interviews with some doctors concerned about the addiction these programs create with users.
These apps take two very different tracks (though they can do both). The first level of Chat AI is a “friend” or “character” interaction. It’s meant to give you a companion or person to talk to when bored. The second level of these bots aims at an adult audience.
I want to target the first one because it’s getting a real push. The company founders and users point to two things: 1) AI Chatbots provide a means of discussing “mental health” problems. You can treat them as either a therapist in the pocket or a person with a friendly ear.
The second thing these tech companies point to is the loneliness epidemic. In short, these companies believe they’re targeting a real problem and providing a solution—at least on the surface. Some of them are effectively nothing more than “dating bots” that force you to pay for the “premium” experience. Others rely on users to create the bots and let those creations rank against other user-created content.
Either way, the ads these companies use are meant to convey the idea that you can have any friend you’d like. And that “friend” is always there. They’ll say the right thing and always respond.
I was under the impression that these kinds of AI bots were farther off in the future because I didn’t believe AI adoption was high enough to fund these kinds of companies. I was wrong. If anything, we’re several years beyond what I expected.
The target audience is very clearly teens and young adults. The chat apps aim to help alleviate social anxiety and other issues. The problem is that AI can’t solve these things; it can only point a mirror up to what we are as humanity and reflect that back on us. Further, the morality displayed by these apps will directly affect downstream users.
One of my first observations in college was that kids entering university didn’t change what they believed because of professors (though that did happen occasionally). The far more common thing is that kids either change because of friends and adopt those beliefs or throw off what they didn’t believe at home.
What is a user likely to adopt if you replace that friend group with a chat AI program? Whatever the developers of that AI program believe. Right now, the moral code of Silicone Valley is the worst in the country. Take one look at San Francisco and you can see what the Tech Titans brought forth in one place. Boiling that down into chat characters isn’t a great idea, especially when people replace human interaction with it.
When Star Trek started using voice commands with the ship’s computer, the program was a disembodied voice that made general announcements. Data, the android, was the anomaly. But we’re dealing with something beyond that now. We’re dealing with AI mimicking human relationships and emotions to replace the real thing among humans. And it’s growing fast.
For a while, I have believed that America isn’t walking into Orwell’s 1984. If you want that, check China. Orwell predicted the Chinese Communist Party in every aspect (the CCP mimicked the USSR, so this makes sense). America is in English author Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Put in movie terms, we’re not headed towards The Terminator; we’re in the dystopian world of Wall-E.
America is a country that is chasing every addiction imaginable, real or fiction, to get away from the real world. AI chatbots provide a constant source of dopamine hits to provide that escapism, mimicking human interaction while supplying nothing of it.
That’s not to say AI should be banned. Banning AI is officially impossible. How do I know? Because the world has access to open-source, free AI models. Once AI escapes the paid gateways, it can run anywhere because cost is no longer an issue to access.
What continues to strike me about this is the speed. This is one of the fastest technological revolutions in history. Even if we had a recession that started tomorrow and doubled into a depression, I don’t think it would dent the progress of AI. It could speed it up.
Nvidia, the company at the center of making computer chips for this revolution, had its shares top $1,000 for the first time. It’s now valued at $2.5 trillion. A recession would hurt that valuation, for sure. But the hunger for more AI applications is growing, not dissipating. Where this will be at the end of the year, let alone next year, is anyone’s guess.
If you’re curious about where things are headed, start paying attention to the ads you get for AI content. People are clicking on ads for things they want. AI companies are one of the market demands.
Links of the week
I’m in love with my AI girlfriend OpenAI’s new creation will prove insatiable – UnHerd
The road from Gaza to a court in The Hague runs through Washington – The Washington Examiner
Biden Admin To Rely on Hamas-Linked UNRWA As Gaza Pier Effort Ramps Up: ‘The entire U.N. family’ will be leveraged in U.S. aid operations – Washington Free Beacon
More than half of Americans think the U.S. is in a recession. It’s not. – Axios
The End of a School Year Like No Other: College students reflect on a year of fear, isolation, and poop tents – Tablet Magazine
Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Columbia: For decades, the university cultivated the conditions that led to its campus Intifada. – City Journal
Second US worker infected with cow-linked bird flu – BBC
NCAA, Power 5 agree to deal that will let schools pay players – ESPN
Fireball Lights Glacier National Park Sky; 3 States Witness – Weather Channel
A Spectacular, Rare Alignment of 6 Planets Is About to Happen in The Sky – Science Alert
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Nate Silver says that if Biden is still struggling in August, he should step aside.
The NIH has a “FOIA lady” to help government employees get around accountability laws.
Satire of the week
Frustrated Cicadas Assumed There’d Be More Than One Hole For Trillion Insects To Emerge From – Onion
Jerky, 7-Fingered Scarlett Johansson Appears In Video To Express Full-Fledged Approval Of OpenAI – Onion
AOC Demands To Know Where Alito Bought An Upside-Down U.S. Flag – Babylon Bee
Biden Begins Speech By Thanking Iran President Ebrahim Raisi For Coming – Babylon Bee
Experts agree: ‘The Sound of Freedom’ is actually tinnitus: 3M CEO: ‘Tinnitus is patriotism and vice versa.’ – Duffel Blog
‘It’s Important to Celebrate Your Accomplishments,’ Says Woman Looking for Any Excuse to Buy a Cheesecake – Reductress
Terrifying New Anti-Marijuana PSA Says Overindulgence Could Cause You to End Up Like Bill Maher – The Hard Times
ICC Issues Arrest Warrant for Cast, Crew Of “The Big Bang Theory” – The Hard Drive
“Aw That’s A Shame Now” – World Leaders Respond To Iranian Helicopter Crash – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!