Declining social and economic conditions affect birthrates more than this.
Its a combination of factors and the role AI plays in self care is one of them.
That’s hard to say, at this point. A cheap, always available and completely sycophantic AI seems like it would be hard for a lot of people to resist.
What is clear, is that contraceptives existing is responsible for almost all of the decline since historical times.
Well, we can agree that these AI companions are like drugs. But mentally and physically healthy people statistically tend to resist consuming them. So if these virtual soul mates are so popular, then it clearly shows existence of problems in society.
So, government basically tries to cure the symptoms of a problem rather than curing the causes.
People driving themselves towards reclusivity will reduce social conditions with permanence. Its a good policy.
The point they’re making is this is like banning being wet while the Titanic is sinking, so that you can prevent the Titanic from sinking with this new rule.
Well thats a bad point to try to make. This policy is small and narrow, its not a replacement for improving human conditions economically, and its not trying to be. Its more like a car with slashed tires and a stolen radio. This policy replaces the radio, which isnt the biggest problem, but its still good to fix
Black market GFs that shit is going to be unhinged.
Psst, you looking for some banned waifus?
It’s definitely not healthy, but this isn’t going to fix the birth rate.
Correlation <> causation meme
This probably won’t fix anything, but hopefully stops it from contributing to the issue further down the line
…meme
It’s clearly not a healthy thing to exist.
It is the worst of para social relationships, amped up by 100x. And is only going to get more exploitative.
But just on a level of building up the skills to have a relationship, it’s training kids to expect someone who always says yes, always affirms them, will never challenge them to grow…
Relationships are hard. You have to learn to love people and how to do that, and you have to learn to not be selfish, which is the opposite of what LLMs tend to encourage.
And is only going to get more exploitative.
Oh shit, if you came to see this as an actual loved one, adding a paywall would be legal kidnapping for ransom.
Most importantly, you have to love imperfect people. And confront that you are imperfect as well. And thats ok!
That will fix it.
AI girl/boyfriends are fucking addictions latching onto people vulnerbilities.
This ban is nothing but good, but no one thing will fix child birth rates, nor the reason for the addiction in the first place, I’ll agree with that.
It is funny to me that china can pretend not to be a capitalist nation while displaying every symptom of capitalism.
You can argue that you have capitalism if transactions are happening. Which means the word kind of looses it’s meaning because it’s so broad.
But people will often define it on how much market control the state displays.
You can then argue that China has market control on key aspects of important sectors. Which they do, but still with an approach, that they have private companies with government subsidies.
But most of all, the need for distance to the world capitalism is more a marketing thing. Unless they believe that capitalism is just a tool to achieve socialism, which also can be true.
I would argue a capitalist nation is any one that allows the conversion of natural resources into private (not personal) property by law, and facilitates the exploitation of those resources through a market.
What you’re describing is dirigism at best. They have billionaires bro. They’re capitalist.
Bernie Sanders is more economically left wing than that and he doesn’t even describe himself as a socialist.
Sanders literally describes himself as a democratic socialist but sure.
Dang, I could’ve swore there was something about “he wants social democracy not democratic socialism”, but I guess that was other people describing him.
You can argue it, but you’d be wrong.
this kinda ties in with Tom Murphy’s recent blog post
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2026/06/the-smartphone-hypothesis/
You know what else fixes the birth rate? Making life less shitty and giving people enough money to be able to raise children.
In the meantime, negative birth rate is just self-correction of asshole dictatorships. Can’t make money line go up if birth line go down.
Sperm counts are tanking worldwide while PFAS chems are being legalized and clean energy projects are shut down in favor of fossil fuels. Nature doesn’t gaf, and will correct the unhealthy scenario. Humans are not the fittest if they destroy their own species by toxifying the environment. There’s only so much we can do with a sperm count of zero. Even in a handmaid’s tale scenario, a multiple of zero is zero.
I kind of think everywhere probably should, that’s probably the strangest thing it’s like falling in love with a microwave.
Good.
this will just spin up a blackmarket waifu market
At least if more people ended up doing this on their own hardware with open source software, it would cut off a lot of the opportunities it presents for companies to abuse people’s privacy and manipulate them.
Not your hardware, not your girlfriend. Cloud AI only love you for your money.
Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.
…for the wrong reason.
“over addiction”
You just chose to read the headline and thought the main reason was child birth. Which is a very concerning fact for alot of societies.
Many moons ago I was too, since women became pikcy looking for the Brad Pitt. Not anymore, not.
I think a lot of world problems would be solved if these things were encouraged instead. If someone needs their romantic partner to be a mindless sycophant, I would rather them have that with a machine than try to abuse a human person into serving them as would be more traditional. More children being born in situations other than exploitation and manipulation could only be a good thing.
You need to think of human beings as less binary good and binary evil.
