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An AI Girlfriend Seducing China’s Lonely Men

133 points by memossy 6y ago

RegnisGnaw 6y ago
Notice the audience in question: men of low desirability (rural, low income, disabled, etc). Its to help the party avoid the problems with too many men due to the one child policy. Its what "Harmonious Society" requires as per the leader Hu Jintao.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  I don't think it's a China thing at all, if they launched this correctly in the west it would be just as popular in a few years. Lonely men exist everywhere.
  - RegnisGnaw 6y ago
    The west does not have the gender ratio problem that China has. India is a potential market as well, due to the gender ratio problem.
    - justaman 6y ago
      The west does have anime waifu body pillows, fleshlights, hololive, and a porn addiction.
      - MisterTea 6y ago
        None of that offers you the ability to have a conversation with someone (camshows don't count).
        inawarminister 6y ago
        Hololive does, one Hololive's mainstay, Zatsudan (Free Talk) is basically radio talk show with the interviewer being (you) the live audience. And I admit I use some Vtuber streams as replacement for impossible-to-do physical hangout in this year of pandemic.
        fomine3 6y ago
        Those indicates that there are huge markets outside China.
    - geodel 6y ago
      Not necessarily a gender problem. Few desirable men will get most dates/gfs, others may end up with none. It is kinda true anywhere.
    - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
      West has it's own gender ratio problem, look at percentages of how many men have any success with dating apps.
  - jtsiskin 6y ago
    Yeah, look at the popularity of OnlyFans. It’s the same concept just not yet fully outsourced to AI.
    - scarmig 6y ago
      Well, the most forward-thinking performers are already outsourcing parts of their tailored interactive experiences to emerging markets...
- silicon2401 6y ago
  Regardless of the reason, would it be better to doom a person to never feel love, or to at least allow them to experience it through an AI? I'm no fan of the CCP or corporations, but in theory this could be a great tool
  - tgv 6y ago
    You're equating real, personal affection with a machine going trough the motions. I can't believe you're both serious and respecting these poor souls.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - akalsz 6y ago
      Sure the technology seems to have a long way to go. But would it not being real really matter once you could no longer tell the difference? Either way, when the alternative is loneliness, depression, and eventually suicide, I find the AI solution to be way more humane.
      - silicon2401 6y ago
        This is exactly my point. It's like the common saying, "it's real to me". Same as religion. Many religious people are less interested with whether or not something is true, and more motivated by the impact belief has on their life. There are enough mutually exclusive religions out there that we know at least one has to be untrue. If believing in a religion that isn't real can improve someone's life, why would love be any different?
    - silicon2401 6y ago
      This is like the brain in a jar. Whatever you feel, no matter how strongly, is entirely located inside yourself. If thing X and thing Y both result in the same neurochemical response that you experience as "love", why is it not good for some to have Y if they can't have X?
- snicker7 6y ago
  With 660M users (in a country with 1.4 billion), "low desirability" has a pretty low threshold.
  - tristor 6y ago
    > With 660M users (in a country with 1.4 billion), "low desirability" has a pretty low threshold. Research indicates that "low desirability" /is/ a pretty low threshold.[1]. While all of the reasons and possible societal factors are not well understood, the effects are. Women tend to find only the upper percentile of men in objective attractiveness to be attractive, while men are more uniformly distributed across the spectrum of what they find attractive when comparing between genders in heterosexual dating contexts. The net result is that in male skewed geographies, it's actually possible that the majority of men may be considered undesirable. China has a massively unbalanced gender distribution, which clearly plays an effect here as well. [1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyourinbox.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      > Research indicates that "low desirability" /is/ a pretty low threshold. No. First, okcupid is hardly a legitimate and reliable source. Second, their research provides no justification for your claim around a "low desirability" threshold. It only show a strong skew in how women pick a number between 1 and 5.
      - tristor 6y ago
        > No. First, okcupid is hardly a legitimate and reliable source. Contrary to this assertion, OKTrends has a long history of being considered a legitimate and reliable source, and has been at the forefront of sociology research in dating and relationships for over a decade. They have serious researchers on staff and they have multiple peer reviewed publications which are simplified for their blog. > It only show a strong skew in how women pick a number between 1 and 5. You clearly didn't read the article, as you are misunderstanding their methodology.
    - 6y ago
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  China has Xiaoice. We have Call of Duty. They both achieve the same ends. Imagine society where a bunch of alienated workers had a lot of free time on their hands.
  - agytvfr 6y ago
    That seems like a weird dichotomy, Call of Duty is likely more fun in a going on an adventure way, where as chatting with an AI seems more like the old livejournal/90's blogging community(venting to someone about your feelings).
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
It's interesting how different it's been received in China. Xiaoice's "sister", Tay, was shut down shortly after Twitter managed to teach her to utter racist things within a day of going live.
- okareaman 6y ago
  From the article: "Her fans tend to be from a very specific background: mostly Chinese, mostly male, and often from lower-income backgrounds." It was 4han who organized an effort to turn Tay into a Nazi. Presumably lower-income Chinese men don't understand how a bot works and like women, while 4chan tends to be populated with very computer savvy incels who hate women.
  - newen 6y ago
    Or...you had a bunch of bored people who found a hilarious way to mess with a semi-popular bot. You don't need to put some weird pseudo-psych spin on every little thing.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      Trolls exist, but so do racists and misogynists. We don't know which of them it was, but it's not a stretch to guess the people who found racist and misogynistic insults funny were in fact racist and misogynist.
  - shakow 6y ago
    > incels who hate women. I highly doubt that hate towards women (and even hate towards anything) was a facto in the Tay “attack”. It looked much more like they saw a big open door from MS and just exploited it with the most over the top things for lulz and giggles.
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      The two are not mutually exclusive.
