A friend of mine visited recently, and he was showing us Musk’s Grok on his phone. Yes, eww yuck, I detest Eugenics Boy, government wrecker, swasticar salesman, and public Nazi saluter Elon Musk, so I’d never use this thing, let alone pay for it. For that matter, I won’t use or pay for Chat GPT, Claud, or any of the rest, because I think this shit’s stupid, just more surveillance in different clothing, wasteful, overhyped, too centralized in the hands of the oligarchy, and so forth. Anyhow, my friend was demonstrating it for us, and at some point, he mentioned its “personality.”

I nearly blew a gasket. No, no, no! This thing is basically a read-eval-print loop, where the reader reads English queries and statements, the printer responds with English statements, and the evaluator is some huge pile of complexity including neural nets, statistical models, and a bunch of other things I am too dumb and too sick to understand. It doesn’t think; it makes statistical predictions based on past input and training. To invert Descartes famous statement “I think, therefore I am”: “It doesn’t think, therefore it isn’t.” It has no ego. It cannot feel emotions either, so if it expresses them, they are just fake and based on mathematical models and statistical predictions. Without an ego, it cannot have a personality. I was chilled to the bone to hear my friend, who is very technically capable, anthropomorphizing it to the degree he did.

A few days later, another friend tells me that there are actually people who are “in relationships” with AI. If they can make human-like robots, probably the most popular application would be the AI-powered sex bot. I see this coming, pun not intended. Its every word, sound, or motion during the sex act will be mathematically predicted, and probably trained over time to appeal most to the owner’s particular turn-ons. Every orgasm will be fake: faker than Meg Ryan’s in When Harry Met Sally. Unlike a real partner, it won’t feel anything. It won’t care about you, because it is incapable of caring. It won’t be with you through thick and thin, because as soon as you can no longer afford its monthly subscription, it will just be a lump of simulated flesh. A relationship with this thing will be about as fulfilling as a parasocial relationship with some camgirl on Only Fans.

One wonders what the subscription model for this thing will look like, because as surely as the sun rises, there will be one. Is there an ad tier and a premium tier? If you can only afford the ad tier, then foreplay is basically listening to it read off ads and try to sell you shit you don’t need. Will there be subscriptions that limit the kind of sex acts you can perform with it? Will there be jailbreaks of the AI prompt? Imagine a world in which your friend tells you that he got his artificially-limited sex bot to give him anal using some tricky prompt engineering.

Don’t forget that everything will be recorded and sent to the manufacturer. It will give those companies deep insight into your most intimate activities and communications. Your sexual behavior will be used to train future versions of the AI.

Due to tech’s penchant for overpromising and underdelivering, I cannot say for sure that Stepford wives / husbands are coming. If they are, it won’t be sexually – unless you count fakes – but they will have a subscription model and lots of yummy surveillance features.

While I’m on the topic of Seig Heilin’ Eugenics Boy Elon Musk, why does this little freak have to ruin things by naming his garbage after it? Examples include Tesla, starship, and now “grok”. Of course I’ve written about my campaign to eliminate the useless and now reputationally damaged letter x from the English alphabet.

One more loose thought: if you want to know all you need to know about the AI bubble or crypto ponzi schemes, I’d suggest the 1841 book Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.