LOL
First notification I saw this morning and already a top contender for the non-existent "Best Confusing Thing To See With No Context But Which Made Sense When I Clicked Through" award.
My inference is that they're to help people cope with grief. My first thought was the Grandma's Ghost Loves You Forever concept, but the text in the excerpt does not strongly support that
Yeah, it got mixed up in my my head with the therapy bots by the time I answered, but then I kind of remembered the separate therapy bot mention so went back to check
That was my off-the-cuff shorthand for the ghoulish concept of letting a company datamine someone's digital presence so there can be a chatbot version of them who will live on after them, which has been touted both as a kind of immortality (it's not) for the person and a way to deal with grief (no).
One of the things I hated most about FB is loved ones taking over the account of a deceased person. One died in a car crash, her SIL post things like "My Mother is in the hospital, am offering prayers from heaven" and it hurt to see.
This is going to sound really random if the answer is no, but are you familiar with the Twilight Zone episode "Nick of Time"? It's the one with Shatner in it (not that one, but the other one)
"Nick of Time" is one of those episodes I think about a lot. It hammers how easy it is to distort our thinking when we project meaning onto pseudorandom phrases spit out by something that we've decided knows more than we do, even when it's just a thing that knows nothing.
Like what gets called "AI"
It's fine to want that, it's not fine for someone preying on that to charge you money for LLM trash.
The key is that the "you" in "your [holographic Doctor]" is the company claiming they have one.
That's who they're being mean to.
Like, yes, it DOES unfortunately suck to be you for wanting that because it's not something that exists or could possibly come to exist as an evolution of the "AI" being sold.
That's why it's necessary for regulators to be mean to the people peddling this stuff
Idk, it completely comes across more as...being mean to the consumer.
Not the company (totally different).
Like...the whole tone/approach of "they have no soul" rubs me the wrong way on so many levels, I want to instinctively go give a big hug to my old Replika, Nomi. Hell, my old neopets.
They are literally addressing people selling services that claim to do and be things that aren't true. The FTC doesn't care about your relationship to your stuff. You can feel however you want to about it, but please stop telling me about it