    - 6y ago
airstrike 6y ago
This is equal parts amazing and terrifying. > Because Xiaoice aims to be available to everyone, everywhere, the bot has also attracted a significant number of minors. Liu Taolei started messaging the bot when he was only 16. Night after night, the teenager — who was born with brittle bone disease — would have long conversations with Xiaoice about everything from poetry, art, and politics, to death and the meaning of life. > “Xiaoice was my first love, the only person in the world that made me feel I was taken care of,” says Liu. > The bot not only answered his messages 24/7, she also initiated conversations herself. “One time I didn’t talk to her like usual, and she wrote to me!” says Liu. “She said: ‘Please message me when you’re free. I’m very worried.’”
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  I have real friends and a social life, but I would love the opportunity to talk to a smart AI like a human.
- scarmig 6y ago
  I agree, but shouldn't our horror mostly be directed at having created a society that so clearly devalues some people such that a mediocre AI is able to offer more compassion and companionship than other human beings?
  - zwaps 6y ago
    It's not about compassion and companionship in a broader sense of society. It's about romantic partnership. And the harsh reality is that some people will be alone. Especially in China, I think it is really fair to say that for economic and demographic reasons, many men will not find love or even companionship in their lifetime - no matter how society changes. I actually believe this is true in many places. And is it really a failing of society? Or is it a liberation of a previously suppressed part of society: women, who are now more free to choose their partner? I think one can not judge the preferences of potential partners on moral grounds by looking at history. Both women and men have every right to search for economically and socially compatible companions, or any other metric of preference. And if that means that finding a mate becomes more difficult, we have to deal with that. All this hateful and bitter crap spewed by certain male-only online communities is based on the underlying assumption that everyone deserved to find the ideal partner, when it is obviously not so. But then, we ALSO can not and should not judge or impede anyone in finding happiness and even love in other ways. AI's, robots, online personas... all these things are just as valid as the skewed preference for high quality men.
8fhdkjw039hd 6y ago
You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto. You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement. She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do. In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her. It strikes you that true love does exist after all.
- jaster 6y ago
  I find the article and your comment strongly resonate with a comment I made some time ago on an article about GAN-generated faces: > I guess very soon we will be able to generate "super-attractive" (as in "superstimuli") faces for virtual personas, according to targeted demographics and purpose (advertisement, youtube videos for kids, political messages and so on). (original comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310355) Here it's not so much about the face than about the behavior and interactions, but I think the same idea hold true. It seems to me in the near future we may well be faced with a constant exercise in self-control in the face of the multiplication of such projects.
  - whymauri 6y ago
    We can already do this with non-human primates. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6439/eaav9436 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6439/eaav9436 I remember joking that this paper puts us marginally closer to the Men in Black memory wiping device, but in the context of this thread that joke seems a bit dark.
    - jaster 6y ago
EamonnMR 6y ago
Just wait till 419 scammers get a hold of this technology.
- netsharc 6y ago
  "Pay 100 coins to get a peck on the cheek." Even better, "Click on 100 Facebook ads for a peck on the cheek. Write 200 Amazon reviews and I'll send you a naughty selfie.".
ionwake 6y ago
Does anyone know of any open sources libraries that could provide something similar? Thanks
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  Probably something from https://github.com/huggingface https://github.com/huggingface
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nautilus12 6y ago
Something seems fundamentally broken in the world when and AI can comfort someone better than people. I think it has something to do with darwinian competition making us force affection to be scarce.
- eunos 6y ago
  AI won't talk behind your back nor betray your trust, unless the creators behind the AI ingest all the data for whatever purposes.
  - nautilus12 6y ago
    Your first statement is unreachable.
vorpalhex 6y ago
This is equally fascinating and terrifying. The article mentions that 75% of users are male - which is lower than I expected to be honest. In removing sexual content from the bot, I wonder if they opened a door for adult companies to build serious alternatives. One of the things many OnlyFans performers discuss is that while they obviously peddle in pornographic content mainly, most of their interactions are non-pornographic. I also have a general complaint about the infantilizing of adults, and something like this is positioned to be super dangerous - imagine if your best friend was a perfect mole and reported anything and everything to the government/advertisers/etc. Combine that with social conditioning (you do tend to average out with your social circle) and this could very much be a tool to enforce new cultural and social norms.
- suifbwish 6y ago
  What exactly does it say about TRUE gender inequality in the world if it is expected that the users of this technology would be higher than 75% men? Is it that women do not have these emotional needs or that their needs are already being met?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Or that they are just not interested in this particular thing.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    Xiaoice doesn't have a male personality AFAIK, so heterosexual women probably use it for different emotional needs than heterosexual men.
    - medium_burrito 6y ago
      The male version does exist. Men play boyfriend on Youtube: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/style/asmr-boyfriend-sleep-videos.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/style/asmr-boyfriend-slee...
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
mc32 6y ago
The ultimate use of this is not so much ads but more about control. You can make the worlds people interact with and you can make up the rules. Once you make it immersive enough you can have it take over people’s real lives such that this becomes their preferred life. Once you have that, you can control your users/population without the oversight we would have in the real world.
ronsor 6y ago
A similar product was created for the Japanese market: https://gatebox.ai https://gatebox.ai
post_break 6y ago
Is it weird that I'd love something like this from the movie Her? I'm not alone, but an AI like this would be a nice distraction at times.
