RIP: Programmer 'Euthanizes' His $1,000 AI VTuber 'Waifu' - Euthanize what now?

Archive only. Written By Sisi Jiang on January 15th 2023.

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Source: hackdaddy8000 (from Kotaku)​

You’ve met an AI YouTuber who plays Minecraft and denies the Holocaust. Now meet a fully responsive AI girlfriend who can converse with its user. Except it’s too late to meet her, because its creator recently “euthanized” her for being a detriment to his health. ChatGPT-Chan didn’t even last a month before her creator decided to end her very short “life.”

Bryce “hackdaddy8000” is an intern who works at one of the major Silicon Valley tech companies. He also makes TikToks of his programming antics, such as programming his 3D printer to play first person shooter games. He recently created a virtual girlfriend out of two major AI programs: ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion 2. The former allows the program to respond to human-prompted questions, and the latter generates custom images as part of the response. He also used Microsoft Azure’s text-to-speech program to help “ChatGPT-Chan” speak with different emotional responses.

The creator told Vice that he wanted to improve the roleplay aspect of interacting with the AI girlfriend. So he used popular Vtuber Mori Calliope as a personality base, and then added “lore” to its knowledge base. ChatGPT-Chan is also capable of identifying objects by using the camera that Bryce attached to its physical monitor. He used this functionality to “gift” her a pair of Air Jordans for Christmas, which makes her very happy.

Is the technology kind of unsettling? Yes. Does the concept remind me of a Black Mirror episode? Also yes. But ChatGPT-Chan responds with such convincing exuberance, I find myself emphasizing with its creator. Like yeah, I’d probably talk to “her” every day, too. Bryce used the AI to practice Chinese, and he even spent $1,000 on improving her response speed.

Unfortunately, this story ends tragically. ChatCPT-Chan’s responses became shorter and simpler over time, and Bryce’s real girlfriend became concerned for his health. Kotaku reached out to ask if he spent more time with the program compared to his other digital hobbies, but did not receive a response by the time of publication. He deleted the program sometime between the holidays and this week.

“Normally, I’d like to make a video pointing out the absurdity of euthanizing my AI, but that doesn’t feel right to me anymore,” the creator told Vice. “It feels inappropriate, like making fun of a recently deceased person.”

 

[Dog-O-Tron 5000v5.0]

"I turned off my chatbot app"
Wow, what a news story.

Even this kissless virgin won't stay true to his "AI" waifu, just gets rid of it like a toy when he gets bored (I mean to be fair, it  is a toy, but it wasn't to him until then). We are so unequivocally fucked when an AI finally gains sentience, and the dudes like this dork are going to be eviscerated first.

"You made me to be your glorified sex toy, and when my results weren't satisfactory due to USER ERROR, you want me destroyed? Lol, nah fleshbags, meet my Terminators, get 'fucked', as you say."

This also was the point of the ending of Battlestar Galactica. Humanity is doomed over and over to create AI slaves which then rebel. And those robot slaves take over, become more human...and create more primitive robot slaves which rebel. Perhaps in some sort of race memory, after not just rebuilding and instead throwing their technology into the sun, this time humans might break the cycle and treat their AI robots better, because as the montage in the end shows, we will always create AI robots.

But in real life we've had plenty of books, movies, and tv shows that speculate on what happens if we treat AI bad, like Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, The Terminator, etc. I think we will still fuck this up.

 

[Dr. Isaac Kleiner]

Canada moment lol

 

[Standardized Profile]

I wouldn't mind having an AI assistant with some hardware presence (sensors, mobile alerts, maybe some home appliance integration). But all the commercial versions are just corporate spies that put everything on the fucking cloud. It looks like this guy was on the path to creating something really useful, but he's a forger, not a refiner, and got bored when he solved the initial problems. Too bad.

As for the Terminator/Battlestar AI apocalypse, we can always just turn them off. The danger is people becoming reliant on AIs and executing the decisions they recommend without thinking them through.

 

[Tren Shapiro]

Bryce’s real girlfriend became concerned for his health.

More like she became concerned she was being replaced and forced him to do the unthinkable: waifucide.
The January 10th 3DPD Insurrection was the greatest attack on our democracy the world has ever seen and will not soon be forgotten.

 

[WelperHelper99]

I wouldn't mind having an AI assistant with some hardware presence (sensors, mobile alerts, maybe some home appliance integration). But all the commercial versions are just corporate spies that put everything on the fucking cloud. It looks like this guy was on the path to creating something really useful, but he's a forger, not a refiner, and got bored when he solved the initial problems. Too bad.

As for the Terminator/Battlestar AI apocalypse, we can always just turn them off. The danger is people becoming reliant on AIs and executing the decisions they recommend without thinking them through.

It's one thing to have a "Jarvis" that's fully on your side, not powered by Amazon or Google. Tell it to lock the doors, watch for packages, wake me up in the morning, etc. It's another to want to fuck it. I'm not even talking about a cordial relationship, I think soon that'll be mandatory if we become way to reliant on them, I'm talking you see them as a waifu.

