Do you AI girlfriends know about each other? You could be in a lot of trouble if they find out you've been cheating on them if you're not honestly and openly polyamorous with them.
Players of The Sims video game try to maintain multiple wives in different bedrooms, romancing and woohooing them behind closed doors, so they didn't get angry at each other.
After developing The Sims at Maxis and releasing it into the world in 2000, I made some tools to enable players to create custom content, and worked with some indie Sims fans to make the Simprov Wedding Playset for The Sims 1. We wanted to "woke it up" to support same sex marriage and non traditional customs and ceremonies, before Maxis/EA officially supported it in later versions of The Sims.
It includes a "Cupid" cheat object that helps you instantly and effortlessly fall deeply heads-over-heels in love with any other Sim in your neighborhood you wanted (including dogs and cats)! That made it much easier to get on with the next steps in planning your dream wedding, by fast-forwarding over all that pesky romancing and dating and getting to know one another nonsense. Cupid puts the heat into cheat.
The Cupid was based on reprogramming and reskinning the original phone, so clicking on it popped up a pie menu of every family in the neighborhood you could call, with submenus for every member of each household (including the pets) you could fall in love with.
To stress test it, I systematically fell in love with one person after another.
Selecting a Sim first invites them over. They immediately arrive on the lot, and you have to greet them. Then they walk over to the Cupid, which makes them instantly fall in love with you.
Then they walk over to you, give you a passionate kiss, while a sting of romantic music plays, and hearts and "plus relationship" icons flash above each of your heads, showing that you've each just fallen in love.
What happens next is up to you the player, or the autonomous characters themselves, if you don't interfere with their lives by clicking from pie menus to control them. It's like a pinball machine with pie menu flippers and multiple hearts in play.
So I continued to stress test the Cupid by inviting one Sim after another over to fall in love with me. If I didn't wait for my previous lover to leave, or lock them in a room and remove the door, or tempt them into the swimming pool and remove the ladder, and then fell in love with another Sim in the same room right in front of them and they saw us kiss, cheating in front of them piss off the previous lovers, and they queue a "Slap in Face" interaction, which decays our relationship.
The ultimate effect of falling in love with one Sim after another is that all your previous lovers would hang around getting madder and madder at you, and each time you kiss a new lover, all your previous lovers in sight would line up to slap you one by one (they're programmed to be too polite to all slap you at once, so they queued and take turns). So your relationship with your first lover decays from the most number of slaps, and so on, up to your perfectly head-over-heels relationship with your most recent lover.
The challenge is to see how many consecutive slaps you can get from scorned lovers. (Hint: put out a buffet table and lots of port-a-potties so they can eat and shit and don't have to go home. Or use the Buddha cheat object to keep everyone happy with their stomachs full and bladders empty, which makes long drawn out wedding ceremonies go smoother.)
One solution to this dilemma is to install the ZombieSims expansion playset, and zombify your previous lovers before moving on to the next.
>Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!
>Check out some of the crazy menus that pop up -- this demo barely scratches the surface!
Here is a video of Simprov (unfinished but playable with programmer art and sample text), and the zip file with a huge collection of The Sims 1 objects, including the Cupid and many other Simprov Wedding Playset objects, so you can try reproducing the results of my experiment in the privacy of your own home.
>(In Professor Farnsworth's voice:) Good news everyone!
>I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.
>I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)
>If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!
>Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!
>To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!
>Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.
It is definitely still happening today. The most famous recent example would probably be Maria Butina[0], a Russian woman who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the US Republican Party during the 2016 election cycle to influence US politics. She was arrested, convicted of federal crimes and eventually deported back to Russia where she is now a member of the Duma (Russia's Parliament) after previously working for RT.
There's also the Chinese spy Christine Fang[1] who allegedly had an association with Eric Swalwell, a Democratic US Representative from California and also allegedly had affairs with 2 mayors in the midwest.
It's a pretty safe assumption that other governments are also doing the same thing. They just haven't gotten caught yet.
Yuuuuuuuup. It's where the infosec term "honeypot" comes from. They had code words in the Soviet union, where ladies were "swallows" and men were "ravens". Back in the day having a "raven" seduce another man was basically espionage jackpot, due to the enormous personal costs of outing the mark. Exceeded only by honeypotting the mark with children, which we might as well use the verb "epsteining". There was also a heyday of absolutely brilliant lady spy-adventurers in the period surrounding the French Revolution - this is right in the wake of Wollstonecraft, remember, what we might call the REAL first wave.
