So, recently, I accidentally stumbled into an almost bottomless pit of romantic comedies on an amazon prime "channel" called PixL. It has a ridiculously large quantity of low-value sort-of-OK content that all kind of bleeds together if you squint.
I watch a lot of TV/movies, and it is mostly something to deal with me feeling lonely (which is probably a bad thing to fix, actually: better I get so sad that I quit computers and go into the real world to find another person... but that's a more fundamental problem).
I have long said that what I really want are 3-star movies, as I am really just using the people in the movie to tie up the tiny bit of my brain that tries to process the existence of people to be less lonely: I don't want it to be so bad as to be frustrating or so good that I actually want to watch it, as that would be distracting.
The problem, though, is it feels more like being at an airport or on a street than around your classmates or friends: people come and go and you never get to know them that deeply, as a movie is only an hour and a half.
Watching multi-season TV shows thereby works a lot better against being lonely, and I think a lot of people essentially use sitcoms like this: they have seen the show a million times and continue to watch it on repeat as part of their brain has established a parasocial relationship with the characters.
But, the problem I have doing that, is that watching the same content on repeat also causes this sense of deja vu and gives the world an air of implausibility. It is fun to be there for the new stuff, but hearing the old stories again doesn't convey the same feeling of "this is happening" (as false as we all know even that is ;P).
But so now like... generating an infinite amount of content for a pseudo-sitcom that is maybe even just sort of OK--as that's what the AI can manage to muster up until the end of time--might frankly be fine, as I'm not trying to really watch it anyway?
It then just needs to be close enough to what my subconscious expects out of a person so that I get the feeling of "I'm watching these people I pretend to know" (though it would be interesting if one's subconscious is better at deciding it is all fake than one's consciousness is ;P "thankfully", TV is already a bit fake).
And, so, maybe it works better if instead of being a new lame sitcom it is a lame extended universe of a great sitcom (such as Seinfeld), so you will have already watched it actively enough to train your own brain that these are people in your life who matter to you and then it is easier to use the seasons of that sitcom to fine tune an AI into generating more content in that same genre / story for you to begin spending the rest of your life not really exactly watching an infinite stream of generated extended seasons.
I remember a study, a couple of decades back, that found that people who watch soap operas estimate they have more friends than people who don't. I figure the lizard brain knows they're people, but doesn't know they're actors in a box. Just thought that might be interesting to you.
I sort of know what you mean. Not necessarily to combat loneliness but I listen to pretty much every Sherlock Holmes pastiche available via audiobook. Many of them aren't particularly great in and of themselves but there are a sufficiently large number of them and it's nice to check in with the same characters/setting. "Comfy" is the popular term for it. I certainly imagine AI will be capable of producing stories of that sort of quality within the next decade or so. And AI voice actors will be equal to at least some of the narrators on Audible.
Meeting real people involves risk. Risk of social awkwardness, boredom, getting hurt, drama, messiness. It's a lot of effort. There are already a thousand ways for people to meet others on the internet, but people choose to passively consume media instead.
The problem is the medium itself. The internet, as much as it was believed to be a tool for bringing people together, also largely serves to keep our interactions shallow. Anonymity provides malevolent sociopathic sadists to cause significant amounts of harm pseudo anonymously, making the kind of vulnerability required to form meaningful connections much more risky than it is in real life encounters. Stories of people meeting great friends and spouses online are outliers and selection bias.
If you want to meet people, the internet is a terrible way to do it.
The internet is also a terrible way to exchange information securely. With encryption, it's possible. There was a time, when security vulnerabilities weren't blamed on the hacker but on the system developer. Why feel limited by malevolent sociopathic sadists when this creates the opportunity to add to the medium and create something better?
It's kind of what people can do already using their own imagination. You can imagine a set of characters and stories that goes on forever and stays the same. AI would just flesh it out with actual writing and visuals, but I'm not sure if it's that is a huge improvement.
I watch a lot of TV/movies, and it is mostly something to deal with me feeling lonely (which is probably a bad thing to fix, actually: better I get so sad that I quit computers and go into the real world to find another person... but that's a more fundamental problem).
I have long said that what I really want are 3-star movies, as I am really just using the people in the movie to tie up the tiny bit of my brain that tries to process the existence of people to be less lonely: I don't want it to be so bad as to be frustrating or so good that I actually want to watch it, as that would be distracting.
The problem, though, is it feels more like being at an airport or on a street than around your classmates or friends: people come and go and you never get to know them that deeply, as a movie is only an hour and a half.
Watching multi-season TV shows thereby works a lot better against being lonely, and I think a lot of people essentially use sitcoms like this: they have seen the show a million times and continue to watch it on repeat as part of their brain has established a parasocial relationship with the characters.
But, the problem I have doing that, is that watching the same content on repeat also causes this sense of deja vu and gives the world an air of implausibility. It is fun to be there for the new stuff, but hearing the old stories again doesn't convey the same feeling of "this is happening" (as false as we all know even that is ;P).
But so now like... generating an infinite amount of content for a pseudo-sitcom that is maybe even just sort of OK--as that's what the AI can manage to muster up until the end of time--might frankly be fine, as I'm not trying to really watch it anyway?
It then just needs to be close enough to what my subconscious expects out of a person so that I get the feeling of "I'm watching these people I pretend to know" (though it would be interesting if one's subconscious is better at deciding it is all fake than one's consciousness is ;P "thankfully", TV is already a bit fake).
And, so, maybe it works better if instead of being a new lame sitcom it is a lame extended universe of a great sitcom (such as Seinfeld), so you will have already watched it actively enough to train your own brain that these are people in your life who matter to you and then it is easier to use the seasons of that sitcom to fine tune an AI into generating more content in that same genre / story for you to begin spending the rest of your life not really exactly watching an infinite stream of generated extended seasons.