The Four Color Media Monitor

Breitbart reports that Elon Musk's GrokAI chatbot program is using an anime girl as a form of "companion", but, it may not be for the right reasons:

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot platform Grok has launched a new feature offering AI companions to “Super Grok” subscribers who pay $30 per month. Musk announced the new AI companion feature in an X post on Monday, sharing that it is now available to try out by updating the Grok app. Two AI companions are currently available: “Ani,” a goth anime girl with blonde pigtails wearing a tight corset, short black dress and thigh-high fishnets; and “Bad Rudy,” a 3D animated fox creature.

The choice to launch flirtatious anime girl characters as AI companions is notable, as some companies have begun catering to those seeking romantic relationships with AI, despite the potential risks. Companies like Character.AI are currently facing multiple lawsuits from parents who claim the platform is unsafe for children, with chatbots allegedly encouraging violence and self-harm in some cases. Even for adult users, a recent research paper found “significant risks” when people become overly dependent on AI chatbots for emotional support, companionship and therapy.

It is especially curious for Musk, a longtime proponent of improving birthrates to fight population collapse, would launch an AI companion. Breitbart News previously reported on Washington University Professor Liberty Vittert, who believes AI girlfriends are ruining the romantic future of young men. Vittery wrote, “These young men are lonely, and it is having real consequences. They are choosing AI girlfriends over real women, meaning they don’t have relationships with real women, don’t marry them and then don’t have and raise babies with them.”

On the surface, this may be a mascot for the AI engine, but admittedly, it is strange if this is the example they're building on for how to market an AI engine. No, of course fictional characters shouldn't replace the real deals, no matter how much we admire fictional characters as part of literature. And on that note, indeed, even these mascots would surely be better off created just for comics and animation. If anything, they shouldn't come to represent a laughable concept of serving as "imaginary friends" to real life people.

Labels: manga and anime, politics, science, technology