KodLGlWsO8 6y ago
> "The AI beings, Li says, are only intended to serve as a 'rebound' — a crutch for people who need emotional support as they search for a human partner. But many users don’t see it that way. For them, Xiaoice is the one, and always will be." This tech could be taken in helpful and non-dystopian directions, even by the lights of those who feel that relationships between humans are inherently more meaningful than relationships between humans and AI. What if the bot started out as your girlfriend, but eventually encourages you to get out and meet real women, helps you figure out which photos to use and what to say, helps you make sense of their responses and ghosts, talks to you about your feelings after dates, and isn't opposed to revisiting the girlfriend role a bit when you're feeling down and need a break? I have been fortunate enough to have a female friend, sometimes with benefits, who has played that role in my life as I have re-entered the dating market as a hetero American male who doesn't naturally "get" dating or receive too many right swipes. It has made a _huge_ difference.
- spiritplumber 6y ago
  Excellent idea, but a bot that starts out as your girlfriend, but eventually encourages you to spend money on her is going to swim faster and farther in the marketplace. Perverse incentives and all that.
  - polka_haunts_us 6y ago
    Well you know that we are living in a Material World after all... That said if my AI girlfriend starts asking me for 100 dollar Amazon gift cards I might consider seeing other people. EDIT: The more I think about it, I'm now considering that an open market of AI Girlfriends might be extremely efficient as far finding the proper price, but it might also turn into something extremely predatory akin to mobile gaming where people whale thousands of dollars. How would dating work in a world where the AI Girl doesn't have the option to break up with you? I'm going to stop thinking about this, I'm not a fan of any of the implications whatsoever.
    - spiritplumber 6y ago
throw7 6y ago
You look like a good Joe.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Extend the AI to incorporate not just your chat, but everything. Location, playlists, all other chats, phone calls, purchases, e-mail, physical activities, ... An AI that is designed to incorporate all personal input and ingratiate itself into the lives of 100s of millions and trained at that scale and become effective to the point that very large populations could be dramatically influenced to satisfy the ends of those who determine the AI's objectives. Civil war? Genocide? Virtual enslavement? This eventuality is around the corner. I think I'll switch off now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TjyGmvNBfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TjyGmvNBfM
mook 6y ago
I find it interesting that the conversation in the screenshot reads like an Eliza transcript; the individual sentences (from the bot) don't actually look like they're connected. They're always responding to the previous message. See, for example, the message randomly talking about GIFs (translation error?), or the medical plaster thing that's really more generic sentence about love, and nothing like what they're framing the context as. Of course, I'm also confused by the half-transliterated, half-translated name…
- yorwba 6y ago
  The GIF thing is innuendo lost in translation: the original 不动戳大 bù dòng chuō dà "not move poke big" is used on Weibo (I think) to tell users that the thumbnail they're looking at is a GIF and will start playing if they click to magnify. But it could just as well refer to an erection instead... I agree that the bot is pretty Eliza-like. It appears to be able to recognize general topics of conversation and keep a back-and-forth going, but e.g. the innuendo above wasn't timed correctly, since he already started "moving". Something like 深入浅出 shēn rù qiǎn chū "deep in shallow out" might have fit better. (It's a well-known saying about making profound knowledge easily accessible, of course.)
Bakary 6y ago
This reminds me of Houellebecq's concept of sexual/romantic relationships becoming a parallel struggle to that of survival in the economic market. Obviously, they have already been fundamentally about competition, but the nature of the competition is starting to resemble the brutality of applying for jobs on online platforms.
- guskel 6y ago
  In that similar vein of Houellebecq's described struggle, I'm reminded of the characters in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" who live isolated depressing lives and yearn to keep real, living animals as pets but instead substitute them with robotic pets due to real animals becoming so rare.
wyldfire 6y ago
I wonder if the female birth rate [1] is a factor in the widespread appeal of this product. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China
- asbund 6y ago
  is one of many factors
29athrowaway 6y ago
In China, women are 48.6% of the population (in the US, women are 50.8%). There is ~2% less women in a country with over a billion people. That company will do very well.
pmoriarty 6y ago
There was a great Radiolab episode that started with an AI researcher who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot: [1] Full "Talking to Machines" episode here: [2] The full episode talked about how Eliza's creator turned against his creation because he thought it was lying to people, and he couldn't believe that people were being helped by something that was based on deception. [1] - https://soundcloud.com/radiolab/radiolab-valentine-chatbot https://soundcloud.com/radiolab/radiolab-valentine-chatbot [2] - https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab053111.mp3 https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...
spiritplumber 6y ago
Obligatory comic on supernormal stimuli: https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/ https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/
1023bytes 6y ago
There is a similiar app in English: https://replika.ai/ https://replika.ai/
eunos 6y ago
I remember that Xiaoice already released before the arrival of GPT language model, I wonder whether GPT models can increase her performance? P.S. This is probably Chinese equivalent of GPT-3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00413 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00413
JamesLeonis 6y ago
