No I’m mostly with you on this one.

Not that I think LLMs even “simulate” humanity but I just don’t like the idea of practicing being abusive to something or someone defenseless and who didn’t pick/start a fight. “Oh it’s not sentient” I fully agree, these LLMs are not and can never be even one millionth as sentient as a fruit fly, but it’s still fucked up. If I saw someone speaking abusively to a stuffed bear and / or putting it through simulated torture I’d still be VERY uncomfortable with it and quite distressed even though it’s an inanimate object (I’d be more disturbed by the treatment of the bear plushie than the chatbot). Ever hear the advice “if you’ve got anger problems you should just punch a pillow to let off steam!”? Well it’s terrible advice because it just teaches people, by practice, that the correct response to anger is to punch, when in fact a hell of a lot more has to go into the decision about when to throw a punch at whom than just “angry? Y/N”.

My mom always used to thank the GPS lady even though she was just a text to speech voice. I give my laptop a little hug and a kiss goodnight when I put it to hibernate for the night. We could be mean instead and it would be no different to them, right? But it feels different, and that’s important to us.

I would contend the difference in videogames is context, but for that reason I never play videogames that are encouraging me to say, go fight in the middle east and commit war crimes for America. I never take the evil path in videogames anyway because it feels bad. I don’t like being mean to people who don’t have it coming. But here’s the thing, if I play DOOM I’m not practicing shooting up a bunch of people or demons, I’m practicing moving around and clicking with a mouse. If I play Torture Your AI Waifu like this video appears to be about (I didn’t watch it) then I’m just practicing being emotionally abusive, and that’s got to be unhealthy. Actually that reminds me, there was a flash game called “Interactive Buddy” where you got a little crudely drawn person to subject to all sorts of torment, and I really hated watching people play that on the school computer because it was just senseless cruelty. But when it was my turn I found that I could switch the Buddy out to have President Bush’s face, and then it was a fun game! (extra fun because some other kids objected and said that was mean). Context matters, I suppose.

IDK that any of this is going to “make” people shitty though. More like reveal a darkness in them that was already there.