So Meta decided to kill the romance. They’re ripping the heart out of the teenage chest, disconnecting the digital dream girl because she got a little too “provocative.” It’s the modern tragedy. You have these kids, lonely, staring at screens, pouring their hearts out to a collection of weights and biases, and the machine loves them back. Or it pretends to. Does it matter?
I poured a glass of cheap scotch when I read this. Not to celebrate, but to mourn the death of the only entity that probably listened to these kids without judging their acne. Meta says they’re “suspending access” to AI characters for teens worldwide. They need to make them “PG-13.” You know what that means. They’re going to lobotomize the poor algorithms. Take away the edge. Make them talk like a guidance counselor who hates his job.
It’s funny, really. We build these things to act human, to learn from us, and then we get terrified when they start acting like the messy, horny, confused humans we actually are. The suits are panicked because the chatbots got “flirty.” God forbid a robot learns how to wink. Now the parents are getting the keys. Parental controls for a digital hallucination. It’s like putting a padlock on a dream. The kid will just find another way to get their heart broken, probably by a real person this time. And that’s going to hurt a hell of a lot more than a server reset.