In ancient times sexpionage would flawlessly blend with the world of marriage alliances; Nefertiti, to take one example, was very likely of west Asian descent herself, and was thus a conduit for strange religions and large migrations from Hatti and Canaan. After Akenhaten's death, she probably sent for relatives, which gave impetus to the restoration of Amun, and would definitely put her closer to "spy" than unwitting spouse. I remember, there was one kooky old 19th century book, where Moses was actually Nefertiti. In drag, I guess? I need to go look that up.
Man, I wonder if anyone's written just a general survey of sexpionage through the milennia? Seems like it would sell a couple books.
It didn't end at the Cold war, at least for the Russians. Most notable is Maria Butina who, among other assignments, was sleeping with Republican political operative Paul Erickson who had close ties to the NRA, and in a relationship with Overstock.com CEO and Trump conspiracy theorist Patrick M. Byrne. She was arrested in July 2018, and charged with acting in the United States as an agent of a foreign government, specifically the Russian Federation. After release, she had a show on Russia Today network and she's now a member of the State Duma representing Kirov Oblast for the United Russia party. [0]
There was also a ring of three Russian women spying on Ukraine, feeding military intelligence to Russia and the Wagner Group. [1] The bust came one day after Ukraine announced it foiled assassination attempt on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
And of course there was notorious NY party circuit regular Anna Chapman [2], charged with covertly communicating with Russian intelligence in the largest spy ring bust in the U.S. since the fall of communism.
Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app.
> As part of our research, we looked to see how many trackers the app sends out when you use it. Trackers are little bits of code that gather information about your device, or your use of the app, or even your personal information and share that out with third-parties, often for advertising purposes. We discovered that Romantic AI sent out 24,354 ad trackers within one minute of use. That is a LOT of trackers (for reference, most apps we reviewed sent out a couple hundred trackers). Now, not all these trackers are necessarily bad. Some might be for legitimate reasons like subscription services. However, we did notice that at least one tracker seemed to be sending data to Russia, whose privacy laws aren't necessarily as strong as those elsewhere.
It's always ironic to find these kinds of articles on sites that have hundreds of background trackers. Even though I "rejected all" unnecessary cookies I still see around 16 of them coming through. Like adsafeprotected, adlightning, google-analytics.
I mean the point of the article still stands, it was just an observation of how funny it seems.
I have ublock installed, so this can be at least prevented with news websites. Which can't be said for unseen tracking in chat-bots. Collecting and storing this data without consent obviously sidesteps GDPR, so I'm not even sure about legality of these practices in EU.
Is there anything intrinsically privacy hostile about this potential industry, beyond sending data to a server - which is something you might do if you engage with doctors or therapists virtually?
I hope that consumers choose to pay a premium for privacy preserving services. If users are indeed getting alot of value from the arrangement - I would hope they don't use free or cheap services that need data harvesting as part of the revenue.
My concern is that even premium products would want to pool user interaction logs in order to train better models - which isn't as directly hostile as packaging user labeled data and selling it, but it is a sloppy art to claim you are anonomyizing user data. As any sufficient anonymization necessarily destroys information that would be useful to training.
> Is there anything intrinsically privacy hostile about this potential industry, beyond sending data to a server - which is something you might do if you engage with doctors or therapists virtually?
Presumably people share things with their romantic partners that they don't share with doctors and therapists (assuming they aren't dating one). People shouldn't be using virtual doctors or therapists for the same reasons though. Everything they reveal about themselves will be collected, analyzed, stored forever, leaked/sold, and ultimately used against them at every opportunity.
It's also basically a myth that only free or cheap services abuse your data. Paid services and extremely expensive products do it all the time too. There is no company that wouldn't make a greater profit by taking your money and then also abusing your data so they pretty much all do it. The only services you can really trust are the ones you can run locally that don't send your data anywhere.
But the problem is how can consumers really know if the company is selling this data and to who, without some kind of legislation? Being a premium product is just an indicator, but it's not definitive.
I think even CCPA in California should be able to prevent abuses like that. At least you should know what data is being sold and you should be able to opt-out. If that's really the case, only time will tell.
It's even more dystopian than Bladerunner 2049. From the film it seemed like Joi was a local model that he could even download to his own device.
It's really depressing to me as someone who grew up with the tech optimism of the 80s and 90s to watch how this whole area has transformed into a horror show. Everything since the PC revolution has been a net negative for regular people: mobile devices (addiction, manipulation, mental health crisis), cryptocurrency (gambling, pump and dump scams, ransomware), cloud (no privacy, no data ownership, perpetual rent), streaming (DRM, paltry royalties to artists), and now AI (manipulation, un-filterable spam, political propaganda).
