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Sunday, May 10, 2026
Harnessing the power of parasocial interactions for virtual worlds
You might be excused for thinking that OnlyFans is a porn site. But in reality, creators on OnlyFans make about three quarters of their income not from porn, but from chat. Lonely people, mostly men, pay a lot of money to have a parasocial chat interaction with the OnlyFans content creator. And that in spite of the fact that it is well-known that this chat isn't necessarily actually with the content creator herself; especially for the more successful content creators the chat volume is far beyond what a single person could handle in a day. So the chat gets outsourced, often to countries like the Philippines. And increasingly the "person" the client is chatting with isn't even a person anymore, but an AI chat bot. That doesn't seem to be bothering many people, and in fact there are an increasing number of other web services which explicitly offer AI girlfriends / boyfriends to chat with, with or without sexual content.
Large language model AI is pretty bad at getting facts straight. But its weaknesses in matters of truth are strengths when the task is a friendly chat: AI models tend to be extremely sycophantic, doing their very best to say exactly what the person using the service wants to hear. That can be bad when the person using the chat service is pondering something harmful, and the AI encourages that person. But outside those edge cases, many people think highly of their AI "friends", because those are so supportive, unselfish, and unlikely to contradict you.
The origin story of this blog is as a MMORPG blog. After many years of covering MMORPGs, I stopped playing those. While some were quite good if you just considered them as games, the overall feeling was that MMORPGs never lived up to their promise as virtual worlds. NPCs in MMORPGs were static and boring. Other players were either actively harming you if they could, were more interested in their own goals than interacting with you, or were simply offline. I certainly had some great moments of interaction with other players, and even great roleplaying moments. But mostly I had the choice of either fighting other players in PvP, which I hate, or playing a PvE game in which the interaction with other players was just a minor part. The most common positive interaction with other players was trying to beat group content together with other players, but that was not always a nice experience, and rife with stuff like guild drama or group members shouting at each other. The most famous player interaction in the universe of MMORPGs is Leeroy Jenkins, and that is telling you something.
It isn't just MMORPGs. Other attempts of creating virtual worlds, from Second Life to the Metaverse, not only failed because of technical problems and design flaws. The fundamental problems, that other players were online only some part of the day, might be gone next month due to having lost interest, and rarely had a positive social interaction with you are their primary goal, made the whole idea of virtual worlds that feel lived in impossible. People ended up playing The Sims instead, because the interactions with the NPCs in that game were still better than the social interactions with real people in virtual worlds.
So I had a vision of a future in which somebody would create a virtual world which was predominantly or even exclusively populated by AI chat bots. Where you could live in a virtual village, and have virtual friends and neighbors that are all powered by AI. They'd be there 24/7, they'd always be interested in chatting with you, and they'd always be nice. They would have memory of previous interactions with you, and a consistent personality. The virtual world could optionally have game mechanics, like Stardew Valley or The Sims, but in a way that wouldn't punish you if you spent most of your time just having parasocial interactions with AI chat bots. I do think that such a virtual world would be highly attractive to a large number of people. Maybe humans just aren't good enough to populate a virtual world and make it feel alive.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link
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This is almost literally the world Philip K Dick was describing back in the 50s and 60s, the world I grew up reading about and am now apparently going to be living in. Not sure how I feel about that...
I'm far more interested in the virtual worlds/games where the AI chatbots have their own preset distinct "fictional character" personalities/personas and hold relatively well to them. That's an emergent narrative generator and a storyworld extraordinaire - like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress on steroids.
Feels like we might hit it in less than a decade, if we don't burn up the world first.
There's a Youtube channel - Turing Games - that I've been idly watching and they're already putting the current AI models through stuff like Among Us, Mafia and Monopoly. To reasonable entertainment success (though it's more in the errors and AI quirks and twists of random fate right now.)
The current crop of reasoning LLMs can already, more or less, hold their own mirroring in a co-conspirator gamemaster/storyteller-like scenario where they simulate multiple characters, given the right prompts and sufficient contexts.
Which could be a way forward also, where it doesn't -have- to be one chatbot per character, but the same model powering multiple characters, just with different persona instructions for each game character.
The tricky thing is giving them that sufficient context, without overrunning their current context limitations.
Feels like we might hit it in less than a decade, if we don't burn up the world first.
There's a Youtube channel - Turing Games - that I've been idly watching and they're already putting the current AI models through stuff like Among Us, Mafia and Monopoly. To reasonable entertainment success (though it's more in the errors and AI quirks and twists of random fate right now.)
The current crop of reasoning LLMs can already, more or less, hold their own mirroring in a co-conspirator gamemaster/storyteller-like scenario where they simulate multiple characters, given the right prompts and sufficient contexts.
Which could be a way forward also, where it doesn't -have- to be one chatbot per character, but the same model powering multiple characters, just with different persona instructions for each game character.
The tricky thing is giving them that sufficient context, without overrunning their current context limitations.
Back in the heyday of mmorpgs I remember feeling that something important was happening. Even though those online worlds were flawed I really felt that we were witnessing an important next step in human society. It felt like these pretend worlds were the pre cursor to fully fledged online environments where humans would live and interact. Second life was the exemplar even though its clunky implementation always put me off. I was aware that AI personalities might exist in such worlds (I have read Gibson and Williams) but I assumed that human to human interaction would still be the norm. Your vision of people migrating to AI generated and AI populated nirvanas however sounds both plausible and terrifying. How does the human race survive if we all choose to abandon the real world?
@mbp If you want to get really depressed, I would recommend looking at various statistics about Gen Z dating, marrying, and having children. In my lifetime humanity went from worrying about overpopulation to worrying about humanity dying out.
Perhaps the Great Filter that SETI researchers worry about is not thermonuclear destruction but but simply the fact that once a civilisation gets sufficiently advanced to be able to create a better alternative reality than the real world they will quickly abandon the real world for that virtual world.
Most modern SF that has people abandoning the real world for the virtual suggests that some people will either stay out or be left out, which seems plausible enough.
The human population is much higher than it needs to be; the problem is the transition.
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The human population is much higher than it needs to be; the problem is the transition.
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