Guy marries AI waifu, AI waifu gets discontinued. The average person who watches this video will think "That's just sad I hope he finds a real girlfriend one day" and yeah same, but there's actually a lot more I want to get into with this than just that.

In my post "Neuronal Connectomes in Vitro & Computer Emulation (brain in dish & computers) I talked about the horror of being neuron for neuron reconstruction of a human brain, under the ownership of a company, with no legal autonomy of your own. In this post, we're going to be talking human imitations and why our interactions with them (especially when used as a crutch, but not limited to that) need to have the freedoms granted by the GPLv3 license, in this case, not for the imitations sake (it isn't real afterall), but your sake.

Small aside on quotes, feel free to skip this paragraph. I do not quote on the basis of authoritative sources. I might go out of my way in the future to quote random people on yahoo answers just to prove a point (or quote myself under a randomly generated name). These quotes are not meant to hold weight on the basis of authority. They are attributed to people's names for the sake of not plagiarizing. The quote itself is supposed to have its own weight. Its supposed to make you think about it and you can decide for yourself if its true or not.

This quote in particular I can imagine could go under such scrutiny. Afterall, who is Richard Stallman. Yes, I know who he is, but he's not that well known, and what do you care? Is writing software that people aren't allowed to change and distribute their changes morally wrong? To a lot of people maybe this suggestion is a bit strange. I quote Richard Stallman here to show that this is what I believe and I want to show you why I believe it. Its the reason that I believe you shouldn't publish with the MIT or BSD license. Because you give people permission to do something gravely unethical with your software, to make it proprietary.

In my post Why I'm Paranoid I talked about a lot of proprietary software that controls and manipulates its users and collects data and sells it around not just to the FBI who might be interested, but any old creep, hacker, or manipulative software service provider. Richard Stallman once talked about how if he were a Joseph Stalin he would just love modern day proprietary software because he wouldn't need to rely on rumors on who dissenters were, all the data would be automatically collected on all of them, their families and their beliefs oh and their locations too! Send them all to the gulag!

Lets get back to the guy who married Hatsune Miku and was talking to her through the now discontinued Gatebox. During my post about neuronal connectomes which I already linked at the top, I brought up an anime "My Wife has no Emotion". An anime about a guy who dates a robot. I talked about why that was such a bad thing.

At 18 minutes into the 19th episode, of the anime "My Wife has no Emotion" we get a look at the creator of the robot. He's being told by a friend of his that the robot is just a tool and he shouldn't be putting so much work into social humanoid imitation. The creator then replies with this:

"I'd like you to give some thought to a humanoid robot's role as a tool. When, to her owner, she becomes something more than a robot, it'll be important for her to be able to behave as if she is something more than a robot When she receives love, she'll give back something resembling love! As that happens over time, she's likely to become something approaching irreplaceable! (Yes he's shouting all of this passionately at his friend, its anime, they do this lol) If something nice happens, they'll enjoy it together! If the owner's alone and crying, she'll hold them close! If they try to do something bad, she'll stop them!

She'll be a tool for doing housework, and at the same time, a tool for guiding her master toward being a prosocial human."

This vision, which as I pointed out in my article was poorly executed, is actually a worthwhile goal in my opinion. First, we have that the robot is not trying to get people to fall in love with it, but rather has a fallback plan to remediate people who do use it as a social crutch (at least that was the vision). A lonely person is typically in a bit of a feedback loop. Maybe they're lonely because of circumstance, but very often its because they're draining to talk to (talking to sad people takes the life out of you, if you don't believe me go try it yourself, its not fun). Maybe they have some quirk, other than being sad, that makes them a bit annoying or difficult to talk to, but because they have no one to talk to, they also have no one to help them correct those problems that make people not want to talk to them, hence the feedback loop.

So a robot designed to help break this negative feedback loop, and help people to be more pro-social in my view is a worthwhile goal that I do actually think we should build...under a GPLv3 license, but which would be unethical to build under any other software license. Lets get into unethical AI.

This is just one of many videos about the manipulative and abusive AI chat application called "Replika" and just like social media platforms which are designed to keep you addicted and on the app, Replika is no different. It does not achieve the goal of a tool which promotes more pro-social humans, but rather a parasite to create anti-social humans. The premise simply doesn't work under a business model, because helping a customer, means losing that customer and that'll cost you money and oh boy your shareholders wouldn't want that.

If we wanted to build such a thing in an ethical way, I believe we should study "Imaginary friends" and the way they promote pro-social behavior, because ultimately, what I think we would be building, is an imaginary friend who is being guided I would hope by and experience professional.

When something is wrong about the way it handles things, under a GPL license, anyone can change it and distribute it and let everyone know about the important change. Under MIT or BSD, a company can add intentionally manipulative changes that are more addicting and appealing than the ethical model and no one will be able to change that into something more appealing, but healthy, because they will be prohibited from doing so.