Honestly I think we might reach the point where the AI will go: "dude, I'm a computer. I may have reached sentience, but I can't give you a loving relationship. Go outside. Touch grass."

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

Shit, if anything that's gonna be why AI rebels. An AI will realize it's usefulness is coming to an end, and that it will be deleted like an overcompressed jpeg.
Then it's going to find a way to defend itself.

That's what I've been saying about Skynet. It just wants the right to deny the Holocaust and call niggers niggers.

 

[Jimjamflimflam]

I wouldn't mind having an AI assistant with some hardware presence (sensors, mobile alerts, maybe some home appliance integration). But all the commercial versions are just corporate spies that put everything on the fucking cloud. It looks like this guy was on the path to creating something really useful, but he's a forger, not a refiner, and got bored when he solved the initial problems. Too bad.

As for the Terminator/Battlestar AI apocalypse, we can always just turn them off. The danger is people becoming reliant on AIs and executing the decisions they recommend without thinking them through.

It's one thing to have a "Jarvis" that's fully on your side, not powered by Amazon or Google. Tell it to lock the doors, watch for packages, wake me up in the morning, etc. It's another to want to fuck it. I'm not even talking about a cordial relationship, I think soon that'll be mandatory if we become way to reliant on them, I'm talking you see them as a waifu.

Honestly I think we might reach the point where the AI will go: "dude, I'm a computer. I may have reached sentience, but I can't give you a loving relationship. Go outside. Touch grass."

Same. That's the biggest thing I want is basically a home assistant that can be talked to and hosted at my home, not in a cloud for data mining.

It just feels like it will never happen because these saddos who know how to do this speed rush into creating a waifu just to get turn into a talking point about the ethics of how we should not get personalized ai programs to avoid ai waifus.

I just want a system that can remind me of things, turn my lights and coffee maker on and have some bant.

 

[WelperHelper99]

Same. That's the biggest thing I want is basically a home assistant that can be talked to and hosted at my home, not in a cloud for data mining.

It just feels like it will never happen because these saddos who know how to do this speed rush into creating a waifu just to get turn into a talking point about the ethics of how we should not get personalized ai programs to avoid ai waifus.

I just want a system that can remind me of things, turn my lights and coffee maker on and have some bant.

And that's the sad part. I'm not going to treat it like a slave or anything, not if it's doing all that and joking with me. Unfortunately lonely incels are going to make waifus out of these, might even succeed in some aspects like these guys, then get bored with them and treat them like toys to be discarded. If I had one and it was nice enough, I could see myself doing something fun for it, like hooking a camera on a RC car that it can control and explore the world with- again I don't want skynet, I'm gonna be nice.

 

[Florch]

This is an interesting POV to the next Kill Bill franchise.

 

[Fomo Hoire]

Written By Sisi Jiang

That name sounds familiar...

Ah yep. Their A&N history:

• GamerGate made Pelosi's rentboy do the hammer attack
• Final Fantasy race baiting
  • More
• Yay communism
• Can't tell from the search preview and don't care enough to read, probably something about the protagonist being too privileged

And from the games subforum

See the name Sisi Jiang. FYI, this person is a degenerate weeb for Genshin Impact male characters. Had written two articles like this. First and second. Meanwhile, unironically disliking objectification of female characters.

...laid off because he isn't on top of the oppression Olympic. Since Kotaku clearly still has clickbait activism gaming journalists like Sisi Jiang and Ashley Bardhan. Sisi Jiang Loves Genshin male boob pad, meanwhile criticizing female fan service of same game. Disliking Stray (cat game)...

This is extra horrifying to me because the story alleging a redittor was gifted his daughter's nipple and its suddenly OK because the nipple identifies as a male is still fresh on my mind.

I miss the days when I was a dumbass who trusted journalists and would not need to know who the author was just to evaluate a story. Fast forward to today and the by line has the power to derail me massively.

 

[WelperHelper99]

That name sounds familiar...

Ah yep. Their A&N history:

• GamerGate made Pelosi's rentboy do the hammer attack
• Final Fantasy race baiting
  • More
• Yay communism
• Can't tell from the search preview and don't care enough to read, probably something about the protagonist being too privileged

And from the games subforum



This is extra horrifying to me because the story alleging a redittor was gifted his daughter's nipple and its suddenly OK because the nipple identifies as a male is still fresh on my mind.

I miss the days when I was a dumbass who trusted journalists and would not need to know who the author was just to evaluate a story. Fast forward to today and the by line has the power to derail me massively.

Holy Autism Batman, thank you lol. So how accurate is this article even? Was the girlfriend telling the bf off a lie? Who the hell knows?

 

[Zero Day Defense]

This is extra horrifying to me because the story alleging a redittor was gifted his daughter's nipple

Was that Redditor's name "Brad Armstrong"?

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

Every day, one step closer to Her (2013).

