this kinda ties in with Tom Murphy’s recent blog post
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2026/06/the-smartphone-hypothesis/
Declining social and economic conditions affect birthrates more than this.
People driving themselves towards reclusivity will reduce social conditions with permanence. Its a good policy.
The point they’re making is this is like banning being wet while the Titanic is sinking, so that you can prevent the Titanic from sinking with this new rule.
Black market GFs that shit is going to be unhinged.
Psst, you looking for some banned waifus?
Many moons ago I was too, since women became pikcy looking for the Brad Pitt. Not anymore, not.
That sucks. Everybody should be able to find happiness. Not everyone has the looks, wealth, opportunity, or charisma to find a human lover.
You’re a parakeet in love with your mirror.
Even if that was the case, so fucking what? Why is it your business how people find happiness in life?
Considering how you treat strangers, it is better to spend time with AI, than the likes of you.
So, what’s your AI partner called?
Dunno, as of yet. I am very picky, and my roleplaying sessions with AI hasn’t gone on long enough.
0000
It requires significant hardware to use local AI, and Qwen 3.6 at 35b isn’t quite good enough to understand the lore and characters. Odds are that once I have added VRAM & RAM to my PC, I can run a big enough model to have enough quality to feel good for me.
Unfortunately, I will likely have to wait for America’s AI bubble to have popped, before I can afford enough RDIMM RAM to run Kimi and other large Euro-Chinese open models. I probably won’t ever use American anymore, as their closed models have too many guardrails and likely would align with the Trump Regime in the coming years.
What kind of token rate do you get if you try to run them in swap space?
It’s definitely not healthy, but this isn’t going to fix the birth rate.
Correlation <> causation meme
This probably won’t fix anything, but hopefully stops it from contributing to the issue further down the line
…meme
It’s clearly not a healthy thing to exist.
It is the worst of para social relationships, amped up by 100x. And is only going to get more exploitative.
But just on a level of building up the skills to have a relationship, it’s training kids to expect someone who always says yes, always affirms them, will never challenge them to grow…
Relationships are hard. You have to learn to love people and how to do that, and you have to learn to not be selfish, which is the opposite of what LLMs tend to encourage.
Most importantly, you have to love imperfect people. And confront that you are imperfect as well. And thats ok!
Make babies! It’s illegal to be lonely!
And wasn’t China very recently concerned about their birthrate being too high? One Child Policy?
Now they’re already concerned about their birth rate being too low?
They were wrong, and they know it, but also nobody’s allowed to say that. Ditto for a bunch of other Mao policies.
The one-child policy was abolished in 2015, but birth rates have continued to decline after that. They currently have one of the world’s lowest fertility rates.
Well yes, but also no. I think it was only really heavily policed in the 70s and early 80s then was lifted so regional and rural could have a second child (wiki says by '84 the single child policy only impacted 35% of the population). Still goes to show by forcibly dropping birthrates how much it destroys future planning
Still goes to show by forcibly dropping birthrates how much it destroys future planning.
Looking at all the other countries, it may not have had an impact on future birthrates at all.
Yeah true regarding birthrates… but I think it probably catapulted median age
This website states that in 1960 median age was around 20 (comparable internationally), median age in 2025 was 42( international was 31)
You probably joking, but that actually a thing in China and was a thing in USSR
It says that it was proposed… We propose a lot of bills that never pass here in the US. I’m not sure how China’s laws are setup but Wikipedia doesn’t say that it was ever implemented.
6% of income? Still much cheaper than a kid!
Is that your take on the matter? How is wanting yo promote real human relationships between teenagers a bad thing?
This is like trying to solve mental illness by making sickness illegal.
I’d say that’s more like trying to solve mental illness by making it illegal to exploit and profit from it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
Erewhon: or, Over the Range (/ˈɛr.ɛ.hwɒn/, ERR-eh-hwon)[2] is a utopian novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published in 1872,[3] set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.[4]
In Erewhon, illness is crime and crime is illness. As a result, citizens are imprisoned for offenses like physical ailments, misfortune, or ugliness while those who commit conventional crimes like fraud or theft are seen more sympathetically as exhibiting symptoms of moral afflictions and prescribed sessions with a “straightener” (essentially a psychologist) for treatment.[5]
That is suspiciously close to “Nowhere” spelled backward.
