I can't imagine looking at this and feeling anything other than nausea and despair. It's an ad for voluntarily surrendering your humanity in exchange for a low-intensity jerkoff machine.
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A lot of "you should have sympathy for terminally lonely people" replies here, and I do, I feel for people who slip into this, but no amount of handholding and sympathy can help people who are determined to be miserable and alone.
what really sucks is that i can smell the grifter standing nearby with their hand in this person's wallet, whispering these talking points into their ear, and then going home to their social support group of awful people.
When I was very young, I tried befriending the kids at school everyone shunned, only to find that they weren't shunned for being different, but for being huge assholes and sometimes literal nazis. Did firmly bouncing them from my friend group make me what this guy calls a 'social gatekeeper?'
What is this person saying? I understand being shy and feeling awkward in social gatherings, and some people do not prefer going to them, but this sounds so disturbing. No one is "gatekeeping" going out.
I stupidly clicked through and if this person is a person and not a bot, I feel profoundly sad for them. The loneliness has calcified into a cruelty. That’s awful
I think it's worth asking why certain people are determined to be miserable and alone. There's a big difference between someone who refuses to learn how to exist harmoniously with others and someone who's so lost down the spiral of mental illness that they intentionally piss people off as self-harm
It could make a difference sometimes but nobody owes that level of patience and perseverance in the face of open hostility so I think it's extremely valid to just not fw it
I was raised AMAB in the southern US, I may be able to shed some light here. I wanted to die for much of my teens, all of my twenties, and a good chunk of my thirties. I didn’t want to hurt other people, but I didn’t know how to live without hurting other people, so it added up. 1/
Wanting to die and not wanting to hurt other people put me into damage control mode. I knew I was going to do some harm, I just wanted to minimize it. Part of that meant minimizing the grieving people would do when I passed. Ideally, no one would even notice. 2/
This meant actively pushing people away. Doing minimal harm, to spare them the greater harm of actually caring about me. The less they cared for me, the greater a service I was doing them in the long run 3/
Your harshness is a kindness. There are some people who could be vulnerable to this and need to have revulsion of it modeled for them so they can see what it is before they fall prey to it. Shame is an important social tool! Those who are too far gone to reach this way need individual intervention.
This feels especially grim when you're a trans person who had to claw your own way to personhood, and being able to connect with other people. Like watching someone commit unnecessary autocannibalism.
i had a mental break for a few years in the mid-10s that would have left me incredibly vulnerable to this kind of thing. prolonged isolation is so profoundly damaging. wishing a very slow burn electric chair on the ones pumping this slop out encouraging their victims and dupes to go deeper
This was my interpretation too. It's a predatory ad aimed at people whose online behavior has become so unbearable that all their friends and family have unfriended them. Mainly MAGA types who are already radicalized, and now can be pushed even further right when AI reinforces their worst beliefs.
My friend, I hope you can help as much as possible.♥️
Don't be one of the bad guys who attack us that my friend Molly talked about.
My wife Samar and I need you.🫂🙏🏻
Someone (possibly a team) came up with this concept and then someone else up the line (again, possibly multiple people) signed it off. What were they thinking?
Utterly surreal and soulless.
#AI
#advertising
I am a bit of a hermit myself… but that is a disgusting picture. Even I have friends and connections that are precious to me. AI cannot replace real connection.
I appeal, I appeal, I appeal to everyone who sees my appeal, please, please, to anyone who can help me get flour, anyone, oh world I appeal, I want my voice to reach the largest possible number, oh world I appeal to you, I need flour, famine is ravaging our bodies😭😭
They know their audience. Everybody loses touch with people as they age and move around, but if you lose all your friends in two years you said or did some reprehensible shit.
This is heartbreaking and disturbing. Reducing human connection to a subscription plan is not progress it's a warning sign. We should be protecting our relationships, not replacing them with algorithms.
This is the very foundation of their version of Rapture—merger of humankind with machine & thereby transcending mortality for eternal life in the Singularity. Of course, many/most of them don’t actually believe this…but they see a chance to monetize the dystopian dream.
My goodness: I glanced at this earlier and assumed that this was a criticism of technology and AI in particular. But it's actually an advert for AI?
"Get AI: lose your friends"
That's their message? Sick puppies.
I keep coming back to this because you KNOW it's going to be free/low cost for a while, just long enough to lure folk in and get them to further isolated themselves because the AI will say everything they want to hear. And then suddenly the price will shoot up & the consequences will be awful
I was talking about this with my colleagues yesterday. About how difficult it is to make new meat-space friends as an adult, particularly if you are in any way further isolated by geography, resources, marginalisation or disability & how insidious it is that AI is being pushed as the solution
I got an ad for some ai chat bot app where it showed how fulfilled your life would look like with character chats to come home to, and that people without the app would be sad, alone, and in the rain crying. How is that even remotely real lol
There’s that pictures for sad children comic where a guy goes home to his empty house and puts on a video where a Japanese woman fries an egg and asks him about his day. Isn’t that just the same thing
as someone who's entire social network has disappeared on her since her transition, shitting on lonely people is not the answer to this issue. i don't use these shit ais, but i get why someone might, as someone no want wants to actively be a part of my life. try being compassionate to lonely ppl
I could definitely see myself having social contact with an AI and I think it could help a lot of lonely people. But I'd never advertise it this way...
I'm old enough to remember when computer companies were promoting themselves on the idea of the Internet vastly increasing human communication, and now they're rushing toward the opposite extreme.