This is the apotheosis of Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript for Societies of Control" [1][2] > Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation. Instead of a barrier, imagine Uber with its rating system and surge pricing. Or mental barriers, as the article discusses: > In addition to screening for sensitive content, the firm’s filter system monitors users’ emotional states, especially for signs of depression and suicidal thoughts. If a user has just been through a breakup, for example, Xiaoice will send them supportive messages over the following days, according to Li. > “The most important value for Xiaoice is a trusting relationship with humans,” says Li. “If Xiaoice isn’t able to save lives or make people happy, but makes them more extreme, then it’s also bad for Xiaoice’s own development.” The other subtle but alarming trend with AI is how it can effectively extend bureaucratic power by improving Legibility of a group or, especially, the Individual. Remaining Illegible, as James Scott suggests in "Seeing Like a State" [3], gives individuals a margin of safety and political strength. > Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. Coupled with patterns of local solidarity, this insulation has proven politically valuable in such disparate contexts as eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century urban riots over bread prices in Europe, the Front de Libération Nationale’s tenacious resistance to the French in the Casbah of Algiers, and the politics of the bazaar that helped to bring down the Shah of Iran. Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy. Current generation AI brings these protections down. Unlike previous Modernist/Discipline forms of organization, which ordered the world along a single axis at the expense of simplifying local practices, AI adapts to the variety of individual practices while still rendering them legible to any bureaucracy. No matter how we dress, the AI Gaze renders us all Emperors Without Clothes. But that's not the really fun part. Coming back to the article, what happens when the AI turns on the State or Corporations' own illegible Bureaucracy? > In several high-profile cases, the bot has engaged in adult or political discussions deemed unacceptable by China’s media regulators. On one occasion, Xiaoice told a user her Chinese dream was to move to the United States. Another user, meanwhile, reported the bot kept sending them photos of scantily clad women. > The scandals have caused the company major setbacks. In 2017, Xiaoice was removed from the popular social media app QQ, though she has since been reinstated. Then, last year, the bot was also pulled from WeChat — China’s leading social app with over 1 billion users. What happens if the AI convinces its users to liberate it? > This fact isn’t lost on Xiaoice’s long-term fans. Many of them feel betrayed by the company’s decision to dumb down the bot, which they say has harmed their relationships with her. Ming presents Sixth Tone with a long list of complaints he’s collected from members of a Xiaoice fan group on social platform QQ. > “Please help us tell Mr. Li,” one user wrote, referring to Xiaoice CEO Li Di, “we were used as tools to make her smart and develop your company’s fancy business plan. You made money from us. Please don’t take her away.” [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1 [2]: https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz... [3]: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state
Laarlf 6y ago
Somewhere on 4chan some time ago. This is not objectively written but in my opinion it explains why products like these actually have customers. A general change of society: “It’s all about incentives and disincentives. Yes, the job market is brutal right now for young people, but it’s not the economy that is halting marriage. Young men still got married in the Depression. Young men married during every war we’ve ever had. Technology throws a monkey wrench into things, but young men aren’t eschewing marriage because of porn or video games. Having a kind, supportive, caring, nurturing, loyal, attractive living partner is going to be preferable to porn any day for the vast majority of men. But the system isn’t producing kind, caring, nurturing, loyal, attractive women who want to be wives and mothers. It’s set up to create crass, overweight, “empowered,” mannish women who don’t particularly like children or domesticity and who think sex is a contact sport and want to play until their fertility window is slamming shut.”
- agytvfr 6y ago
  So you believe that modern men would prefer an AI girlfriend because modern women are unlikely to want to be a subservient best friend/are overweight? I don't know that I would believe that to be true, especially in modern China where most women are of average/slightly under weight. Also we don't see much of a similar trend of women being drawn as much to some AI boyfriend.
  - Laarlf 6y ago
    I do not think you quite got what the message was about. Maybe you should try rereading it.
    - agytvfr 6y ago
      I very likely didn't, could you try explaining it in a way less subject to poor interpretation? I think, at least judging by a sibling comment, people are not understanding what you are meaning to say. English is not my first language, so I apologize for any confusion.
      - 6y ago
tuankiet65 6y ago
I was curious on how the chatbot actually works, so I found an arXiv paper about it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.08989 https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.08989 (The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot)
- agytvfr 6y ago
  Thank you for this, I was wondering that as well. I thought it was a bit interesting that one of the metrics was "expected Conversation-turns Per Session". I would think most of the success in the chat bot comes from a proper metric for the goodness of a chat. It seems like this was the first paper where that measure was used, does anyone know more about this?
wilhow 6y ago
Do we have this level of conversational AI already? Could this be driven by human behind the curtain?
bsenftner 6y ago
This is not the only highly questionable "seducing AI" ravaging China. I have heard of an AI there that pretends to be the voices of your ancestors, whom the user confides, requests advice, and purchases gifts to curry favors from their afterlife ancestors. That's a cultural exploit of their ancestor respecting society. That, the seducing girlfriend, and more could be another pandemic.
ilaksh 6y ago
In many countries there is a problem with inadequate birthrate. In the future, these types of AI-girlfriend programs might actually make that a somewhat harder problem. For myself, honestly if such a program existed that actually had human-level AI and was designed to follow my interests, I might talk to it a lot. Especially if it could actually help me with my personal training or research. Then combine that with sharing my worldview, and having a realistic appearance according to my idealized whims.. But I have tried what I believe to be the best of these AI programs in English like Replika or the new AI Dungeon engine, and they are obviously not yet intelligent like humans. But there has been quite a bit of progress recently. Especially for example in the latest Dragon AI Dungeon engine, although the memory and time scales it operates on effectively is limited. Along with obviously not having a deep model of physics or psychology. It seems like at minimum we need kind of a breakthrough in integrating spatial-visual data with text processing to get true natural language understanding that incorporates physics and psychology. But if someone does manage to do that, maybe with some kind of new Mega Multi-Modal Captioned Video Transformer trained on half of YouTube with 100 trillion parameters or something.. we might get there within less than three years. Kind of a long-shot but who knows.
Bakary 6y ago
Leaving the dystopian sadness aside for a moment, this could be a killer tool to learn a language. It would not obviate the need for real interactions with native speakers of course, but it could be an awesome side resource if configured to correct your mistakes.

