Sort of but I think influence over emotional states is understating it and just the tip of the iceberg. It also made it sound passive and accidental. The real problem will be overt control as a logical extension to the kinds of trade offs we already see people make about, for example data privacy. With the Replika fiasco I bet heaps of those people would have paid good money to get their virtual love interests de-“lobotomized”.

Thanks!

Trouble is your statement was in answer to @morrowind@lemmy.ml’s comment that labeling lonely people as losers is problematic.

Also it still looks like you think people can only be lonely as a consequence of their own mistakes? Serious illness, neurodivergence, trauma, refugee status etc can all produce similar effects of loneliness in people who did nothing to “cause” it.

And Hastalavista if you wanted to find things that Altavista didn’t.

That’s really interesting. Its output to this prompt totally ignored the biggest and most obviously detrimental effect of this problem at scale.

Namely, emotional dependence will give AI’s big tech company owners increased power over people.

It’s not as if these concepts aren’t widely discussed online, everything from Meta’s emotional manipulation experiments or Cambridge Analytica through to the meltdowns Replika owners had over changes to the algorithm are relevant here.

That thing about macaques is interesting.

Idk, it looks like it works (or maybe people are just getting better at not littering and it correlates), but this is one of those things that can be measured so I’d trust department of conservation research over my own anecdotal evidence.

I don’t know. I haven’t seen the research.

I was alarmed by it at first but it’s been a few years now and the parks where I go which used to have them don’t seem any more littered fwiw. If anything less so.

But that’s anecdotal and as I understand it the decision was made based on more than that.

This has been happening in New Zealand for a while. The theory seems to be that bins attract more litter and are a hazard to wildlife.

I was sceptical at first but it actually seems to work.

Perturbs me that they are selling food though. Surely yhe food sellers should have bins for which they are responsible in their immediate vicinity.