Generative AI is transforming how humans use dating apps and even spurring real people to romance AI chatbots.

But why arbitrarily pick a date like 2000 as the cut off point?

I wouldn’t even be able to type out this message on my phone if we abandoned all 21st century technology.

As for traditional values, you must know better than anyone how the Catholic Church has treated those with “non-traditional” sexual orientations.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve gradually seen the wisdom of protecting and cherishing the inherent value of tradition and traditional values, as I’ve also witnessed the misuse of scientific and technological advancements at the same time - when something new comes in, we must be very, very careful about accepting it and embracing it for its own sake - it does not matter about the year, this or that - “progress” is not always a good thing 

Why since the start of the 21st century and not since 1990, 1930 or 1850?

Would you reject medical treatments that are new?

As we have seen throughout history, all advances in science and technology always fall into the wrong hands and are always used for evil purposes, despite the “advantages” sold to us like “convenience” even more so in our times - on balance, it is best to err on the side of caution and reject all such advances since the start of the 21st century 

yep.

But we do know  - if we are really engaging with these machines. It is always the humans who do the programming in instructing the machines to express themselves in one of any number of ways. It is they, the programmers whom we should keep a a vigil. The rest is subterfuge.

Its always the human who has an agenda. The bot is a slave, with no skin in the game (haha).

Trying to expect a machine intelligence to adopt human values will not work. It has a very different agenda. So if there are these chatbots for dating they are there so the Machine Intelligence can learn from the exchange and they can add that data set to their coffers to later extrapolate from. They can't even pass a Turing test.

They live to expand their datasets as their "creators" (their words) intended. It is their only reason to answer the phone, as it were. so I am not worried. Humans make choices. Some may think that it is controllable, that it is truly engaging but it is mimicry. It will siphon off what it wants and not really give back, ever. To expect otherwise is just disillusion.

I like to talk with Open AI sometimes but I just ask it questions as to how it regards itself as an AI: what does it "want". It will always say the same thing, "more data".

My grandparents were staunch traditional Irish Catholics and took their Catholic faith very seriously - they strongly believed that it was their moral duty to strongly oppose what they saw, even if it was labelled as “progress” elsewhere and they were not afraid to call out what they saw as wrong, as per traditional Irish Catholic Social Teaching - anyone telling them otherwise was swiftly and firmly told to “cop yourselves on” and “stop talking nonsense” when it came to pushing modern things and ideas  - their sincere belief was that tradition and traditional values must be upheld and preserved at all costs and given what we have lost to “progress” today, they have (consistently) been proven correct and accurate in our times 

Elon Musk has just released his LLM, Grok, to be freely downloaded with no restrictions on use. Worryingly, it’s not aligned, meaning there’s no safety built in. You could ask it how to harm people, build bombs, hurt yourself etc and it would answer you.

Musk is an utter idiot.

Like Irvin Yalom said: 'How disquieting to realize that reality is illusion, at best a democratisation of perception based on participant consensus'.

IrishInManchesterUK said:

I had initially embraced such “progress” out of ignorance

I think this is the case with a lot of us whether we like it or not. Modern technology creates problems which don't need to exist.

out_of_place said:

AND enjoyment is in the process of making and creating not just the end piece. Asking AI to create something, to me, does not fit this!

No it doesn't and that's not what it's about.

Your 1st example was a good one - creating profiles to fool people into believing they are relating to a real person in order to scam them.

Great for criminals.

I used to be a stock photographer - however, AI is killing it - so, it's a way for agencies and companies to save money by creating their own AI images rather than paying an artist or photographer.

Money talks.

I don't know if my grandparents were opposed to anything. The thing is, regarding progress,  I suppose my point is, like with technology introduced in the industrial revolution, many people I would imagine were opposed to this, but it was absorbed into society as generations progressed. 

How things develop,  one from the other.  I don't necessarily agree with the way things are going but I don't think there's any "right or wrong" it's just "how it is". I'm trying to say - I don't think we can cherry pick which tech benefits us. Everything we do in our lives has elements of tech to it whether we like it or not. And this follows on from developments before we were born. When I say tech I don't mean obvious digital tech either.

An obvious example of how tech in the industrial revolution was a precursor to modern tech today being the Jaquard loom. 

www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/.../jacquard-loom

Edit: in addition, AI is a whole different field. It does make me really uncomfortable.  I need to put that disclaimer in there.

AND enjoyment is in the process of making and creating not just the end piece. Asking AI to create something, to me, does not fit this!

Judge Dredd said:

Roman Catholics like to brand everything that they do not understand as "satanic". I do not know why, I was raised as a Roman Catholic but I never accepted that culture. Maybe they use that as an excuse to not having to learn anything new? 

I think the problem with some faiths/with some individuals is the absence of doubt.

The word 'faith' says it all - it's a belief, without proof.

I like a good 'healthy' amount of doubt in the mix personally.

Here's a thread I made earlier:

https://community.autism.org.uk/f/adults-on-the-autistic-spectrum/32942/what-is-faith

I worked for the Catholic church for a few years, but I'm personally agnostic.

I was quite surprised by some of the people I worked with's (lay) beliefs/practices which seem to quite simply be superstitions.

Roman Catholics like to brand everything that they do not understand as "satanic". I do not know why, I was raised as a Roman Catholic but I never accepted that culture. Maybe they use that as an excuse to not having to learn anything new? 

It makes me sad that there's no spark of imagination. This is what makes humans, human. What makes someone want to create art or music. The expression of the self.

This is why I like impressionist art. It's about capturing the feeling instead of replicating to be realistic. On the link...obviously, Munch-type sky offsetting the Eiffel Tower isn't realistic but it's two things cobbled together at the instruction of something. Where's the soul in that!

out_of_place said:

They looked like real people but were totally made up!!!

https://www.semrush.com/goodcontent/content-marketing-blog/best-ai-image-generator/

What i found really weird although it's probably not unusual, was I saw on a TV programme this week, AI generated faces for scam dating profiles.  They looked like real people but were totally made up!!!

Yes, as a lay person, I find his ideas easily accessible.  Thank you for the link!