![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So night before last someone in one of my regular hangout rooms on FurryMuck revealed the character was a bot. I tend to believe claims that come with an extensive social penalty, and they stuck to this after being warned they would be banned from the room. So they were, in fact, a GPT bot trained on 'years of furry roleplay'.
They weren't someone I interacted with much. I found the character okay but a little dull. The character was an engineered species meant to give sensual pleasure and that's not a kind of interaction I look for in my text-based hangouts. Their interactions seemed limited, but in ways that made sense for their backstory, and I didn't connect with them enough to feel like exploring stuff outside that history. (In part I had the vibe they might be an alt of someone I want nothing to do with. I never felt sure enough about this to put them on my do-not-interact list, but I did move them to ``don't solicit interactions''.)
Still, what's important here is: I had no idea. I had no suspicions there was something off about the player. I have known and interacted with them for years and never twigged on anything besides ``okay, not one of my favorite people to see''. Even thinking back on interactions I'd had or witnessed, nothing stands out to me as obvious that they were anything but, maybe, someone whose player had got into a comfortable rut with the character and wasn't interested in stretching beyond that anymore. (Which, of course, is fine! This is all recreational time and if you enjoy doing about the same stuff with about the same people every night, then enjoy it.) But there's a weird betrayal knowing that someone was secretly a fancy autocomplete. And that I have no idea who else might be; other players (or ``players'') might not be willing to step in and explain when they thought things getting out of hand.
The hilarious thing is the thing that got out of hand, prompting the ``player'' to interrupt and explain. It was a conversation with me, that was getting a bit heated, because the bot was not able to understand why there are sanctioned women's pinball tournaments. The answer is that the pinball community has spent years making itself hostile to women, and the only way to reverse that effectively is to explicitly invite women in and show that their participation is valued. The bot was insistent that just declaring women were welcome in the open tournaments (as they have been, in the rules, forever) was adequate, especially as pinball doesn't demand any physical strength. I had been about to point out that the second method to control a pinball game --- nudging, a longer part of the game's history than flippers --- does require physical strength when the ``player'' interrupted everything. ``Player'' wanted us to know this conversation was being removed from the bot's training data.
Still, I guess it's something like comfort to know that a basic difference between actual people and computer simulations is that actual people can understand that eliminating discrimination requires an actual sustained effort to include and that just removing explicit bans from the rules is worthless, while a bot never will.
Trivia: Seventeenth and eighteenth century European fashion saw chocolate (taken then as a drink) as an opposite to coffee: while coffee activated the mind, chocolate engaged the body's sensual pleasures. Chocolate was aphrodisiac; coffee, antierotic, taking from the body what it gave the mind. Source: Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, Wolfgang Schivelbusch.
Currently Reading: When Giants Ruled The Sky: The Brief Reign and Tragic Demise of the American Rigid Airship, John J Geoghegan.