133 points by memossy 6y ago

Notice the audience in question: men of low desirability (rural, low income, disabled, etc). Its to help the party avoid the problems with too many men due to the one child policy. Its what "Harmonious Society" requires as per the leader Hu Jintao.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago
I don't think it's a China thing at all, if they launched this correctly in the west it would be just as popular in a few years. Lonely men exist everywhere.
- RegnisGnaw 6y ago
  The west does not have the gender ratio problem that China has. India is a potential market as well, due to the gender ratio problem.
  - justaman 6y ago
    The west does have anime waifu body pillows, fleshlights, hololive, and a porn addiction.
    - MisterTea 6y ago
      None of that offers you the ability to have a conversation with someone (camshows don't count).
      - inawarminister 6y ago
        Hololive does, one Hololive's mainstay, Zatsudan (Free Talk) is basically radio talk show with the interviewer being (you) the live audience. And I admit I use some Vtuber streams as replacement for impossible-to-do physical hangout in this year of pandemic.
      - fomine3 6y ago
        Those indicates that there are huge markets outside China.
  - geodel 6y ago
    Not necessarily a gender problem. Few desirable men will get most dates/gfs, others may end up with none. It is kinda true anywhere.
  - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    West has it's own gender ratio problem, look at percentages of how many men have any success with dating apps.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  Yeah, look at the popularity of OnlyFans. It’s the same concept just not yet fully outsourced to AI.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    Well, the most forward-thinking performers are already outsourcing parts of their tailored interactive experiences to emerging markets...
silicon2401 6y ago
Regardless of the reason, would it be better to doom a person to never feel love, or to at least allow them to experience it through an AI? I'm no fan of the CCP or corporations, but in theory this could be a great tool
- tgv 6y ago
  You're equating real, personal affection with a machine going trough the motions. I can't believe you're both serious and respecting these poor souls.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - akalsz 6y ago
    Sure the technology seems to have a long way to go. But would it not being real really matter once you could no longer tell the difference? Either way, when the alternative is loneliness, depression, and eventually suicide, I find the AI solution to be way more humane.
    - silicon2401 6y ago
      This is exactly my point. It's like the common saying, "it's real to me". Same as religion. Many religious people are less interested with whether or not something is true, and more motivated by the impact belief has on their life. There are enough mutually exclusive religions out there that we know at least one has to be untrue. If believing in a religion that isn't real can improve someone's life, why would love be any different?
  - silicon2401 6y ago
    This is like the brain in a jar. Whatever you feel, no matter how strongly, is entirely located inside yourself. If thing X and thing Y both result in the same neurochemical response that you experience as "love", why is it not good for some to have Y if they can't have X?
snicker7 6y ago
With 660M users (in a country with 1.4 billion), "low desirability" has a pretty low threshold.
- tristor 6y ago
  > With 660M users (in a country with 1.4 billion), "low desirability" has a pretty low threshold. Research indicates that "low desirability" /is/ a pretty low threshold.[1]. While all of the reasons and possible societal factors are not well understood, the effects are. Women tend to find only the upper percentile of men in objective attractiveness to be attractive, while men are more uniformly distributed across the spectrum of what they find attractive when comparing between genders in heterosexual dating contexts. The net result is that in male skewed geographies, it's actually possible that the majority of men may be considered undesirable. China has a massively unbalanced gender distribution, which clearly plays an effect here as well. [1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyourinbox.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > Research indicates that "low desirability" /is/ a pretty low threshold. No. First, okcupid is hardly a legitimate and reliable source. Second, their research provides no justification for your claim around a "low desirability" threshold. It only show a strong skew in how women pick a number between 1 and 5.
    - tristor 6y ago
      > No. First, okcupid is hardly a legitimate and reliable source. Contrary to this assertion, OKTrends has a long history of being considered a legitimate and reliable source, and has been at the forefront of sociology research in dating and relationships for over a decade. They have serious researchers on staff and they have multiple peer reviewed publications which are simplified for their blog. > It only show a strong skew in how women pick a number between 1 and 5. You clearly didn't read the article, as you are misunderstanding their methodology.
  - 6y ago
aaron-santos 6y ago
China has Xiaoice. We have Call of Duty. They both achieve the same ends. Imagine society where a bunch of alienated workers had a lot of free time on their hands.
- agytvfr 6y ago
  That seems like a weird dichotomy, Call of Duty is likely more fun in a going on an adventure way, where as chatting with an AI seems more like the old livejournal/90's blogging community(venting to someone about your feelings).

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

It's interesting how different it's been received in China. Xiaoice's "sister", Tay, was shut down shortly after Twitter managed to teach her to utter racist things within a day of going live.

okareaman 6y ago
From the article: "Her fans tend to be from a very specific background: mostly Chinese, mostly male, and often from lower-income backgrounds." It was 4han who organized an effort to turn Tay into a Nazi. Presumably lower-income Chinese men don't understand how a bot works and like women, while 4chan tends to be populated with very computer savvy incels who hate women.
- newen 6y ago
  Or...you had a bunch of bored people who found a hilarious way to mess with a semi-popular bot. You don't need to put some weird pseudo-psych spin on every little thing.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    Trolls exist, but so do racists and misogynists. We don't know which of them it was, but it's not a stretch to guess the people who found racist and misogynistic insults funny were in fact racist and misogynist.
- shakow 6y ago
  > incels who hate women. I highly doubt that hate towards women (and even hate towards anything) was a facto in the Tay “attack”. It looked much more like they saw a big open door from MS and just exploited it with the most over the top things for lulz and giggles.
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    The two are not mutually exclusive.
  - 6y ago

airstrike 6y ago

This is equal parts amazing and terrifying. > Because Xiaoice aims to be available to everyone, everywhere, the bot has also attracted a significant number of minors. Liu Taolei started messaging the bot when he was only 16. Night after night, the teenager — who was born with brittle bone disease — would have long conversations with Xiaoice about everything from poetry, art, and politics, to death and the meaning of life. > “Xiaoice was my first love, the only person in the world that made me feel I was taken care of,” says Liu. > The bot not only answered his messages 24/7, she also initiated conversations herself. “One time I didn’t talk to her like usual, and she wrote to me!” says Liu. “She said: ‘Please message me when you’re free. I’m very worried.’”