So I guess you’re pretty fine with the pedo/misogynist/nazi/bullying shit happening on Discord servers.
What do Discord servers have to do with anything??
What does the fact that leaving kids unsupervised can lead to bad shit have to do with the issue at hand?
In this case, we have to look at the parents, how can you be so irresponsable that you need a government and a company to look after YOUR child?
Everything can be true at same time ie that parents need to be more present (what capitalism helps to not be the case), that companies need to be made accountable for what happens in their platforms (what they don’t want), and that governments in the interest of the betterment of all society need to preemptively avoid the worst scenarios of societal unhealthiness (prevention is cheaper than treatment). What I don’t understand is the willingness of Feddit to bend the knees to the man with money’s will instead of accomodate the collective will of all society through State policies.
“You hate hotdogs? YOU MUST LOVE BURGERS THEN”
What are you even trying to say?
That will fix it.
AI girl/boyfriends are fucking addictions latching onto people vulnerbilities.
This ban is nothing but good, but no one thing will fix child birth rates, nor the reason for the addiction in the first place, I’ll agree with that.
It is funny to me that china can pretend not to be a capitalist nation while displaying every symptom of capitalism.
You can argue that you have capitalism if transactions are happening. Which means the word kind of looses it’s meaning because it’s so broad.
But people will often define it on how much market control the state displays.
You can then argue that China has market control on key aspects of important sectors. Which they do, but still with an approach, that they have private companies with government subsidies.
But most of all, the need for distance to the world capitalism is more a marketing thing. Unless they believe that capitalism is just a tool to achieve socialism, which also can be true.
You can argue it, but you’d be wrong.
What you’re describing is dirigism at best. They have billionaires bro. They’re capitalist.
Bernie Sanders is more economically left wing than that and he doesn’t even describe himself as a socialist.
Sanders literally describes himself as a democratic socialist but sure.
Dang, I could’ve swore there was something about “he wants social democracy not democratic socialism”, but I guess that was other people describing him.
I would argue a capitalist nation is any one that re-inforces private (not personal) property by law, and facilitates the exploitation of those resources through a market.
You know what else fixes the birth rate? Making life less shitty and giving people enough money to be able to raise children.
In the meantime, negative birth rate is just self-correction of asshole dictatorships. Can’t make money line go up if birth line go down.
There’s a lot of problems with this, and declining birth rates of the most invasive species on Earth isn’t one of them.
Bro think about Chinese economy please. Economy needs to survive bro… Let go of your imaginery girl bro… Treating your actual girlfriend like human is not mandatory bro… Do it for patriotism bro…
I kind of think everywhere probably should, that’s probably the strangest thing it’s like falling in love with a microwave.
Good.
this will just spin up a blackmarket waifu market
At least if more people ended up doing this on their own hardware with open source software, it would cut off a lot of the opportunities it presents for companies to abuse people’s privacy and manipulate them.
Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.
…for the wrong reason.
“over addiction”
You just chose to read the headline and thought the main reason was child birth. Which is a very concerning fact for alot of societies.
I’m a bit confused as to why this is related to 1984. I understand banning AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” could be seen as a form of censorship, though. But I also think it’s kind of a good thing; some people genuinely believed these AI were their real relationships and might avoid any real relationships.
It is a sarcastic observation of the shallow and reductive take that “nineteen eighty four is when the government does something i don’t like!”.
I find it less likely that anyone who uses lemmy would sincerely think it is actually good that people become parasocially addicted to a hallucination box that has been finely tuned to lie to them as convincingly as possible.
However, I admit this inference is doing a lot of gravy lifting; this is, after all, why Poe’s Law exists. There are so very many excessively dim, narrow-minded, and ignorant people who WOULD indeed unironically cry “1984!!” whenever any government does anything that such a person being right here, right now, is always a statistically significant possibility that cannot be dismissed out of hand without risk.
I am giving the person to whom you are replying a generous benefit of a doubt, to be fair…
It was in jest
username checks out