All these technologies are used in very positive ways too, but it seems like that's only for the highly tech-savvy or those with money. If you are neither tech-literate nor wealthy they're weaponized against you.
The ethos of the industry seems to be: if you aren't smart or rich, not only are you fair game but you deserve it. That's the vibe I get from the hyper-elitist ideologies that have proliferated in this culture. I'm talking about things like neoreaction and related ideas.
As a tech person myself I feel like I'm now part of some kind of corrupt wicked black magician priesthood destined to rule over the rest of humanity. If I extrapolate forward to where this is going I see a future where most of humanity is fully addicted to things like infinite feeds, VR games, and AI girlfriends and controlled by misinformation and psychological manipulation. Essentially the bulk of humanity is given an API whereby it can be programmed and marshaled as a service by a mix of the rich, governments, and criminals.
This is exactly cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was by far the most prophetic genre of sci-fi. It achieved this by being optimistic about technology but pessimistic about human beings.
> All these technologies are used in very positive ways too, but it seems like that's only for the highly tech-savvy or those with money. If you are neither tech-literate nor wealthy they're weaponized against you.
Honestly, even if you are wealthy and highly tech-literate they are still weaponized against you. You literally can't protect yourself and still use some products, and some (like the cell phone you carry) are too useful to be avoided. I go out of my way to avoid as much of it as I reasonably can, but technology is leveraged against us everywhere. You can never avoid all of it and still participate meaningfully in society
>As a tech person myself I feel like I'm now part of some kind of corrupt wicked black magician priesthood destined to rule over the rest of humanity
It’s funny to hear the worker bees think this, while all the data and code is really owned by the emergent mega corp. I guess it’s easier to swallow psychologically that you’re part of the secret cast of rulers rather than a cog who is subject to the rubber hose treatment at the slight change in a law like the rest of the workers.
For a group so supposedly smart, a little class consciousness would go a long way.
As my age slowly starts to creep into the earliest phases of "Old Man Yells At Cloud", I find that I'm not distrusting new technologies because they're just ambiently bad because I didn't grow up with them. I find I'm distrusting new technologies... and a generous helping of old ones too... because I don't trust the people behind them.
Not quite the same thing as the traditional "I just don't like anything new".
A good AR toolset sounds like fun. But am I so arrogant as to believe I can resist all the "nudges" that will inevitably be applied to everyone using the tech? There's simply no way the nudges are for my benefit; claims that they are are just part of the marketing campaign.
It's seriously annoying because I'd love to play more with these technologies and figure out how to use them. But it's clear rather a lot of them come with implicit clauses in the contract I'm not willing to sign. I'm not interested in running my political opinions past Silicon Valley AIs. I've got a finite amount of tolerance to poke through with-malice-aforethought uses of addiction mechanics against me to try to figure out how to use technologies to my advantage. And so on. The more amazing the technology, the shittier the deal on offer it seems.
This isn't "old man yells at cloud." This is a subset of a larger realization that dawns on all engineers over time:
A lot of the things you thought were technology problems are actually people problems.
I've come to this realization about a lot of what's bad about the Internet's architecture. It's not because we can't do it differently. It's because there are human social and especially economic incentives that make it this way, and introducing better tech won't change those.
> “Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
> It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.
Misinformation, maybe. But if people really get addicted, it'll hurt the economy, and then the invisible hand will step in. That's why opiates are illegal
I don't see that. We've given up on the idea that human beings have any value beyond their impact on GDP, so if the lower classes aren't seen as necessary they will be allowed to die on the street.
Addicting them to cybernetic control systems might be seen as a better alternative because it'll allow them to be "monetized" in some way-- make them go get gig jobs, then gamble away their earnings online.
You can see this future already in some cities like San Francisco and across the poorer parts of rural America.
AI girlfriends solve the 'angry single men' (AKA drone AKA incel) issue even better than pornography - and I've seen a lot of public health types touting the benefits of pornography.
Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while, it's an AI Girlfriend. Of course it's company policy never to imply ownership in the event of an AI Girlfriend. Always use the indefinite article an AI Girlfriend, never your AI Girlfriend.
Step 1) Have AI girlfriend direct you to show your naked body, what you're doing "to her" - capturing very high-resolution video and audio.
Step 2) Generate blackmail materials of you involved in sexual acts in very high resolution with minors-children.
