I recently discovered the MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit and I wish I hadn’t.

There’s a woman who had ChatGPT pick from a bunch of rings online and now she’s “engaged” to it.

I just… I don’t know… we’ve failed people.

You know that by assigning the role of tulpa to their ai they imply that they can summon their companion outside of the chat itself right?

They're misidentifying that LLM as a tulpa.

We're aware that some people use LLM output as a basis for the creation of tulpas, but this doesn't seem to be the case here. This seems to be a person attributing independent intelligence to an LLM external to herself, not recounting her experience with an additional consciousness within her own brain.

Whether or not you consider tulpas or other forms of plurality to be genuine phenomena, this conflates two different concepts which are tangentially related at most.

I'm not even sure it's really parasocial. There's nothing to have a relationship with. This seems like something else, although I don't know what you'd call it. It's more akin to getting addicted to a video game.

Clanker-loving cogfuckers. Disgusting. Traitors to the species. But at least they'll never breed.