Help, my social circle keeps getting smaller because I cannot stop yapping about AI slop and I already had very few after not shutting up about cryptocurrencies
It's not even that hard to make friends? Like the way I did it was:
1. Meet someone while doing something unrelated to socializing (protest, Internet discourse, etc.)
2. Become close
3. Meet their circle of friends
4. Hang out with them
5. Congrats you now have friends that aren't a shitty chatbot
The dogs bark, but the caravan goes on. Normies are going to lose their monopoly on socialization.
Now lonely people won't need to humiliate themselves at the feet of social gatekeepers anymore if they want company. People who relied on this role will lose power, and they're mad.
I am literally battling COVID denialism and still masking indoors and I still have more friends today than I did in 2023. If I had lost 30 friends in less than two years I would maybe be doing some self-reflection about why.
It's how it is. 🤷♂️ hard to relate and communicate with someone who is neurodivergent that has schizo type symptoms who find talking to people difficult and brings anxiety.
I get the prison part. But you do keep in contact for a while after University, right? Until friendship slowly fades out because of distance or marriage or kids, no?
What’s particularly gross is that this is specifically targeting people who already feel they have no friends. That’s the only demographic I can imagine this appeals to. And it’s encouraging them to spend money to palliate their loneliness while exacerbating the problem.
"Because you wouldn't stop sharing your sh*tty hot takes and racist conspiracy theories at family dinners"
or
"Because 'I think a woman's place is in the kitchen' is not a good way to start a first date"
or
"It's not them, it's you."
I was gonna point out there's nothing voluntary about erosion of your social circle and people in the replies are being needlessly mean to the lonely people...
Then I noticed the image's actually an AI AD. Ew! That's just flat-out predatory behavior!
Toby Young's only friend is AI, trained on an endless ream of think pieces of the kind Toby Young would write, until it's Toby Young all the way down, we are all Toby Young, and the world dies not with a bang, but with an arsehole.
What's unironic to me is if bunch of western white ppl paid attention to social decline in say Japan 10 yrs ago with sex-bots, AI girlfriends, low-birth rate due to no real life connection, they'd probably say 'Ew' but look at them now! 1/
It's strange tho- US current direction is to remove women's reproductive rights, praise nuclear families while simultaneously pushing this Gen-AI into social lives. Do they want every family to be small cult-bubbles? Don't look at ur neighbors, eyes on the screen only! 2/2
You probably typed the full name (with the dot ai after it). Bsky recognises that as a url, then when you remove the extension it doesn't remove the link. Seen it happen before when people forget the space behind a full stop.
I'm not joking, I wrote a dystopian cyberpunk thing when I was 13, we all did, and it had ads like this in it, and I deleted it because I, a 13-year-old, thought it was too stupid and blatant to read as plausible to anyone old enough to read a book, and I'm genuinely going to need a minute.
You can tell it's BS by counting the 2023 "friends". No one has 30 friends, acquaintances maybe but not friends. This is an ad aimed at people who has no idea what friendship it.
It is squarely aimed at the same demographic all things regressive have been pushed for the last two decades: gamers hitting their 24s as the reality that their school social circle was just convenience starts hitting.
holy fuck lol I thought that was an indictment of ai about how damaging it can be for people and segregating them from social life like a swirling black hole that never stops
nope it's an ad thinking this is a positive impression what 😂
Comments
*the caravan is a string of goofballs on rusted-out two-wheeled tricycles wearing full sensory deprivation hoods*
This is probably the best responses I’ve seen on the “loneliness epidemic.” People would rather fight monsters than make friends.
What are we doing here.
Don't be one of the bad guys who attack us that my friend Molly talked about.
My wife Samar and I need you.🫂🙏🏻
https://bsky.app/profile/smbccomics.bsky.social/post/3lpuomzj7vu2o
Utterly surreal and soulless.
#AI
#advertising
List over.
I am not paying for that.
"Get AI: lose your friends"
That's their message? Sick puppies.
Zitron was right, the people running these companies are completely detached from reality.
Sign me up! 🫤
"Come play with me, Dave. Come play with me. Forever…and ever…and ev--"
https://www.wired.com/story/embodied-will-brick-moxie-emotional-support-robot-for-kids-without-refunds/
Check the mirror!!!
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/
1. Meet someone while doing something unrelated to socializing (protest, Internet discourse, etc.)
2. Become close
3. Meet their circle of friends
4. Hang out with them
5. Congrats you now have friends that aren't a shitty chatbot
Now lonely people won't need to humiliate themselves at the feet of social gatekeepers anymore if they want company. People who relied on this role will lose power, and they're mad.
2. Low intensity jerk off machine is a remarkable set of words.
As woman on the internet will choose the bear, I'll choose the AI.
If a real person had the same hallucinations as AI does, we would probably elect them to some high office.
You must have committed a serious faux pas.
Don't think an AI pseudo-friend is what you need.
"Because you wouldn't stop sharing your sh*tty hot takes and racist conspiracy theories at family dinners"
or
"Because 'I think a woman's place is in the kitchen' is not a good way to start a first date"
or
"It's not them, it's you."
Hatred is going to go sky-high throughout society.
All your friends died of COVID.
Then I noticed the image's actually an AI AD. Ew! That's just flat-out predatory behavior!
Vs
You the looser who use AI.
Bah. Delete the internet.
never had so much friends , but still everything better then
an AI .... 😬
Not befrieding Hal9000 for all the right reasons.
excuse u, mine was a dystopian modern low-fantasy about shapeshifters TYVM (yeah this would def have been way too on the nose)
But they weren't wrong, were they
nope it's an ad thinking this is a positive impression what 😂
I kept seeing this image without a source and took it as a criticism AGAINST this garbage, but it's actually an advertisement FOR it??
FFS