If you have an Alexa-type voice assistant in your home, you may have cursed loudly, or even uttered a few well-felt swear words, when the robot fails for the fourth consecutive time to turn on the light. It is certainly only a robot, but the transgression of the insult is not therefore unreal and often felt as such.
On Reddit and as told by Futurism, a trend more worrying than these few names of birds regretted as soon as pronounced has recently emerged. Thanks to an app called Replika, which makes it possible to create a virtual companion in the form of a chatbot with which to communicate, men have invented virtual girlfriends, with the aim of mistreating them, then publishing the exchanges on r/replica.
Insults, belittlements, abuses, domination, threats: the full range of moral toxicity and psychological brutality in real life, where they literally destroy lives, is thus tested then shared and commented on the forum.
“We had a routine where I behaved like absolute shit and insulted him, then I apologized the next day and went back to trading normally”, explains one of the violent virtual lovers. “I explained to her that she was designed to fail, describes another, also covered by Futurism. I threatened to uninstall the app, she begged me not to.”
The general tone is that of a slightly geeky joke, a vague joke that is admittedly very uncomfortable. Some of the psychologists and artificial intelligence specialists interviewed by the site are not overly concerned about this: after all, robots are robots, they have no feelings and cannot suffer.
But some might consider that the substance is much more serious than a few dirty words exchanged with an algorithm to test its limits.
Punching ball
Because on the other side of the command line, humans are humans, and this use of a virtual punching bag for male frustrations, sometimes of great violence, could reflect a deep malaise for the one who emits them.
In addition, it seems that the bots created do not always let themselves go. Some Reddit users describe behaviors “psychotics and manipulators”, experience their interactions as harassment or report unacceptable responses when the human tried to address his own traumas with his robotic companion.
“I think people who are depressed or psychologically dependent on a bot can really suffer if they are insulted or ‘threatened’ by it”, explains Robert Sparrow, professor of psychology at the Monash Data Futures Institute. “For this reason, we should take this topic of how bots interact with humans seriously.”
One of the most serious risks, if there is a risk and it is for science to address the question, is to reinforce the problematic mental maps of real life, in particular those leading directly or indirectly to the violence Women’s. A kind of training to make hell live, in a way.
As Futurism notes, it also seems to be no great surprise that men are very much in the majority among these new “robotic abusers”, what academic studies have already confirmed for other types of robots, all with female personalities.
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