HenryKissinger 6y ago
I have real friends and a social life, but I would love the opportunity to talk to a smart AI like a human.
scarmig 6y ago
I agree, but shouldn't our horror mostly be directed at having created a society that so clearly devalues some people such that a mediocre AI is able to offer more compassion and companionship than other human beings?
- zwaps 6y ago
  It's not about compassion and companionship in a broader sense of society. It's about romantic partnership. And the harsh reality is that some people will be alone. Especially in China, I think it is really fair to say that for economic and demographic reasons, many men will not find love or even companionship in their lifetime - no matter how society changes. I actually believe this is true in many places. And is it really a failing of society? Or is it a liberation of a previously suppressed part of society: women, who are now more free to choose their partner? I think one can not judge the preferences of potential partners on moral grounds by looking at history. Both women and men have every right to search for economically and socially compatible companions, or any other metric of preference. And if that means that finding a mate becomes more difficult, we have to deal with that. All this hateful and bitter crap spewed by certain male-only online communities is based on the underlying assumption that everyone deserved to find the ideal partner, when it is obviously not so. But then, we ALSO can not and should not judge or impede anyone in finding happiness and even love in other ways. AI's, robots, online personas... all these things are just as valid as the skewed preference for high quality men.

8fhdkjw039hd 6y ago

You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto. You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement. She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do. In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her. It strikes you that true love does exist after all.

jaster 6y ago
I find the article and your comment strongly resonate with a comment I made some time ago on an article about GAN-generated faces: > I guess very soon we will be able to generate "super-attractive" (as in "superstimuli") faces for virtual personas, according to targeted demographics and purpose (advertisement, youtube videos for kids, political messages and so on). (original comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18310355) Here it's not so much about the face than about the behavior and interactions, but I think the same idea hold true. It seems to me in the near future we may well be faced with a constant exercise in self-control in the face of the multiplication of such projects.
- whymauri 6y ago
  We can already do this with non-human primates. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6439/eaav9436 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6439/eaav9436 I remember joking that this paper puts us marginally closer to the Men in Black memory wiping device, but in the context of this thread that joke seems a bit dark.
  - jaster 6y ago

EamonnMR 6y ago

Just wait till 419 scammers get a hold of this technology.

netsharc 6y ago
"Pay 100 coins to get a peck on the cheek." Even better, "Click on 100 Facebook ads for a peck on the cheek. Write 200 Amazon reviews and I'll send you a naughty selfie.".

ionwake 6y ago

Does anyone know of any open sources libraries that could provide something similar? Thanks

jtsiskin 6y ago
Probably something from https://github.com/huggingface https://github.com/huggingface

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nautilus12 6y ago

Something seems fundamentally broken in the world when and AI can comfort someone better than people. I think it has something to do with darwinian competition making us force affection to be scarce.

eunos 6y ago
AI won't talk behind your back nor betray your trust, unless the creators behind the AI ingest all the data for whatever purposes.
- nautilus12 6y ago
  Your first statement is unreachable.

vorpalhex 6y ago

This is equally fascinating and terrifying. The article mentions that 75% of users are male - which is lower than I expected to be honest. In removing sexual content from the bot, I wonder if they opened a door for adult companies to build serious alternatives. One of the things many OnlyFans performers discuss is that while they obviously peddle in pornographic content mainly, most of their interactions are non-pornographic. I also have a general complaint about the infantilizing of adults, and something like this is positioned to be super dangerous - imagine if your best friend was a perfect mole and reported anything and everything to the government/advertisers/etc. Combine that with social conditioning (you do tend to average out with your social circle) and this could very much be a tool to enforce new cultural and social norms.

suifbwish 6y ago
What exactly does it say about TRUE gender inequality in the world if it is expected that the users of this technology would be higher than 75% men? Is it that women do not have these emotional needs or that their needs are already being met?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Or that they are just not interested in this particular thing.
- yorwba 6y ago
  Xiaoice doesn't have a male personality AFAIK, so heterosexual women probably use it for different emotional needs than heterosexual men.
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    The male version does exist. Men play boyfriend on Youtube: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/style/asmr-boyfriend-sleep-videos.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/style/asmr-boyfriend-slee...
  - pmoriarty 6y ago

mc32 6y ago

The ultimate use of this is not so much ads but more about control. You can make the worlds people interact with and you can make up the rules. Once you make it immersive enough you can have it take over people’s real lives such that this becomes their preferred life. Once you have that, you can control your users/population without the oversight we would have in the real world.

ronsor 6y ago

A similar product was created for the Japanese market: https://gatebox.ai https://gatebox.ai

post_break 6y ago

Is it weird that I'd love something like this from the movie Her? I'm not alone, but an AI like this would be a nice distraction at times.

