3 Comments

It is interesting. Parasocial relationships are not inherently good or bad but they are increasingly prevalent due to digital distribution technologies. This is not my area of expertise but it seems they must exist on a spectrum (or cartesian plane) of intensity for intellectual and emotional factors.

It would seem that the higher the ratio of intellectual to emotional factors, the more benign. The examples of the AI girlfriends strike me to be on the other end of the scale with a low intellectual to emotional ratio. Since we typically seek social relationships more for emotional than intellectual fulfillment, a logical conclusion is that emotional parasocial relationships create more risk of undermining social relationships. When this was a one-way broadcast relationship, the risks were likely bounded. Now that AI enables bi-directional parasocial relationships, the risk boundaries have expanded. Get ready for addiction counseling and support groups for parasocial relationships that led to bad individual outcomes.

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I like the idea of this emotional / intellectual matrix related to the benign-ness (that's not a word right?) of the parasocial synthetic relationship.

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We can just use the inverse ... risk. Aka the likelihood of unbenign-ness. 😀

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