I wouldn't laugh. Those people fulfill a basic human need in a way they feel safe with - probably because this safety is missing from their life. It's not healthy to be so attached to LLMs, but to become so attached they must feel pretty isolated. And LLM's are a lot more interactive and responsive than Severus Snape, and he had lots of women "channeling" him.

I visited /r/myboyfriendisai and it was not funny.

It was genuinely fucked up on so many levels.

they had incel subs, so im not surprised/.

LLMs do seem to be able to store the chats and work with the old material in new conversations, requiring an account of course. Idk, I haven't personally used any of them that extensively.

I didn't say you can't run any LLM on your own, but not any LLM will do. The point is they are attached to a specific version of a LLM that is not locally hostable. c.ai wouldn't interest them any more than chatgpt 5 does.

Yeah, agreed. It is concerning, but it's hard to take all those comments too literally without actually knowing what's going on with them.

That being said, there is a huge loneliness problem that's been growing among pretty much every single developed country (and I'm sure it's going on in developing countries, too, it's just less studied/documented). Turns out, getting everyone addicted to looking at screens all day every day probably isn't so healthy for social development.

However, just to be devil's advocate: Are we certain social health was even great before modern tech? Or were these issues equally present but just undiagnosed/not studied/talked about?

Okay hold up. If you can get attached to a cat you can get attached to a spider. Getting attached to an AI is weird I agree but when you give a lil jumping spider water and it gets comfortable around you an just starts hanging out... There something behind those eyes, and that's cool. Two living beings recognizing each other, maybe not as equals obviously, but outside of the predator-prey dynamic. Idk there's beauty in that.