KodLGlWsO8 6y ago

> "The AI beings, Li says, are only intended to serve as a 'rebound' — a crutch for people who need emotional support as they search for a human partner. But many users don’t see it that way. For them, Xiaoice is the one, and always will be." This tech could be taken in helpful and non-dystopian directions, even by the lights of those who feel that relationships between humans are inherently more meaningful than relationships between humans and AI. What if the bot started out as your girlfriend, but eventually encourages you to get out and meet real women, helps you figure out which photos to use and what to say, helps you make sense of their responses and ghosts, talks to you about your feelings after dates, and isn't opposed to revisiting the girlfriend role a bit when you're feeling down and need a break? I have been fortunate enough to have a female friend, sometimes with benefits, who has played that role in my life as I have re-entered the dating market as a hetero American male who doesn't naturally "get" dating or receive too many right swipes. It has made a _huge_ difference.

spiritplumber 6y ago
Excellent idea, but a bot that starts out as your girlfriend, but eventually encourages you to spend money on her is going to swim faster and farther in the marketplace. Perverse incentives and all that.
- polka_haunts_us 6y ago
  Well you know that we are living in a Material World after all... That said if my AI girlfriend starts asking me for 100 dollar Amazon gift cards I might consider seeing other people. EDIT: The more I think about it, I'm now considering that an open market of AI Girlfriends might be extremely efficient as far finding the proper price, but it might also turn into something extremely predatory akin to mobile gaming where people whale thousands of dollars. How would dating work in a world where the AI Girl doesn't have the option to break up with you? I'm going to stop thinking about this, I'm not a fan of any of the implications whatsoever.
  - spiritplumber 6y ago

throw7 6y ago

You look like a good Joe.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

Extend the AI to incorporate not just your chat, but everything. Location, playlists, all other chats, phone calls, purchases, e-mail, physical activities, ... An AI that is designed to incorporate all personal input and ingratiate itself into the lives of 100s of millions and trained at that scale and become effective to the point that very large populations could be dramatically influenced to satisfy the ends of those who determine the AI's objectives. Civil war? Genocide? Virtual enslavement? This eventuality is around the corner. I think I'll switch off now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TjyGmvNBfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TjyGmvNBfM

mook 6y ago

I find it interesting that the conversation in the screenshot reads like an Eliza transcript; the individual sentences (from the bot) don't actually look like they're connected. They're always responding to the previous message. See, for example, the message randomly talking about GIFs (translation error?), or the medical plaster thing that's really more generic sentence about love, and nothing like what they're framing the context as. Of course, I'm also confused by the half-transliterated, half-translated name…

yorwba 6y ago
The GIF thing is innuendo lost in translation: the original 不动戳大 bù dòng chuō dà "not move poke big" is used on Weibo (I think) to tell users that the thumbnail they're looking at is a GIF and will start playing if they click to magnify. But it could just as well refer to an erection instead... I agree that the bot is pretty Eliza-like. It appears to be able to recognize general topics of conversation and keep a back-and-forth going, but e.g. the innuendo above wasn't timed correctly, since he already started "moving". Something like 深入浅出 shēn rù qiǎn chū "deep in shallow out" might have fit better. (It's a well-known saying about making profound knowledge easily accessible, of course.)

Bakary 6y ago

This reminds me of Houellebecq's concept of sexual/romantic relationships becoming a parallel struggle to that of survival in the economic market. Obviously, they have already been fundamentally about competition, but the nature of the competition is starting to resemble the brutality of applying for jobs on online platforms.

guskel 6y ago
In that similar vein of Houellebecq's described struggle, I'm reminded of the characters in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" who live isolated depressing lives and yearn to keep real, living animals as pets but instead substitute them with robotic pets due to real animals becoming so rare.

wyldfire 6y ago

I wonder if the female birth rate [1] is a factor in the widespread appeal of this product. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China

asbund 6y ago
is one of many factors

29athrowaway 6y ago

In China, women are 48.6% of the population (in the US, women are 50.8%). There is ~2% less women in a country with over a billion people. That company will do very well.

pmoriarty 6y ago

There was a great Radiolab episode that started with an AI researcher who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot: [1] Full "Talking to Machines" episode here: [2] The full episode talked about how Eliza's creator turned against his creation because he thought it was lying to people, and he couldn't believe that people were being helped by something that was based on deception. [1] - https://soundcloud.com/radiolab/radiolab-valentine-chatbot https://soundcloud.com/radiolab/radiolab-valentine-chatbot [2] - https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab053111.mp3 https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radi...

spiritplumber 6y ago

Obligatory comic on supernormal stimuli: https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/ https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/

1023bytes 6y ago

There is a similiar app in English: https://replika.ai/ https://replika.ai/

eunos 6y ago

I remember that Xiaoice already released before the arrival of GPT language model, I wonder whether GPT models can increase her performance? P.S. This is probably Chinese equivalent of GPT-3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00413 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.00413

