The Ludditetheluddite
Jun 16, 2025, 11:35 PMThis screenshot is from the Replika app's onboarding flow.
Replies
- The LudditetheludditeJun 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:
"Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology by Command of His Majesty"
Bastian Greshake Tzovarasgedankenstuecke@scholar.socialJun 17, 2025, 12:17 AM@theluddite each new post you make infuriates me more about this BS!
- The LudditetheludditeJun 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!
Jun 17, 2025, 3:51 PMThought 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?- The LudditetheludditeJun 17, 2025, 5:36 PM
@abucci That's spot on and I will absolutely watch this. Thanks!
- 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.