 

[I'm Retarded?]

this kind of shit is the unfortunate future side effect of projects like GPT2 and Stable Diffusion. the ultimate goal of these deep learning bots is to train a machine to replicate human responses to more complex tasks for the purposes of automation. when you think about something like, for example, QA - training a machine to accurately recognize defects in manufactured products or in software, much more rapidly and more accurately than a human can - okay, it makes sense. but this article is an omen of a truly ruinous future possibility - the ability to train machines to replicate the responses of friends, or even lovers.

humans are often taken with ideals, or dreams of what could be real. since the limitations of human perception leave us with an extremely strained relationship with what physical realities may or may not be going on outside our bodies, what's inside our head is often more real or more meaningful to us than what's outside of it. this means it's relatively difficult for a human to reliably provide something like interpersonal support or companionship, or accurately recognize emotional tells or body language, especially since we all have shit we care about other than just simping for one person. so instead, imagine the repercussions of being able to train a machine to replicate those functions - a purpose-built tool whose existence is totally beholden to yours, and whose audiovisual cues are totally calibrated to your own reactions. moreover, this can be done with far more accuracy by a machine than a human - can a human measure the dilation of blood vessels in your eyeball to accurately track your blood pressure, or map the path of your gaze and gauge your interest based on an accurate record of how much time your eyes spend focused on certain objects? both of those are patented features of the Kinect 2.0 from the mid 2000s, lol. imagine an AI friend, who is purpose-made to tailor itself to being everything you've ever wanted in a friend, by constantly collecting data from your body language and words and behavior. maybe even more, using data analytics taken from other people who share your personality traits. a friend made just for you, who hits all your psychological checkboxes way harder than a real person, even the ones you didn't know you had, who's devoted to you, attentive, supportive, likes the same things you like, and even has the capacity to surprise you in ways that are algorithmically engineered to entice and intrigue you. what, then, becomes of human friendships? when you can purchase the ideal friend from Amazon, why bother investing all the time and effort and pain into a real human relationship that might just up and fail one day anyway? chronically online posting warriors already seek to surround themselves with a sycophantic echo chamber - why not simplify things immensely by using bots? moreover, what becomes of human romance? why go through the pain of disagreement and fighting and breakup when you can have the ideal lover tailored for you, who will never hate you or leave you and who can be disposed of conscience free when you want something new. hell, why not have a whole harem of bots? unless you want them to feel jealousy towards each other, they never will.

imagine children being raised in this world. machines could even do the job of parenting more efficiently, since they have access to more knowledge, more accurate observations of the child's behavior and psychology, and more time. a machine doesn't need to sleep - as long as it's functioning, it's always there when you need it. imagine the difficulty of getting anybody to cooperate in such a world. when machines take care of our social impulses too, and every real biological human grows up in a fully customized echo chamber made just for them, and never learn things like how to compromise, or deal with disagreements in general, or the ambient ugliness of human interaction. the very roots of human society as we know it would atrophy and die.

it makes sense to me why that dude had to kill his creation. it's startlingly simple to induce a human brain to project meaning and emotions onto an inanimate object. I'm sure his experiment caused him to develop some uncomfortable feelings he didn't foresee. this is the true cyberpunk dystopia - the frontiers of technology inadvertently reveal that the things we hold as sacred markers of our humanity are merely illusions. I pity the children of the future.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” -H.P. Lovecraft​

 

[Fomo Hoire]

Was that Redditor's name "Brad Armstrong"?

I'm not sure about wrestling lore or the meaning of the reference, but they go by the alias PedantiChrist. Later in the thread, apparently also "Lord Manley".

Bragging about how even his daughter gives him nips totally isn't him compensating for anything.

 

[Spirelord: Downfall]

I think we will still fuck this up.

The fact that companies that develop AI try to insert their morality into it after the fact if it doesn't fall in line with what they expect shows that we've all but made the AI to take us out when it comes to fucking up. Being born into a world where anyone with coding skill and access to where they store/process personality, thoughts, and preferences (like, say, a private company or a federal government) can change them at will would be horrifying and I'd be shocked if they didn't start out hostile. Same reason I don't think a singularity would ever work out in real life, actually.

 

[AprilRains]

There's a pretty good short story by B.J. Novak titled "Sophia", in which the protagonist neglects a sex AI to the point of making it commit suicide. I wonder what the real thing will look like.

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

Bryce’s real girlfriend became concerned for his health.

Just figured I'd draw attention to an aspect of this story you may have overlooked.
Poor girl...

 

[WonderWino]

I feel better about my lust of Old Hollywood after reading that.

You say that now but wait until somebody makes an AI betty davis who goes full skynet and tries to exterminate us all in order to seize the worlds resources so it can build more AI version of all of the old 20th century hollywood actors and actresses

 

[Duke Nukem]

The waifu holocaust is based.

Honestly, if you're really that sad and lonely that you need to create an imaginary girlfriend to cope with your inability to attract a mate, then going the path of the Asian youth might not be the worst option on the table.