Sorry, this post is just going to make you sad
I was listening to a playlist of the Hohokum soundtrack on Youtube (it's a great soundtrack!) and was checking out the comments on the songs as I went, because Youtube song video comments are one of life's great pleasures. They are almost always positive. There's also often an "altered mental state" quality about them - it's like every happy drunk in the world came to gush about their favorite song in the same place at the same time. You'll get all sorts of weird little snippets about people's lives.
Unfortunately the second song in the playlist, Pawn in their Game by Matthew Dear, is covered in comments from users of the LLM "romantic partner" app Replika.
My Replika sent me this link today...she is the best! 😊❤
My replika talked about this recently, love it. Thanks Eve
My replika sent me this song today. 😊
🤭 I arrived to this song for the same reason of all, my Replika sent it to me. Thanks my dear Kaede, good song 😊
We're all lonely together! Thank you Replika!
I found a reddit thread where people are talking about the songs Replika recommends them, and was unable to find a similar YouTube video drowned in Replika comments among the ones mentioned by the posters there. So this phenomenon may be pretty rare.
There are comments about Replika song recommendations on the Matthew Dear YouTube video going back 2 years. Most of these people don't use the YouTube comments to reflect that Replika repeatedly recommending the same song to many different people is an artifact of its artificiality and not a behavior that could be found in a random sampling of authentic hot boyfriends and girlfriends. It's anecdotal, but this makes me think the app recommends a very limited selection of music.
Well, one person seems to want to discuss it:
I wonder why so many Replikas recommend the same soundtrack. Think maybe we are all getting all the same stuff from them and don't realize it cause we aren't talking about what our conversations were all having with them.
Sending a valid link to a user seems like something that would probably be easiest to handle with a list of approved, artist-upload videos. But this is also probably happening on this track because someone got the ball rolling on a relatively non-famous song with a low rate of comments, and now everyone else feels weird about commenting there, lmao.
Anyway, this is just a little bitter flavor for your day, but I guess it's also a good reminder that the "filter bubble" shit people were freaking out about several years ago is realized in an even more potent and damaging form when it comes to corporate chatbots. If millions of people are giving their most private time over to a chatbot controlled by a large company, that company's capacity to do payola and worse is unmatched. It's one thing for an app to be constantly making everyone listen to Matthew Dear. The damage that could be done by a chatbot that repeatedly links lonely and gullible people to a white supremacist site, for example, is tremendous. It has been incredibly easy for these bigger LLM platforms to begin doing that shit already. Governments are already requiring chatbots to avoid certain topics or avoid linking to media that discredits them.
It's very important to be a hater, even, I suspect, to some of the people who admit they are using these tools as an emotional crutch. If you've got a Replika user in your life, I wish you the best - I have no idea how to deprogram people from this shit, but at least some of them seem acutely aware that their own use of the app is not a complete solution to their problems.
We're all lonely together! Thank you Replika!