In one sense, the COVID-19 pandemic forever changed the way we live. Although the isolation and strict social distancing were eventually lifted, months had passed, and whole generations of people had experienced a solitude and desperate aching for companionship that they hadn't known before. Our lives, from school to work, from shopping to meeting with family and friends, moved almost entirely online. And while the world, or at least parts of the world, returned to normal, the process was so gradual that there was hardly any chance to appreciate it or celebrate the occasion. 2020 became the year that wasn't, and even after three years it feels like we're trying to catch up with this decade. But in another sense, the pandemic just accelerated the trends that were already taking shape in the 21st century. Our lives were moving online and remote work had become the norm for many industries. eBay had brought online shopping into the mainstream even before Amazon overtook it to become the largest online retailer - then the largest retailer of any sort - in the world. Online education had become a legitimate learning option offered by almost every university. And, of course, we were already living on social media. It isn't entirely surprising, then, that lifting the restrictions that forced most of us into a virtual life didn't reverse the changes. It slowed them, perhaps, but the momentum was already there, and it was the same direction we'd been heading since the dawn of the internet anyhow. From parasocial media relationships and the breakthrough popularity of ASMR to the growing sophistication of chatbots, including AI superstar ChatGPT, we're both more connected than ever and more isolated from each other. We Live in a (Para)society There's nothing really new about parasocial relationships. Even the term isn't particularly recent: it was coined in 1956 to describe the asymmetrical emotional bonds between celebrities and their fans. At the time this meant figures like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, and fictional characters like Doctor Kildare, but Beatlemania would soon take fan relationships to a whole new level, as would pop idols in the 1980s and '90s. But now we're living in the 21st century, and, as Andy Warhol's purported to have said, "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." The line between celebrities and their audience has blurred, and, at times, become invisible thanks to social media. In theory, anyone might become a celebrity: all it takes is a smartphone and a podcast, video, or stream account that happens to go viral. As for those actors and recording artists who became famous the old-fashioned way, they're living online just like the rest of us, talking to us as they go about their day, sharing their first dates and breakups in real-time, and always just a simple click away. Hollywood stars seem just like us, and influencers and streamers often were just like us, at least when they started. The pandemic only heightened that effect by moving everyone, even the friends and family we have truly social relationships with, onto the same level as those parasocial connections. If we're isolated and seeing everyone on a screen anyway, then the comedian who keeps us laughing through the hardship with homemade skits might be doing just as much to lift our spirits as the people we know. We share the same sense of humor, and they relate to what we're going through, so we start to feel like they're a friend. The fact that we're not seeing them in person hardly matters if we aren't seeing anyone else in person. But it does matter. The key to a parasocial connection is that it isn't a two-sided relationship. The audience might be invited into a celebrity's personal life, but we're not a part of that life, not on an individual level. We aren't their friends, we're their fans. The distinction might seem obvious enough, but it's a fairly new kind of relationship: the ability to communicate from afar through voice, face, and body language only arrived a century ago, and our brains aren't especially well designed for such remote connections. The emotions we feel are immediate and real, even if the reason for them is literally a thousand miles away. Just like the concept itself, the negative consequences of parasocial relationships aren't especially new, but they're much more widespread thanks to the information age. Fixations upon celebrities by troubled, lonely, and potentially dangerous fans have always been a problem, but the ease of access in today's world makes such obsessions simpler to act upon. There was a time when the phrase "death threat" evoked newspaper letters glued onto a page: now it's just a few seconds of typing and clicking send. And whereas the former might have led to a visit by the police, the latter's become such a frequent occurrence that we shrug it off. "Everyone gets death threats," we say, as if that doesn't make it worse. This doesn't mean that parasocial relationships are all bad, that we should delete our watch lists and renounce our favorite singers. On the contrary, parasocial relationships bring genuine happiness and are a natural result of our social instincts. But it's important to remember that they aren't the real thing, and neither celebrities nor their audiences are entitled to anything from each other. They aren't our friends, they're our brands. Sweet Nothings in Our Ears Parasocial interactions may be older than we think, one particular form has just emerged online within the past ten years or so and largely came into its own during the pandemic. That's the now-exploding ASMR video genre, a relaxation technique that's both addictively soothing for its fans and a source of confusion and misunderstanding elsewhere. ASMR is short for "autonomous sensory meridian response," but that isn't precisely a scientific term. The phrase was coined in an online forum in 2010 to describe a phenomenon that didn't really have a name yet and hadn't been scientifically described. That's changed over the years since as neurologists have begun to study its effects, but the acronym stuck and is now an inseparable part of the culture that's emerged around it. So what is ASMR? For outsiders, particularly older people who aren't very internet savvy, the stereotype is that it involves videos of young women ripping sheets of paper and whispering into microphones for the sake of an obscure fetish. One early "ASMRtist" wrote to Dear Abby about a boyfriend who thought of it as