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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    Apr 4, 2025, 2:30 PM

    Bethanie Maples: "My work actually has proven that AI companions can halt suicidal ideation"

    youtu.be/-El-CFpOf2I?t=1198

    Jump to ~3 min to hear the host discuss Weizenbaum. It's an insult to mention him in a video promoting exactly what he warned us against.

    (scroll up in this 16 month old thread for context)

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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    May 24, 2025, 12:45 AM

    I interrupt my month of silence on social media to continue screaming into the void about my personal favorite case study in the AI hype. Bethanie Maples should absolutely not be giving a webinar for the International Association of Suicide Prevention. This is frustrating and irresponsible. People are going to get hurt.

    A poster for the International Association for Suicide Prevention research webinar, which happened yesterday, 22 May. The first guest speaker is Bethanie Maples (the subject of this thread), along with two other people that I don't know anything about. It says "This webinar is focused on the use of chatbots for training and intervention."
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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    Jun 16, 2025, 11:35 PM

    This screenshot is from the Replika app's onboarding flow.

    Screenshot of a phone in portrait mode. The background is two hands coming together veritcally, as if about to high five, but gently, and touching at the fingertips. " Stimulation of other human relationships, not displacement, was reported in association with Replika use." Standford University Maples, B., Cerit, M., Vishwanath, A. and Pea, R. (2023)
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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    Jun 5, 2026, 3:49 PM

    In which I continue chronicling this case study of corrupt, bullshit AI research leaking into public life.

    In a report from Brookings Institution:

    brookings.edu/wp-content/uploa

    "Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology by Command of His Majesty"

    gov.uk/government/consultation

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  • tapelooptapeloop@mastodon.social
    Aug 2, 2025, 7:41 PM

    @paninid @theluddite Miriam Weizenbaum:
    I always heard that just really kind of soaked in arrogance. Like, how could she be so stupid to think that this is actually a meaningful communication? Here you have somebody who so needs a landing pad for her feelings that she’s willing to embrace it, right? And he totally misses that, he totally misses the human need and instead speaks of just evidence of this person’s stupidity rather than evidence of their humanity. 99percentinvisible.org/episode

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  • Amin Dostfluidlogic@oldbytes.space
    May 24, 2025, 9:25 AM

    @theluddite this whole thread describes a slow-motion train crash of opportunism, naïveté and wilful ignorance. I dread to read its inevitable outcome.

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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    May 24, 2025, 12:02 PM

    @fluidlogic same! This thread doesn't even have the whole story, just the highlights! For example, there's also the time that I sent everything I knew about this to 404media asking them to do journalism and investigate only for them to write an article based only on what I told them, not even credit me, then feed me insulting bullshit when I emailed them about it.

    I've been doing some digging myself and there will almost certainly be an update post sooner than later :)

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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    May 24, 2025, 8:42 PM

    @gedankenstuecke

    Haha yes. Extremely bleak. It seems that the AI people have found the most aggressively spreading scam and it's metastasizing at breakneck speed. The AI singularity is real, though not in a p(doom) sense, but a Baudrillardian postmodern sense. In like 10 years there will be only empty slop composed of symbols that once meant something in their long lost training data!

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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    Jun 17, 2025, 1:13 AM

    @gedankenstuecke right?! It's infuriating how far it has gone. I would've never imagined, almost a full 2 years ago, that this would have so much life!

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  • Anthonyabucci@buc.ci
    Jun 17, 2025, 3:51 PM
    Thought you might be interested in this Sherry Turkle talk wherein she rips not just on Replika in particular, but on everything they and their ilk represent: https://youtu.be/jy7bpyt_vnE

    Here are some choice quotes:

    Consider Replika, at this point a chatbot that offers itself as a friend, confidante, lover, psychotherapist. It’s built to be emotive, supportive, and erotic if that’s what a person wants. There’s a remarkable parallelism between what Replika’s developers promise and what enthusiastic users say they like about Replika. The description of Replika by the parent company in its ad says this: Join millions talking to their own AI friends. Replika is for anyone who wants a friend with no judgement, drama, or social anxiety involved. Replika users make it clear that the writers of these ads know their clientele. Users say to me that people are disappointing because they judge you and they can abandon you. The drama of human connection is exhausting. In my studies people tell me that they like chatbot friendship because it takes the stress out of relationships. With a chatbot friend there is no friction, there is no second guessing, there is no ambivalence, there is no fear of being left behind. In contrast, Replika is a sure thing, a confidence booster, always there, day or night.

    A self over the past 20 years that’s become starved of the give and take of conversation, that hasn’t learned to tolerate vulnerability and respect the vulnerability of others, is primed to look to technology for simpler fare.

    We treated programs as though they were people, but now we are trained to treat people as though they were programs. To me that’s the moment to mark. It’s not whether or not chatbots are fascinating, or smart, or pass the Turing test. It’s what it’s doing to our treating people as if they were only machines.

    When we connect to machines that pretend to be empathic, we tell, and they will remember, but we will not have been heard. And I ask the question: will we no longer care?
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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    Jun 17, 2025, 5:36 PM

    @abucci That's spot on and I will absolutely watch this. Thanks!

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  • Anthonyabucci@buc.ci
    Jun 17, 2025, 6:07 PM
    @theluddite@assemblag.es She makes a point towards the end regarding who has standing to talk to you that I think is important. I wish she'd elaborated on it a bit more. It occurred to me that we do this with one another all the time, size up whether someone talking to us has standing to be talking about what they're talking about. Professionally we do it, assessing what we perceive to be another person's qualifications and experiences and whatnot. Personally we do it, feeling out whether or not we're close enough to a person to have a conversation about some sensitive topic. Yet when it comes to interacting with chatbots, some people seem to flatten or ignore all of this and treat the bots as though they have standing to "talk" about any topic, when in fact they have no standing at all and cannot. I think that's an interesting and alarming phenomenon.
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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    Apr 4, 2025, 3:33 PM

    @abucci I decided to check in because I got an email that her response to our response is finally done so they'll be publishing it at some point relatively soon.

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  • The Ludditetheluddite
    Apr 4, 2025, 3:52 PM

    @abucci Me too! I'm so excited for the followup blogpost :)

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