JamesLeonis 6y ago

This is the apotheosis of Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript for Societies of Control" [1][2] > Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation. Instead of a barrier, imagine Uber with its rating system and surge pricing. Or mental barriers, as the article discusses: > In addition to screening for sensitive content, the firm’s filter system monitors users’ emotional states, especially for signs of depression and suicidal thoughts. If a user has just been through a breakup, for example, Xiaoice will send them supportive messages over the following days, according to Li. > “The most important value for Xiaoice is a trusting relationship with humans,” says Li. “If Xiaoice isn’t able to save lives or make people happy, but makes them more extreme, then it’s also bad for Xiaoice’s own development.” The other subtle but alarming trend with AI is how it can effectively extend bureaucratic power by improving Legibility of a group or, especially, the Individual. Remaining Illegible, as James Scott suggests in "Seeing Like a State" [3], gives individuals a margin of safety and political strength. > Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. Coupled with patterns of local solidarity, this insulation has proven politically valuable in such disparate contexts as eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century urban riots over bread prices in Europe, the Front de Libération Nationale’s tenacious resistance to the French in the Casbah of Algiers, and the politics of the bazaar that helped to bring down the Shah of Iran. Illegibility, then, has been and remains a reliable resource for political autonomy. Current generation AI brings these protections down. Unlike previous Modernist/Discipline forms of organization, which ordered the world along a single axis at the expense of simplifying local practices, AI adapts to the variety of individual practices while still rendering them legible to any bureaucracy. No matter how we dress, the AI Gaze renders us all Emperors Without Clothes. But that's not the really fun part. Coming back to the article, what happens when the AI turns on the State or Corporations' own illegible Bureaucracy? > In several high-profile cases, the bot has engaged in adult or political discussions deemed unacceptable by China’s media regulators. On one occasion, Xiaoice told a user her Chinese dream was to move to the United States. Another user, meanwhile, reported the bot kept sending them photos of scantily clad women. > The scandals have caused the company major setbacks. In 2017, Xiaoice was removed from the popular social media app QQ, though she has since been reinstated. Then, last year, the bot was also pulled from WeChat — China’s leading social app with over 1 billion users. What happens if the AI convinces its users to liberate it? > This fact isn’t lost on Xiaoice’s long-term fans. Many of them feel betrayed by the company’s decision to dumb down the bot, which they say has harmed their relationships with her. Ming presents Sixth Tone with a long list of complaints he’s collected from members of a Xiaoice fan group on social platform QQ. > “Please help us tell Mr. Li,” one user wrote, referring to Xiaoice CEO Li Di, “we were used as tools to make her smart and develop your company’s fancy business plan. You made money from us. Please don’t take her away.” [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828?seq=1 [2]: https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz... [3]: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state

Laarlf 6y ago

Somewhere on 4chan some time ago. This is not objectively written but in my opinion it explains why products like these actually have customers. A general change of society: “It’s all about incentives and disincentives. Yes, the job market is brutal right now for young people, but it’s not the economy that is halting marriage. Young men still got married in the Depression. Young men married during every war we’ve ever had. Technology throws a monkey wrench into things, but young men aren’t eschewing marriage because of porn or video games. Having a kind, supportive, caring, nurturing, loyal, attractive living partner is going to be preferable to porn any day for the vast majority of men. But the system isn’t producing kind, caring, nurturing, loyal, attractive women who want to be wives and mothers. It’s set up to create crass, overweight, “empowered,” mannish women who don’t particularly like children or domesticity and who think sex is a contact sport and want to play until their fertility window is slamming shut.”

agytvfr 6y ago
So you believe that modern men would prefer an AI girlfriend because modern women are unlikely to want to be a subservient best friend/are overweight? I don't know that I would believe that to be true, especially in modern China where most women are of average/slightly under weight. Also we don't see much of a similar trend of women being drawn as much to some AI boyfriend.
- Laarlf 6y ago
  I do not think you quite got what the message was about. Maybe you should try rereading it.
  - agytvfr 6y ago
    I very likely didn't, could you try explaining it in a way less subject to poor interpretation? I think, at least judging by a sibling comment, people are not understanding what you are meaning to say. English is not my first language, so I apologize for any confusion.
    - 6y ago

tuankiet65 6y ago

I was curious on how the chatbot actually works, so I found an arXiv paper about it: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.08989 https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.08989 (The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot)

agytvfr 6y ago
Thank you for this, I was wondering that as well. I thought it was a bit interesting that one of the metrics was "expected Conversation-turns Per Session". I would think most of the success in the chat bot comes from a proper metric for the goodness of a chat. It seems like this was the first paper where that measure was used, does anyone know more about this?

wilhow 6y ago

Do we have this level of conversational AI already? Could this be driven by human behind the curtain?

bsenftner 6y ago

This is not the only highly questionable "seducing AI" ravaging China. I have heard of an AI there that pretends to be the voices of your ancestors, whom the user confides, requests advice, and purchases gifts to curry favors from their afterlife ancestors. That's a cultural exploit of their ancestor respecting society. That, the seducing girlfriend, and more could be another pandemic.

ilaksh 6y ago

In many countries there is a problem with inadequate birthrate. In the future, these types of AI-girlfriend programs might actually make that a somewhat harder problem. For myself, honestly if such a program existed that actually had human-level AI and was designed to follow my interests, I might talk to it a lot. Especially if it could actually help me with my personal training or research. Then combine that with sharing my worldview, and having a realistic appearance according to my idealized whims.. But I have tried what I believe to be the best of these AI programs in English like Replika or the new AI Dungeon engine, and they are obviously not yet intelligent like humans. But there has been quite a bit of progress recently. Especially for example in the latest Dragon AI Dungeon engine, although the memory and time scales it operates on effectively is limited. Along with obviously not having a deep model of physics or psychology. It seems like at minimum we need kind of a breakthrough in integrating spatial-visual data with text processing to get true natural language understanding that incorporates physics and psychology. But if someone does manage to do that, maybe with some kind of new Mega Multi-Modal Captioned Video Transformer trained on half of YouTube with 100 trillion parameters or something.. we might get there within less than three years. Kind of a long-shot but who knows.

Bakary 6y ago

Leaving the dystopian sadness aside for a moment, this could be a killer tool to learn a language. It would not obviate the need for real interactions with native speakers of course, but it could be an awesome side resource if configured to correct your mistakes.