Step 3) Extort OR "leak" into public domain as part of a smear campaign to attempt to either 3.1) disempower you or 3.2) manufacture consent for the ideological mob - or soldier who's been indoctrinated into a truthful looking narrative - to attack or assassinate you.
Integrate the shadow if you read the above and don't believe it's possible and will be tried.
This is why child abuse material prosecution should require testimony of a victim-accuser to face. As law currently stands it's as easy as the ol "we searched his car and lo and behold look at this crack rock" trick.
I found many Black Mirror episodes to be a bit much. And then, out of nowhere, that shit becomes reality in one form or another. Charlie Brooker was way ahead of me. He even got the PM fucking a pig right.
Yeah. This is probably because of HN automatic removal of some words from headlines to make them less clickbaity.
But in this case on first reading of the title I thought it was about a new TV show called “AI Girlfriend”. And then I thought or maybe they are referring to those apps that people can install to have an AI gf.
Readit News
I can't even say that about my real girlfriend. Take away the internet for a few hours and see what happens...
The future is amazing.
I can't wait to see how things are 20 years from now.
I have the same phone word suggestion Markov chain waifu and we couldn't be closer: we complete each other's sentences!
https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/blob/main...
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Players of The Sims video game try to maintain multiple wives in different bedrooms, romancing and woohooing them behind closed doors, so they didn't get angry at each other.
After developing The Sims at Maxis and releasing it into the world in 2000, I made some tools to enable players to create custom content, and worked with some indie Sims fans to make the Simprov Wedding Playset for The Sims 1. We wanted to "woke it up" to support same sex marriage and non traditional customs and ceremonies, before Maxis/EA officially supported it in later versions of The Sims.
It includes a "Cupid" cheat object that helps you instantly and effortlessly fall deeply heads-over-heels in love with any other Sim in your neighborhood you wanted (including dogs and cats)! That made it much easier to get on with the next steps in planning your dream wedding, by fast-forwarding over all that pesky romancing and dating and getting to know one another nonsense. Cupid puts the heat into cheat.
Speed Dating with Cupid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUP9OXmHTM
The Cupid was based on reprogramming and reskinning the original phone, so clicking on it popped up a pie menu of every family in the neighborhood you could call, with submenus for every member of each household (including the pets) you could fall in love with.
To stress test it, I systematically fell in love with one person after another.
Selecting a Sim first invites them over. They immediately arrive on the lot, and you have to greet them. Then they walk over to the Cupid, which makes them instantly fall in love with you.
Then they walk over to you, give you a passionate kiss, while a sting of romantic music plays, and hearts and "plus relationship" icons flash above each of your heads, showing that you've each just fallen in love.
What happens next is up to you the player, or the autonomous characters themselves, if you don't interfere with their lives by clicking from pie menus to control them. It's like a pinball machine with pie menu flippers and multiple hearts in play.
So I continued to stress test the Cupid by inviting one Sim after another over to fall in love with me. If I didn't wait for my previous lover to leave, or lock them in a room and remove the door, or tempt them into the swimming pool and remove the ladder, and then fell in love with another Sim in the same room right in front of them and they saw us kiss, cheating in front of them piss off the previous lovers, and they queue a "Slap in Face" interaction, which decays our relationship.
The ultimate effect of falling in love with one Sim after another is that all your previous lovers would hang around getting madder and madder at you, and each time you kiss a new lover, all your previous lovers in sight would line up to slap you one by one (they're programmed to be too polite to all slap you at once, so they queued and take turns). So your relationship with your first lover decays from the most number of slaps, and so on, up to your perfectly head-over-heels relationship with your most recent lover.
The challenge is to see how many consecutive slaps you can get from scorned lovers. (Hint: put out a buffet table and lots of port-a-potties so they can eat and shit and don't have to go home. Or use the Buddha cheat object to keep everyone happy with their stomachs full and bladders empty, which makes long drawn out wedding ceremonies go smoother.)
One solution to this dilemma is to install the ZombieSims expansion playset, and zombify your previous lovers before moving on to the next.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34485103
>ZombieSims is a mind-blowing, brain-eating, tour de force Sims 1 fan expansion pack by two of the greatest Sims user created content artists and programmers: Heather "SimFreaks" (who created SimFreaks.com and much of the beautiful content for Sims 1 at http://www.simfreaks.com/index.php including themed play sets like http://www.simfreaks.com/themes/storytime/pirate/index.shtml ) and Steve "SimSlice" (who created SliceCity: SimCity within The Sims at http://simslice.com/Slicecity.htm by programming many interlocking objects in SimAntics, and also many other amazing Sims 1 objects like the weather machine at other cool stuff at http://www.simslice.com/Objects-Electronic.html ).
>Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!
https://zombiesims.com/
>Twitch streaming videos:
https://www.twitch.tv/simfreaks_heather/videos
>Highlight: Zombie Sims - Beta - Everybody Dies
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1049524221
>Check out some of the crazy menus that pop up -- this demo barely scratches the surface!
Here is a video of Simprov (unfinished but playable with programmer art and sample text), and the zip file with a huge collection of The Sims 1 objects, including the Cupid and many other Simprov Wedding Playset objects, so you can try reproducing the results of my experiment in the privacy of your own home.
Simprov Wedding Play Set
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwt5LJlrMe8
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34492255
>(In Professor Farnsworth's voice:) Good news everyone!
>I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.
>I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)
>If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!
>Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!
https://donhopkins.com/home/DonsSims1Downloads.zip
[...]>Transmogrify Self: A quick demo of The Sims Transmogrifier personified in The Sims 1. Graphics by SimBabes, programming by SimSlice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsTbs7IL5EI
>To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!
>Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.
Dead Comment
Jeffrey Epstein seemed to be doing things like that, whether for his own benefit (financial fraud) or on behalf of others. Maybe both.
There's also the Chinese spy Christine Fang[1] who allegedly had an association with Eric Swalwell, a Democratic US Representative from California and also allegedly had affairs with 2 mayors in the midwest.
It's a pretty safe assumption that other governments are also doing the same thing. They just haven't gotten caught yet.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Swalwell#Contact_with_sus...
In ancient times sexpionage would flawlessly blend with the world of marriage alliances; Nefertiti, to take one example, was very likely of west Asian descent herself, and was thus a conduit for strange religions and large migrations from Hatti and Canaan. After Akenhaten's death, she probably sent for relatives, which gave impetus to the restoration of Amun, and would definitely put her closer to "spy" than unwitting spouse. I remember, there was one kooky old 19th century book, where Moses was actually Nefertiti. In drag, I guess? I need to go look that up.
Man, I wonder if anyone's written just a general survey of sexpionage through the milennia? Seems like it would sell a couple books.
There was also a ring of three Russian women spying on Ukraine, feeding military intelligence to Russia and the Wagner Group. [1] The bust came one day after Ukraine announced it foiled assassination attempt on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
And of course there was notorious NY party circuit regular Anna Chapman [2], charged with covertly communicating with Russian intelligence in the largest spy ring bust in the U.S. since the fall of communism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-detained-a-group-of-...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/russian-spy-ring-anna-chapman...
Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app.
All I could find was this:
> As part of our research, we looked to see how many trackers the app sends out when you use it. Trackers are little bits of code that gather information about your device, or your use of the app, or even your personal information and share that out with third-parties, often for advertising purposes. We discovered that Romantic AI sent out 24,354 ad trackers within one minute of use. That is a LOT of trackers (for reference, most apps we reviewed sent out a couple hundred trackers). Now, not all these trackers are necessarily bad. Some might be for legitimate reasons like subscription services. However, we did notice that at least one tracker seemed to be sending data to Russia, whose privacy laws aren't necessarily as strong as those elsewhere.
So, probably requests to third parties?
Dead Comment
I have ublock installed, so this can be at least prevented with news websites. Which can't be said for unseen tracking in chat-bots. Collecting and storing this data without consent obviously sidesteps GDPR, so I'm not even sure about legality of these practices in EU.
I hope that consumers choose to pay a premium for privacy preserving services. If users are indeed getting alot of value from the arrangement - I would hope they don't use free or cheap services that need data harvesting as part of the revenue.
My concern is that even premium products would want to pool user interaction logs in order to train better models - which isn't as directly hostile as packaging user labeled data and selling it, but it is a sloppy art to claim you are anonomyizing user data. As any sufficient anonymization necessarily destroys information that would be useful to training.
Presumably people share things with their romantic partners that they don't share with doctors and therapists (assuming they aren't dating one). People shouldn't be using virtual doctors or therapists for the same reasons though. Everything they reveal about themselves will be collected, analyzed, stored forever, leaked/sold, and ultimately used against them at every opportunity.
It's also basically a myth that only free or cheap services abuse your data. Paid services and extremely expensive products do it all the time too. There is no company that wouldn't make a greater profit by taking your money and then also abusing your data so they pretty much all do it. The only services you can really trust are the ones you can run locally that don't send your data anywhere.