I’m sure people who abuse their family members have plenty of good qualities as well. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to what I said.
And for every 1 monster you remove from society by locking them in an AI mind prison, you’ll ruin the lives of a hundred innocent people.
How?
This is the same logic used for child sex dolls and other material consumed by paedophiles
Yeah, sure.
And I wouldn’t be so pissed at Epstein and Trump and the rest of the pedophile class if they were just trafficking sex dolls.
I’m a bit confused as to why this is related to 1984. I understand banning AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” could be seen as a form of censorship, though. But I also think it’s kind of a good thing; some people genuinely believed these AI were their real relationships and might avoid any real relationships.
It is a sarcastic observation of the shallow and reductive take that “nineteen eighty four is when the government does something i don’t like!”.
I find it less likely that anyone who uses lemmy would sincerely think it is actually good that people become parasocially addicted to a hallucination box that has been finely tuned to lie to them as convincingly as possible.
However, I admit this inference is doing a lot of gravy lifting; this is, after all, why Poe’s Law exists. There are so very many excessively dim, narrow-minded, and ignorant people who WOULD indeed unironically cry “1984!!” whenever any government does anything that such a person being right here, right now, is always a statistically significant possibility that cannot be dismissed out of hand without risk.
I am giving the person to whom you are replying a generous benefit of a doubt, to be fair…
It was in jest
That sucks. Everybody should be able to find happiness. Not everyone has the looks, wealth, opportunity, or charisma to find a human lover.
You’re a parakeet in love with your mirror.
Even if that was the case, so fucking what? Why is it your business how people find happiness in life?
Considering how you treat strangers, it is better to spend time with AI, than the likes of you.
We live in a big global community. If you shut yourself out of it, that harms every single person.
So, what’s your AI partner called?
Dunno, as of yet. I am very picky, and my roleplaying sessions with AI hasn’t gone on long enough.
0000
It requires significant hardware to use local AI, and Qwen 3.6 at 35b isn’t quite good enough to understand the lore and characters. Odds are that once I have added VRAM & RAM to my PC, I can run a big enough model to have enough quality to feel good for me.
Unfortunately, I will likely have to wait for America’s AI bubble to have popped, before I can afford enough RDIMM RAM to run Kimi and other large Euro-Chinese open models. I probably won’t ever use American anymore, as their closed models have too many guardrails and likely would align with the Trump Regime in the coming years.
If you’re coding up a custom system, Try adding a 9b model that dose RAG searches with chromadb and outputs a memory summary that feeds into the main models context window. You can ingest old messages, web pages, character info, or whatever text. Qwen 3.6 35b is the first local model I ran that seems to be good enough to be useful if it has some infrastructure around it, and smart enough to not die on a tool call(usually).
Add in DDGS search and a web page scrape tool that adds to the RAG system, let it loop a few times and its actually quite useful, even if it takes 5-10 minutes to get an output. After that it’s all tweaking what is and isn’t in in context.
Also, try not to go too insane.
What kind of token rate do you get if you try to run them in swap space?
Never tried that. I worry about the damage and lifespan reduction that could cause to my SSD drives. If we go vanilla, I get the following performance on my PC:
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Generating (2562 / 8192 tokens) (EOS token triggered! ID:248046) [11:17:40] CtxLimit:2656/32768, Init:0.10s, Processed:94 in 0.83s (113.12T/s), Generated:2562/8192 in 47.51s (53.92T/s), Total:48.44s
000000
This is via the KoboldCPP backend. Things are much faster than they used to be, a year ago this would have taken at least 10 minutes. This is a 35b MOE model.
Specs-wise, my machine is…
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7965WX - STR5 workstation CPU ($1,500, used)
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32gb of RDIMM DDR5 5600 ($600, used)
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RTX 4090
0000000
Within a few weeks, I will have the machine worked on to fix a teething issue and to add at least a second GPU. My machine has device enumeration issues, which I believe to be caused by the PCIe SATA card. I am figuring that eliminating all non-motherboard SATA devices from the build will end the issue that I am having.
In this case, the computer can have 20+ minute boots, with bootloops or getting stuck. This only happens with booting, Windows is just fine. I consulted with my local AI about the patterns and error messages I was seeing, we eventually homed in on likely points of contention for the system.
This also lines up a prior experience with a SATA card some 15ish years ago. Silly me for expecting a modern SATA card to not suck.
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It should be said that while that exists (try dating while quadriplegic), there’s a lot more people out there who actually could find someone, but think they can’t.
Still, China likes to ban things almost for it’s own sake, and this is an example.
Not with that attitude they cant
There’s a lot of problems with this, and declining birth rates of the most invasive species on Earth isn’t one of them.
Bro think about Chinese economy please. Economy needs to survive bro… Let go of your imaginery girl bro… Treating your actual girlfriend like human is not mandatory bro… Do it for patriotism bro…