cheating, and Abby's advice made it clear she didn't really understand it either. Another artist has talked in interviews with The Guardian and The New York Times about how she's had to push back against the idea that it's something unseemly. That a few creators do blur the lines, sometimes as a loophole in countries where online pornography is banned, hasn't helped matters. That's what ASMR, by and large, isn't, which still leaves the question of what it is. At its core, it's a neurological phenomenon where certain low, soft sounds, particularly the sound of a human voice, can trigger relaxation and a physical sensation along the spine, often called "tingles." The purpose of ASMR videos is to deliberately create that effect and help people relax and fall asleep. Bob Ross, of The Joy of Painting, is often credited as an unwitting pioneer of the genre with his soothing voice and brush strokes, and the videos have evolved from simple home props to professional productions with elaborate effects. The neurological response might be as old as our species: after all, what are lullabies if not a form of do-it-yourself ASMR for lulling infants to sleep? But social media, a deeper understanding of just how ASMR works, and 21st-century audio technology have conspired to transform it into an entirely new experience. Binaural recordings and 3D audio can create convincing auditory illusions of someone pacing around you as they talk, and a decade of enthusiasts honing their craft has made it more efficient than ever before. ASMR is, in many ways, an evolution of the popular white-noise machines of years past, given a human touch and an undercurrent of affection that proved immensely popular during the pandemic and remains so today. Some critics have said that, as a parasocial bond, it represents a kind of synthetic affection. But if the world's lacking in affection, it seems unfair to blame the people who are, at least in some small way, trying to fix that. Do Chatbots Dream of Digital Sheep? Parasocial bonds are bonds that only extend in one direction, going from the fan to the person that they admire without being returned. In that sense, chatbots may represent the ultimate parasocial relationship. It isn't just the bond that's one-sided, but sentience itself: only one person in the relationship is self-aware. Welcome to the future. The first article I published was "The Uncanny Artist: Human Creativity in the Age of Deep Learning." It was written a few months earlier and pointed out that, at the time, no AI had actually passed the Turing Test. That might not be true anymore. ChatGPT, a prototype evolution of the GPT-3 language model discussed in that article, was launched by OpenAI on November 30 last year and has since taken the internet by storm. It writes human-like sentences and paragraphs and gives human-like answers to questions. Those answers are derived from reams of online data that've been fed into it, allowing it to correct people's mistakes and offer new information in its conversations. The extent to which it seems like a chatbot (such as explaining that it's a chatbot when asked) is the extent to which it was programmed to do so. Without that deliberate restriction, it may well pass the test. What that means is still very much up in the air. Very few researchers are ready to concede Turing's point that this qualifies ChatGPT as a potentially thinking being: it's more sophisticated than GPT-3, but it's still the same form of data iteration and predictive algorithms. It isn't thinking about what it's saying, or "saying" anything at all. It's constructing its sentences according to mathematical principles. The meaning they seem to possess is the meaning that our understanding of language gives them. But it might be good enough to fool us. Sentient or not, the prospect of custom-built personalities that can pass for human is something with enormous implications. ChatGPT's source code hasn't been made available for such customization, and so far it's drawn more attention for its ability to write human-like content than for mimicking human relationships. Other chatbots, however, have already attempted to bridge that gap with some success: one of the most famous is Replika, an AI-driven chatbot with tiered subscription levels that can be customized into a virtual romantic partner. Is such a partnership, especially one powered by a still more advanced AI that can pass the Turing Test with flying colors, a good or bad thing? Perhaps for people who are lonely and absolutely can't fulfill that need through human companionship, it'd be a good thing. But for people who otherwise could have a healthy human relationship, maybe it would just encourage apathy. How would we go about distinguishing between the two? Has the time come to start playing "I Dated a Robot" in health class? A Futurism article last year made waves with the headline "Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them." The headline is ridiculous clickbait - the "men" amounted to a few Reddit trolls who were downvoted by everyone else - but it raises ethical questions about what it'd mean to abuse a non-sentient persona designed to act human. If parasocial relationships are emotionally real for their fans, then wouldn't the "parasocial" act of emotionally abusing an AI be real for the abuser, regardless of the bot's perspective? On the flip side, Japan has spent years researching robotic caretakers to help address its combination of a shrinking and aging population, and soon those robots may be capable of addressing emotional as well as physical needs. If our social web has been spread too far and thin to support everyone, would filling in the gaps with technology be a good or bad thing? Would it be no different than having a favorite teddy bear, or would it become a crutch, an excuse for neglecting the most vulnerable segments of our population? With ChatGPT and its successors (the first of which arrives this year) blazing the trail of a new generation of convincingly human chatbots, we're probably about to find out. Looking for a confidential content writer, ghostwriter, or copy editor for your writing needs? Email me at Jefferey.D.Moore@gmail.com or click here to visit the Services page for more information!
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AuthorContent writer, ghostwriter, editor. Production assistant and writer for Audio Branding: The Hidden Gem of Marketing. Professional geek. Archives
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