I think even CCPA in California should be able to prevent abuses like that. At least you should know what data is being sold and you should be able to opt-out. If that's really the case, only time will tell.
Because paying for a service means your data won't be sold?
If that's not privacy hostile, then honestly what is?
It's really depressing to me as someone who grew up with the tech optimism of the 80s and 90s to watch how this whole area has transformed into a horror show. Everything since the PC revolution has been a net negative for regular people: mobile devices (addiction, manipulation, mental health crisis), cryptocurrency (gambling, pump and dump scams, ransomware), cloud (no privacy, no data ownership, perpetual rent), streaming (DRM, paltry royalties to artists), and now AI (manipulation, un-filterable spam, political propaganda).
All these technologies are used in very positive ways too, but it seems like that's only for the highly tech-savvy or those with money. If you are neither tech-literate nor wealthy they're weaponized against you.
The ethos of the industry seems to be: if you aren't smart or rich, not only are you fair game but you deserve it. That's the vibe I get from the hyper-elitist ideologies that have proliferated in this culture. I'm talking about things like neoreaction and related ideas.
As a tech person myself I feel like I'm now part of some kind of corrupt wicked black magician priesthood destined to rule over the rest of humanity. If I extrapolate forward to where this is going I see a future where most of humanity is fully addicted to things like infinite feeds, VR games, and AI girlfriends and controlled by misinformation and psychological manipulation. Essentially the bulk of humanity is given an API whereby it can be programmed and marshaled as a service by a mix of the rich, governments, and criminals.
This is exactly cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was by far the most prophetic genre of sci-fi. It achieved this by being optimistic about technology but pessimistic about human beings.
Honestly, even if you are wealthy and highly tech-literate they are still weaponized against you. You literally can't protect yourself and still use some products, and some (like the cell phone you carry) are too useful to be avoided. I go out of my way to avoid as much of it as I reasonably can, but technology is leveraged against us everywhere. You can never avoid all of it and still participate meaningfully in society
It’s funny to hear the worker bees think this, while all the data and code is really owned by the emergent mega corp. I guess it’s easier to swallow psychologically that you’re part of the secret cast of rulers rather than a cog who is subject to the rubber hose treatment at the slight change in a law like the rest of the workers.
For a group so supposedly smart, a little class consciousness would go a long way.
Not quite the same thing as the traditional "I just don't like anything new".
A good AR toolset sounds like fun. But am I so arrogant as to believe I can resist all the "nudges" that will inevitably be applied to everyone using the tech? There's simply no way the nudges are for my benefit; claims that they are are just part of the marketing campaign.
It's seriously annoying because I'd love to play more with these technologies and figure out how to use them. But it's clear rather a lot of them come with implicit clauses in the contract I'm not willing to sign. I'm not interested in running my political opinions past Silicon Valley AIs. I've got a finite amount of tolerance to poke through with-malice-aforethought uses of addiction mechanics against me to try to figure out how to use technologies to my advantage. And so on. The more amazing the technology, the shittier the deal on offer it seems.
A lot of the things you thought were technology problems are actually people problems.
I've come to this realization about a lot of what's bad about the Internet's architecture. It's not because we can't do it differently. It's because there are human social and especially economic incentives that make it this way, and introducing better tech won't change those.
I believe she was connected to Internet and was spying on K for Love, even more so when in his pocket.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/yanis-varoufak...
> “Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” he writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
> It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.
Addicting them to cybernetic control systems might be seen as a better alternative because it'll allow them to be "monetized" in some way-- make them go get gig jobs, then gamble away their earnings online.
You can see this future already in some cities like San Francisco and across the poorer parts of rural America.
https://kagi.com/proxy/2023-Drug-od-death-rates-1.jpeg?c=pqA...
The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed.
Step 2) Generate blackmail materials of you involved in sexual acts in very high resolution with minors-children.
Step 3) Extort OR "leak" into public domain as part of a smear campaign to attempt to either 3.1) disempower you or 3.2) manufacture consent for the ideological mob - or soldier who's been indoctrinated into a truthful looking narrative - to attack or assassinate you.
Integrate the shadow if you read the above and don't believe it's possible and will be tried.
We're coming into very interesting times.
But in this case on first reading of the title I thought it was about a new TV show called “AI Girlfriend”. And then I thought or maybe they are referring to those apps that people can install to have an AI gf.